The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)

December 12, 2024 6:56 AM

[TRAILER] John Ford's 1936 drama presents a highly whitewashed and fictionalized version of the life of Maryland physician Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), who treated the injured presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth and later spent time in prison after his unanimous conviction for being one of Booth's accomplices. Co-stars Gloria Stuart ("Old Rose" from Titanic as Mudd's wife, Peggy.)

Also starring Claude Gillingwater, Arthur Byron, O. P. Heggie, Harry Carey, Francis Ford, John McGuire, Francis McDonald, Douglas Wood, John Carradine, Joyce Kay, Fred Kohler Jr., Ernest Whitman, Paul Fix, Frank Shannon, Frank McGlynn Sr., Leila McIntyre.

Directed by John Ford. Written by Nunnally Johnson. Produced by Nunnally Johnson, Darryl F. Zanuck for 20th Century Fox. Cinematography by Bert Glennon. Edited by Jack Murray. Music by R.H. Bassett, Hugo Friedhofer.

89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Currently streaming free in the US on Plex. JustWatch listing.

posted by DirtyOldTown (3 comments total)

Were this fiction about made-up people and places, this would be a well-made but slightly corny drama.

It's not though. And since it's based on "true events" it ends up a pile of racist apologia for "noble southerners."

Terrific opening, with a shocking reenactment of the Lincoln assassination.

But however reasonable the film tries to make Mudd's actions in treating Booth look and however hard it tries to make him seem like an honorable man who was scapegoated in the name of national morale, pretty much everything else in the film gives away the game. The Union soldiers are crass and/or cowardly, the Black freedmen are depicted as childlike and selfish, Lincoln actually thinks "Dixie" is a great song, and on and on.

If you read a few paragraphs about Mudd, you quickly can suss out that this movie's version of him is horseshit. The truth is, he was a known associate of three of the conspirators. His treatment of Booth's broken leg was unplanned (obviously), but he waited a day to report that he'd seen the assassin so that the killer would have time to get away. And folks, I do not need to see it in Wikipedia to know that Mudd's former slaves did not adore him and prefer him to conniving carpet baggers filling their heads up with ideas of voting.

It's a truly distasteful parable for the way both sidesist white folks of the era thought Reconstruction was too hard on "good" white southerners.

And I'm from Tennessee.

Man, fuck this movie.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:00 AM on December 12 [2 favorites]

To be fair, the story of Lincoln allowing the North to "reclaim" Dixie following Lee's surrender is well known.
posted by SPrintF at 8:25 AM on December 12

Oh for sure. But in this context, it registers as another plank in Ford's apparent, "But really, everyone good knew the Confederates were gentlemen" platform. I mean, they could have gone with any number of Lincoln moments.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:29 AM on December 12 [1 favorite]