One of the
enduring real-life mysteries to intrigue amateur sleuths and professional
historians alike for decades is the strange story of the Mary Celeste, a Canadian ship which sailed into Gibraltar Bay on
December 13th 1872 with no sign of anyone on board. Upon being
boarded, it was found that aside from missing Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs
who set sail with his wife, two-year old daughter and a crew of seven, there
was evidence such as unfinished food to suggest a hurried evacuation – but no
sign of any of the occupants was ever seen again. The tale became known to the
public thanks to the fictional short story
J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement written by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle in 1884. Its popularity as fiction eclipsed knowledge of the true
events’ circumstances enough for some of his incidental details to be
misinterpreted as the actual facts – Conan Doyle described the ship being in virtually
perfect condition whereas in reality it was water-logged from rough seas. Also,
the real vessel was missing one of the lifeboats (a possible explanation for
the disappearances along with its condition) whereas the author chose to
increase the mystery by not mentioning this. Also, the name of the vessel is
usually known erroneously as Marie
not Mary.
According to
the website maryceleste.net, the most likely explanation seems to be that the
crew and passengers took to the lifeboat in a panic to escape perilous conditions
but tragically didn’t survive in such a tiny craft: “The records of the Servicio Metrologico in the Azores says that the
weather deteriorated that morning and a storm blew up involving gale force
winds and torrential rain”. The theory that a mutiny caused the fraught
situation is unlikely as it was a relatively short voyage and the Captain and
First Mate were assessed as being fair-minded rather than tyrants.
Either way,
in 1935 The Mystery of the Mary Celeste
became a film released as the second title by a little-known English production
outfit called Hammer Films. The company was founded by amateur music-hall
artiste Will Hinds in November 1934, inspired by his stage name of Will Hammer.
That same year, Hinds met Spanish émigré Enrique Carreras and in May 1935 they
partnered in the distribution company Exclusive which showcased their own
Hammer films until the horror slump caused the latter to collapse in bankruptcy
after only three more films in 1937. Exclusive survived the climate but it
would be ten years before Hammer would surface again due to the pioneering entrepreneurship
of Carreras’s son James in 1947 to become one of the world’s greatest studios
of horror cinema.
Originally
the film ran at 80 minutes but the only version that exists now is the
20-minute shorter American print titled Phantom
Ship which we’ll refer to from here onwards. The director and co writer (with
Charles Larkworthy) was Denison Clift who began as a scenarist for Cecil B. De
Mille and continued as screenwriter while he directed, till after this move he
focused entirely on writing for the screen and stage.
Phantom Ship aims to explain the mysterious real-life
vanishings by creating a back-story of murderous revenge tinged with the supernatural.
Before setting sail, a love-triangle - rather than the equally enigmatic Bermuda
one - is presented to us between the Mary
Celeste’s Captain Briggs (Arthur Margetson) his new bride Sarah played by
Shirley Grey and his old friend, now fellow Captain, Jim Morehead (Clifford
McLaglen of the large McLaglen acting family). We learn that Morehead had loved
Sarah but Briggs made his move first, breeding a disturbing silence until
Morehead seethes: “Your friend, yes. And
you went behind my back…” On face value, this suggests the plot’s smouldering
gun until a haggard sailor fetches up in a waterfront dive…
In the same
way that Boris Karloff returned to England in 1933 to add dark lustre to British
Gaumont’s hoped-for success in The Ghoul,
Hammer had asked for Bela Lugosi to cross the Atlantic to bolster their murder-mystery. This is good news for Lugosi fans as in Phantom Ship he demonstrates the greater
character actor range that was all too often lost in his post-Dracula typecasting. After a run of cookie-cutter,
suave imperious Svengalis that may also have played on his vanity (he often alluded
to the comedown from his days as a matinee idol back in Hungary), suddenly he
turns up here eschewing the vain self-consciousness in favour of a touching
vulnerability. Lugosi is Anton Lorenzon, a penniless sea-dog burdened with a heavy
unspoken past. The debonair, self-styled romantic of earlier roles is
unrecognisable with his grey hair, unshaven face and humbled demeanour, yet he
becomes animated with fear at the mention of the Mary Celeste and Bilson, the
First Mate.
Lorenzon
joins the crew under the assumed name of Gottlieb, and soon falls foul of the imposing
Bilson (Edmund Willard)’s sailor superstition by bringing a cat on board,
causing a fight with him. To add to Lorenzon’s misery, he kills a fellow crew-member
who attacks Sarah in the Captain’s cabin. Soon Lorenzon is established as the
ship’s Cassandra of doomy foreboding: “When
this ship sails, Death sails on her”.
For the
first half of Phantom Ship, it’s a fairly
dull crossing but then we discover that Lorenzen was shanghaied by Bilson on
this same ship six years before and tossed overboard to the sharks when he
proved too ill to work. Ever since, his desire for vengeance has burned within
him and while we ponder the welcome intrigue of how he’ll do this, off-screen
meanwhile the cast are gradually bumped off till there is just him, Bilson and
the corpulent, tattooed Katz (former British Boxing Champion Gunner Moir).
Bilson may be a lunk but he knows his deductive reasoning: “When the next man goes, I’ll know who it is. The one who’s left”.
There’s a
chilling sequence where Bilson and Katz go above deck and while the camera
lingers on a mournful close-up of Lugosi, a gunshot heralds Bilson coming down
jubilantly to announce he’s shot Katz. Clearly, Lorenzon has some assistance or
competition in the killing, but nothing will stop him taking his revenge. He
recounts how he murdered the Captain and his wife when they tried to flee.
Bilson is shot in cold blood and tossed overboard, retribution metered out by
Lorenzon for his own inhumane treatment - yet here is where the paranormal comes
into play. Lorenzon is struck by the yard-arm and witnesses the ship’s wheel
turning a course as if guided by an invisible hand. Lorenzon becomes filled
with confusion either from concussion or, more ambiguously, an evil entity and
roams the boat searching for Bilson in terror.
What ultimately
happens to make Lorenzon disappear is never explained, a nice touch of the supernatural
that plays into the hands of imaginative theorists rather than a more prosaic
ending. The ship is found empty making its way into Gibraltar port and amidst
the questions, all Morehead can do is be consumed with grief: “"I am thinking of Briggs and her,
dead!"
Overall, Phantom Ship has a convincingly hardened
cast aboard, a pleasing whiff of the unexplained and a reminder of what Bela
Lugosi could do when surrendering himself to a part…
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