Bedlam / The Ghost Ship (1943-1946) from WAC

[Aclea]

Although this isn't the double-bill everyone was expecting, I'm delighted. The Ghost Ship has always felt like the most underrated of the Lewton chillers:



“As long as I wear these stripes, there isn’t a man in the crew who’ll believe you or help you. You’ll find them too lazy, too cowardly, too disinterested. That’s what I want you to learn, Merriman. Men are all worthless cattle. And a few men are given authority to drive them.”

Pulled from distribution for five decades because of a plagiarism lawsuit, the title of 1943’s The Ghost Ship and trailer-friendly lines like “A ship comes alive at sea” may promise a ghost story but, typically for producer Val Lewton, it’s got a lot more on its mind than genuine skulls and crossbones. Rather than a supernatural menace it’s a pertinent look at the initial appeal and dangers of charismatic authority figures that must have struck a particular chord with audiences in the middle of WWII and is sadly topical again.

Its lean 69-minute charts the gradual disenchantment and eventual battle of wills between Russell Wade’s bright eyed and bushytailed young first officer and experienced captain Richard Dix. At first their relationship is a typical paternalistic student-teacher one, but as the voyage takes them further away from civilisation and Dix’s skewed philosophy of command comes more and more to the fore with fatal consequences for those who slight or oppose his will - “In San Paolo, I was just another captain. At sea, I am the Captain” - Wade finds himself increasingly disturbed by the Captain’s ruthlessness and the crew’s complacency. Because he has responsibility for their safety, he feels it gives him rights over his crew’s lives, and the chain of command reinforces his ego at every turn. Even when he causes the death of a crewmember, his officers either regard it as none of their business or favour non-intervention to keep their own noses clear when they reach port. At first Dix simply ostracises him from the crew to neutralise the threat, something his rank and his apt summation of their worth makes only too easy. But as they get closer to port and his inevitable abdication of power on shore, he seeks a more permanent solution…



As anyone who has seen the 1931 version of Cimarron knows, Richard Dix could be a barnstorming ham, but here he reins it in as an initially likeable, soft-spoken man, leaving himself somewhere to go as his obsession with authority gradually develops into full blown paranoia. And thankfully either Dix or second-time director Mark Robson is smart enough to know that a line like “You know, there are some captains that would hold this against you” is all the more chilling when the calm delivery underlines the menacing context of his words. At a time when so many propaganda films were painting the Nazis as one-dimensional ogres, the film acknowledges that its own fascist protagonist is no obvious melodrama villain and that all too often the real threat is the “friendliness that tries to get you to thinking wrong.”

But the line between the villain and the hero is thinner than you might expect. Not only does Wade share a physical similarity to a younger Richard Dix, but others take his initial certainty as a sign that he’ll become like him. The Captain certainly sees his younger self in him, trying to mould him in his own image – or at least until he becomes a threat.

Not that there aren’t some frissons along the way, the film narrated by Skelton Knaggs’ mute and filled with ominous foreshadowing and a sense of dread right from the very opening shot of knives in a store window that pays off with a climax that sees its already ineffectual hero rendered disturbingly powerless. And, as always with Lewton, it has remarkable production values for a B-movie, making full use of the ship RKO built for Pacific Liner five years earlier with typically atmospheric cinematography from the great Nicholas Musuraca and an effectively understated score by Roy Webb that knows when to stand back and let the film do its work, as in a striking silent knife fight to the accompaniment of a distant offscreen calypso. Its lengthy exile in the vaults may have ensured it’s one of the least known of Lewton’s classics, but it’s certainly one of the very best.