THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND
DVD. Odeon.

An early example of Hollywood playing fast ‘n’ loose with the facts of a ‘true’ story, The Prisoner of Shark Island is nonetheless a compelling, very entertaining tale of wrongful conviction, solidly handled by John Ford in his pre-Western era.

The film purports to tell the story of Dr Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), a country doctor who inadvertently treats John Wilkes Booth as he flees after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Rounded up with other alleged supporters of Booth after the assassin himself is killed, Mudd is convicted in a military show trial, where all legal rights have been suspended. While his ‘co-conspirators’ are executed, Mudd is sentenced to life imprisonment on an island prison, surrounded by a shark-infested moat. Here, he is abused by guard Sgt Rankin (John Carradine) and seen as a pariah by everyone else. But after a failed escape attempt, Mudd is given the chance to redeem himself when the island is struck with yellow fever and the prison doctor is taken ill.

The film offers something of a whitewashed version of Mudd, who in reality had some prior connections to Booth and was an enthusiastic slave owner (something touched on, but skirted over). The escape is rather more dramatic here than in reality, and Mudd’s family are also a fiction. However – this is not a documentary or an educational work. To complain too much about the fictionalisation of the facts is probably to miss the point. Ultimately, this is a work of entertainment, loosely based on real events, and as such, it’s pretty successful. Baxter manages to make his character flawed enough to be believable, and while much of the prison brutality has now become cliché, in 1936 this was pretty original, I imagine.

Ford directs efficiently, without any particular flourishes, and helps keep the action moving along. Seen now, it’s a bit creaky in parts, some of the supporting performances are pretty bad and the racial stereotyping pretty crude. But as a pioneering prison break film, it’s held up fairly well on the whole.

DAVID FLINT

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