Slave Ship (1937)

Slave Ship (1937)


Plot Summary

This period adventure drama was directed by Tay Garnett and adapted from a story by William Faulkner. The skipper of a slave trading vessel operating along the West African coast in 1860, Captain Jim Lovett (Warner Baxter) is troubled by his flesh-peddling trade. He's marrying the beautiful Nancy Marlowe (Elizabeth Allan) and wants to replace his morally-indefensible business with a more respectable foray into standard goods shipping. So he orders his first mate, Jack Thompson (Wallace Beery) to fire most of the crew and replace them with new hands. However, the ship's swabbies are accustomed to their lucrative line of work and, under the sway of the greedy Lefty (George Sanders), they mutiny, resulting in high seas histrionics with a nuanced performance provided by Mickey Rooney as Swifty the cabin boy.

Normally i'm not a fan of 20th Century Fox's output from Hollywood's Golden Age as everything i've seen is either turgid or very pretentious but this movie is excellent! I'm a big fan of Wallace Beery as he had a rough but lovable persona though you could tell he was a drunken lout of a man but he always managed to make himself likable in his films. This role sees him in a darker light though at first you wouldn't know it as he's his affable self for most of the first half. It helps that he has a great chemistry with the leading man Warner Baxter who becomes troubled by the business he's engaged in to the point that early in the film after they've brought slaves back to America he tries to get the young Mickey Rooney out of the life to no avail really.

Andy Rooney was the ostensible comedy relief but really he showed a dexterity that he'd show later on in movies such as Boys Town (1938) and The Human Comedy (1943) in that while he did some comedic stuff he could pull off the high drama especially towards the end of the movie when the crew has mutinied but Baxter has cleverly fended off the swabbies after being forced to haul in another cargo of slaves. Rooney is told by Beery to try and trick Baxter by giving him food and steering the ship away from St. Helena where they'd surely be hung by the British for their misdeeds but it backfires on Beery & Co. as Rooney realizes he isn't hated by Baxter and that indeed what they're doing is completely wrong.

The romantic subplot wasn't too bad in this and I have to say that again Baxter showed great chemistry with his co-star Elizabeth Allan who had a beauty and softness to her character that made her very charming to watch. The subplot did kind of slow down the middle section of the movie but it helps to hammer home the point that Baxter has grave misgivings about the slave trade and now that he's found love he's definitely going to give it up.

That leads into the most remarkable part of the film. This movie presents the brutality and indignities of the slave trade in an honest and frank way that would make movie execs try to soft peddle things but this movie doesn't add a soft touch. Instead, what we get are a couple scenes that nearly bookend the movie where slaves are being whipped and packed into the hold of the ship like a pack of sardines. We also see Beery inspecting potential slaves as if they're a piece of meat. The other scene that bookends the flick has the swabbies throwing anchors to ocean floor and drowning the slaves so they wouldn't be caught as slavers while Baxter tries to free as many as he could. It's gripping stuff and I must say while it's not as extensive or graphic as other depictions of black slavery it does show what happened in an unvarnished manner.

This movie gets a big recommendation and is available under the 20th Century Fox Archives Collection banner as a DVD-R. As for my rating? ****