The Ghost Ship (1943) review

 In any collection of films, there has to be one that's the "least", the one that just doesn't hit the right buttons hard enough, or which just somehow feels lacking in some way. And for the nine Val Lewton horror films, it's The Ghost Ship (1943). Not that it's a bad film at all, far from it - just that when stacked against the films surrounding it, it inevitably pales a little, though certainly not by much. It's still a fascinating film but when you're up against the likes of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944) et al, any film would start to look a bit ordinary.

In a change of direction, Lewton and his director Mark Robson and screenwriter Donald Henderson Clarke (working from a story by Leo Mittler), largely abandon any pretence at the supernatural here. Lewton's productions are famed for their ambiguous approach, hinting at things supernatural but leaving enough wiggle room to allow for more mundane answers to the mysteries. Here the ambiguity comes from a different direction. The only hint of something otherworldly comes at the very start of the film when Tom Merriam (Russell Wade), making his way to take up the post of third officer aboard the ship Altair ("played" by stock footage of the Ventura from King Kong (1933)), meets an old blind beggar (Alec Craig) who warns him of the terrible fate awaiting him ("nothing but bad luck and bad blows at sea"), sightless but seemingly able to see things that other can't.

Merriam should have heeded his warnings about the Altair as, although he seems at first to get on with Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), a series of deaths occur aboard the ship which at first seem accidental: "the Greek" dies from the effects of appendicitis; Louie (an uncredited Lawrence Tierney) dies horribly, crushed to death by the ship's anchor chain after suggesting to the captain that they take on new crew to make up the shortfall; and further deaths are narrowly averted when the ship's hook comes loose and swings perilously around the deck after Stone refused to allow it to be secured. Merriam comes to suspect that the captain is murderously insane, obsessed with his need to maintain his authority over the crew, but his men are so blindly loyal to him that no-one will listen to his warnings. Is Stone really mad - or is Merriam just imagining it all?

So this time, the ambiguity springs not from whether there are supernatural forces at work or not, but from whether or not Stone is insane enough to allow his men to die if they cross him. By the climax, all that ambiguity is gone as Stone cracks completely, menacing a bound and gagged restrained Merriam with a blade that turns into a quite brutal knife fight with mute crewman Finn (an uncredited Skelton Knaggs) that gives lie to the myth that all of Lewton's films were subtle and restrained. Stone fears nothing so much as losing his precious authority (there's something deeply unsettling about the way Rix pronounces that single word) and his control over his cowed crew. As such it can be read as an allegory for conformity and more particularly for fascism. Stone has no respect for his men ("men are worthless cattle" he opines) and all that matters to him is that his law is obeyed to the letter, and any man that stands in his way is casually disposed of. Rix plays him superbly, a chilling presence whose calm demeanour hides a man seething with insecurities and hatreds.

There's no disguising the fact that the film was made on the cheap. The film exists mainly because Lewton was told by producers RKO that he should make use of the standing ocean liner sets left over from Orson Welles' Journey into Fear (1943). Lewton had wanted to shoot a fantasy comedy titled The Amorous Ghost but the idea fell on stoney ground at RKO whose head of production Charles Koerner wanted Lewton and his B-movie unit kept busy after The Curse of the Cat People had been delayed. It was he who came up with the title and the idea of reusing existing sets and it was Lewton who came up with the idea of a murderous captain: Edmund G. Bansak in his book Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (2003) writes that "this story about a demented sea captain obsessed with authority and petty details seems to bear a significant relevance to Lewton's own seafaring attitudes. Others may argue that Lewton more likely envisioned The Ghost Ship's Captain Stone as a parallel to the authority-conscious RKO executives. Both views are probably correct; Lewton, who revised the script and rewrote many lines of dialogue, may have been thinking he was lashing out at his superiors, but through the process of dissociation, he was also providing us with a villain who possessed some negative traits not unlike his own."

Other signs that the film was made cheaply are the aforementioned scenes featuring the Ventura (the image is optically flipped left to right to try to disguise the source) and the reuse of sets from Gone With the Wind for the port that the ship briefly calls in at. That port is on the island of San Sebastian, a fictional Caribbean island last seen in I Walked with a Zombie (which, like The Ghost Ship, also featured Lewton regular Sir Lancelot performing a calypso) and which would turn up again later in the non-Lewton film, Zombies on Broadway (1945). With Cat People (1942) and The Seventh Victim linked by the presence of the character Dr Louis Judd, this marks the second time that Lewton and/or his writers would try to link two or more of their films together in a very subtle, easy to overlook way.

Sadly, not many people got a chance to spot the connection. The film was released in the States on Christmas Eve 1943 but was gone two months later after playwrights Samuel R. Golding and Norbert Faulkner successfully sued Lewton claiming that he'd plagiarised their 1942 play A Man and His Shadow which they'd earlier submitted to him as a possible source for one of his films. Lewton always denied the charge, but the courts sided with the writers (ordering RKO to pay up $35,000 in damages) and The Ghost Ship was yanked from distribution, turning up only fitfully on television and at one-off screenings for many decades and it became one of the hardest to find of the nine Lewton horrors. Lewton himself was said to have been deeply upset by the whole affair, becoming depressed and scrapping two further horror films already in development. In the aftermath he made the already-in-development The Curse of the Cat People before taking a break from the genre with Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) and Youth Runs Wild (1944). There would be further problems with the production of Isle of the Dead (1945) before he oversaw his final two horror classics, The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946).