High Seas Noir: THE GHOST SHIP

RKO came late to the horror party, only seeing the economic virtues of low-budget spook shows after the box office disaster of Citizen Kane. Like the other studios who’d been following Universal’s lead since the early ‘30s, when RKO decided to start up a horror division in 1942, they wanted to do something different, something that would make RKO’s monster pictures stand apart from everyone else’s. So  they brought in former pulp novelist Val Lewton to take care of things. Lewton, by all accounts,  was a very hands-on producer who was deeply involved in every aspect of his films, from writing to lighting to directing . As a result, all nine films he produced bore his personal style, and they were all undeniably unique. Only problem was they weren’t exactly the franchise-ready monster-fests the executives were expecting.

The point has been made publicly and on numerous occasions that the potentially dreadful  I Walked With a Zombie is less a horror film than Jane Eyre Goes to Haiti. A similar point can be made regarding most of the classic films Lewton produced in the early ‘40s. They sounded like horror films (The Body Snatcher, Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead),  they were certainly marketed like horror films, and people still refer to them as horror films when in fact they aren’t horror films at all. At least not in any way horror films were defined in the ‘40s.  Instead, they represent a unique kind of proto-noir, with all the earmarks of those films we would come to think of as noir a mere half -decade later. Not just the intense Expressionist play of light and shadow (of course standard to horror films as well as noir), but primarily in terms of characters, who find themselves caught up in noirish predicaments. The settings may differ from your typically urban noir film—19th century Scotland, say, or a small Greek island, or a cargo ship—but the problems are the same, and viewers are  presented a portrait of the dark underbelly of society, no matter where or when the story takes place, At the end there are no silver bullets or wooden stakes, and audiences are rarely offered the comfort of a universe restored to its rightful order.

While there are, on occasion, hints of supernatural tomfoolery afoot, more often than not they turn out to be the result of some psychological glitch on the part of the characters. The “leopard man” in The Leopard Man, for instance, turns out to be a sadly human serial killer. The bodies snatched in The Body Snatcher are not reanimated for nefarious purposes, but rather sold to a professor of anatomy for educational use. And while there is a Satanic cult in The 7th Victim, the members don’t conjure up any demons—at heart it’s just the story of a young girl trying to find a sister who has vanished mysteriously.

The beauty of these films, really, beyond the storylines and the cinematography, was that Lewton could make you think you were seeing a horror film, convince you of it long after the closing credits rolled, when in fact it was nothing more than a very stylish mystery-thriller.

Consider for instance his 1943 film, The Ghost Ship. The film was directed by former editor Mark Robson, whose directorial debut had been on Lewton’s The Seventh Victim a year earlier. He would go on to direct several other Lewton films, before moving on to a long career culminating with films like Valley of the Dolls and Earthquake. It was written by Donald Henderson Clarke, near the end of a long career that began with Born Reckless.  It starred Russell Wade (later of Lewton’s The Body Snatcher) as the idealistic new third officer on a cargo ship, and Richard Dix, who’d made a career portraying rugged frontiersmen and heroic cowboys, here playing decidedly against type as the ship’s captain—a man with his share of those aforementioned psychological glitches.

Notably missing from the film are ghosts. There isn’t a single ghost to be found here (though a Greek Chorus in the form of a deaf-mute sailor is kind of creepy). Nor is the ship ever found adrift and inexplicably abandoned.

Instead, it’s the very human tale of what happens when Wade discovers that the wise and kindly captain—a man always ready with a speech about the nature of authority—is in reality a paranoid fruitcake in the habit of killing any sailor who dares question his decisions. There is very little mystery here, as we see it all play out from the beginning. The question is whether or not the inexperienced officer will be able to convince anyone of the truth.

One of the things that marks the film (and all of Lewton’s films) is the masterful use of sound. In what may be the picture’s most disturbing sequence, a young Lawrence Tierney, playing a sailor who has recently questioned one of the captain’s orders, finds himself trapped in a hold and buried beneath tons of anchor chain. Although he screams for help, he cannot be heard over the clanking and clattering of the chain. A series of quick cuts between the action above and below deck as this is happening is accompanied by a sharp contrast in the sound level which is startling, and only adds to the shocking nature of the scene.

It’s a beautifully crafted film filled with heavy atmospherics, a measured pace, and a slow build in the tension to a satisfying conclusion. But it’s certainly not a horror film any more than, say, Saboteur or Strangers on a Train.    

Some film scholars have covered the distinction by  arguing that Lewton made psychological horror films—a genre as alien to audiences in the early ‘40s as what we would later consider noir films. The term wouldn’t come into general use until 1960’s Psycho, but nevertheless might work here. What he did was certainly something radically new and different. But if you want to call films like The Ghost Ship and Bedlam psychological horror, you can just as well put films like Lost Weekend, Detour, Stranger on the Third Floor, M,  and Cape Fear in the same category, along with most of Hitchcock’s work. And lord knows you may want to, I don’t know.

I suppose all this semantic claptrap over genre distinctions is silly and pointless—especially in a case like Val Lewton, who turned the pulp mentality into a handful of brilliant films which were ahead of their time (whatever you call them) and defy categorization. RKO wanted something distinct from their horror division and they got it—they got Val Lewton films.

One final note of interest. The Ghost Ship remains one of his more underappreciated and lesser-known films. This may be because the studio never released it, and it wasn’t screened publicly until the mid-‘50s, almost a decade after Lewton’s death. It seems the film’s storyline bore certain marked similarities to a novel which was out at the time. Since Lewton refused to purchase the novel’s film rights, RKO didn’t want to risk a lawsuit. Lewton felt that the studio execs were just looking for excuses to get rid of him, after they couldn’t make sense of his movies.

by Jim Knipfel

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