Phantom Ship (1935)

Director: Denison Clift                                 Writer: Denison Clift
Film Score: Eric Ansell                               Cinematography: Eric Cross
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson and Edmund Willard

I’ll say it right up front: I love Lugosi. And that can be problematic. There are bad Bela Lugosi movies, plenty of them, but there are also bad movies with Bela Lugosi in them, and for me there is a distinct difference. Unfortunately, this is one of the former. Unlike Return of the Vampire, where the rest of the film is fairly banal but Lugosi’s presence makes it worth watching, Phantom Ship is just bad, and even Lugosi can’t save it. A British version of the Mary Celeste story, the ship that was found adrift in the Atlantic in 1872 with no one onboard, the conceit here is that someone stowed away on the ship seeking revenge and killed off everyone. Unfortunately, this makes the film little more than a floating old dark house mystery, and a bad one at that.

Only the third film produced by the nascent Hammer Films in Britain, it would take a couple more decades before the company would find its sea legs and begin to make a major impact on the international film industry. This film tries, with the meager resources at hand, but just can’t overcome them. The British actors are, for the most part, fairly unremarkable and the crude acting styles tend to drag the whole production down. Oddly enough, one of the worst things about the film is actually the editing, an element that is usually invisible. But John Seabourne leaves too much film prior to reaction shots and it causes the reactions to feel as if they’re lagging. In terms of Lugosi, whose style could be somewhat stilted anyway, it has the effect of making the audience wonder if he is actually going to say anything at all.

Arthur Margetson is the ship’s captain. He is sailing for Italy with a cargo of raw alcohol and taking along his fiancée, Shirley Grey. The one complication is that he has stolen Grey away from another captain, Edmund Willard, who had been set on marrying her himself. When Margetson finds himself one hand short, he’s forced to ask for a sailor from Willard’s crew who sends his man off to Margetson with the implied instruction to make Margetson pay. Meanwhile Lugosi has just finished an arduous trip after being shanghaied and when he is offered a berth on the Marry Celeste he unexpectedly accepts. Unlike the old dark house mysteries, however, several sailors are killed openly, one while attempting to kill the captain and one while attempting to rape his fiancée.

Lugosi’s performance is just a bit too hammy and difficult to believe. After he kills the sailor who was attempting rape, he practically breaks down, seemingly horrified that he has “killed his fellow man.” And while Shirley Grey is very good, she has too little screen time. The Hammer film was released as The Mystery of the Mary Celeste in Britain, but in the United States the title was changed in addition to excising twenty minutes of the film, mostly onboard the ship. There are characters in the credits who don’t even appear in the American version. Unfortunately, the original British version doesn’t exist any more, so we’ll never know what was cut. While Phantom Ship is an interesting historical piece for Lugosi and Hammer completists, but not something that’s going to appeal to most viewers.