The second film made by the company then known as Hammer Productions Ltd was a prescient taste of things to come as it featured one of the biggest horror stars of the day and recounted the story of “one of the strangest and most dramatic chapters in maritime history.” The Mary Celeste was an American ship famously found abandoned and adrift off the Azores in December 1872, its crew having apparently abandoned her for reasons unknown, never to be seen again. In the decades since, many a fanciful tale has sprung up to explain what happened to the missing crew, everything from a giant squid to the Ill-defined supernatural forces. If Doctor Who is to be believed, the crew leapt overboard when the ship was boarded by Daleks…
Charles Larkworth’s script for The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, based on a story by its director, Denison Clift, has a more prosaic theory about what happened. The plot owed as much to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians as it does to the actual myth, with its steadily rising body count in the latter half though it gets off to a lethargic start with some not-very-interesting business involving a love triangle between friends Captain Briggs (Arthur Margetson), Captain Morehead (Clifford McLaglen) Sarah (Shirley Grey). The two men fall out but are reunited when Briggs, now married to Sarah, is struggling to find a crew for his ship the Mary Celeste and asks Morehead for help. He gathers together a group of men, among them the seemingly gentle Anton Lorenzen (Bela Lugosi) who saves Sarah from being raped by killing her assailant but then weeps for the life he has taken. But someone is soon killing off the crew one by one and of course the killer is Lorenzon (you don’t hire Lugosi for a film of this kind and not make him the killer) who is out for revenge for having been shanghaied six years earlier on the same ship. A last second twist reveals that there was another hand in the murders…
Sadly, it’s a fairly uneventful journey through turgid waters. It’s a film more interested in the romantic triangle than in the horror though it kicks up a gear near the end and Lugosi, who is very good throughout, goes convincingly insane as he finishes of the last of the crew members. But the problem that Larkworth has is that the story is so nebulous – it makes for a creepy campfire tale but the fact that no-one will ever know what really happened aboard the Mary Celeste leaves him with very little to work with. Even at a meagre 80 minutes (although it seems that only the shortened American version, retitled Phantom Ship, that runs a little over an hour, has survived) it feels padded with a lot of time devoted to getting the crew together before they even set sail. The excised footage is widely reported to be a lengthy trial sequence that bookends the main story. In truth we’re probably better off without it – the film is slow enough as it is and trying to ground the events in the mundane world of a legal inquiry will have robbed it of what little atmosphere it had.
The big draw of course was Lugosi, still riding high on the fame he found almost overnight after appearing in the title role of Universal’s Dracula (1931). Clift uses him sparingly which will disappoint some of his more devoted fans, but it works rather nicely, initially keeping him skirting around the edges of the story, his motivations obscure and his presence unsettling. It’s a nice performance from Lugosi who invests Lorenzon with a more interesting character than you might expect. There are still moments where he comes across as inappropriately theatrical, particularly in the first half, but once the killings begin, he comes into his own and dominates the film. Not a tricky task to be fair as most of the rest of the cast are very stiff and unconvincing even by 1930s standards. Shirley Grey is perhaps the pick of the rest of the acting crop, giving a far more compelling and naturalistic performance than the rest of the supporting cast.
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste is best reserved for Hammer completists though anyone expecting the dynamism and richness, both narrative and visual, of their later Gothic horrors is in for a very nasty shock. This is a typically stately British film of the mid-1930s, full of theatrical performances, static camerawork and snails-pace plotting. It scores points for being partly shot aboard an actual ship, “the famous ‘Q’ ship ‘Mary B. Mitchell'” (‘Q’ ships were vessels used by the Royal Navy in World War I as decoys to lure German submarines to the surface and destroy them with their concealed weaponry) which turned up again that same year in Walter Summer’s comedy film McGlusky the Sea Rover (Hell’s Cargo in the States). Lovers of the sea shanty are well served too as there are a few musical numbers scattered about here and there to bring the already glacial voyage to a complete halt.
Hammer Productions Ltd was a less than stellar success, and after just three more films it closed its doors. In 1949, they rose from the grave and started on the road that, less than a decade later, would see them take the world of horror by storm, establishing them as the premier name in the genre for the next decade and a half. The Mystery of the Mary Celeste is a dull film with little to commend it to the modern audience but its place in history, as the first horror film produced under the Hammer banner, ensures it a place in the history books.
The EOFFTV Review 
I knew I could count on you. Having seen this film last night, courtesy of TPTV, I was itching to discuss the merits and otherwise of the productions. I certainly don’t want to come across as a bad-film apologist, but perhaps I am, perhaps my tastes are somewhat on the peverse side, or have been hardened by years of trash-culture infusions. I would argue that the real trash is to be found in the river of the maisntream, but that is a anotheer debate, or series of debates.
So if one approaches the above with the usual caveats, or expectations, regarding the primitive state of poverty row British productions of the era, I found much to enjoy. Even the creakey elements have amusement value. I find butchers-shop editing here quite bracing at present. After all, we are in an era when it is almost impossible for even the most inept filmmaker to replicate such jarring effects, intentionally or not. Present filmmaking, though often bad in it’s own special way, reminds me of Ken Foree’s comment in Dawn of the Dead: ‘the only person who could miss with this, is the sucker with the bread to buy it’.
So Poverty row always carries a kind of ‘Punk’ anti-aesthetic charge. But this is carried through what I found the most interesting element in the film: a convincing maritime milieu, brutally realistic. The makers must have had knowledge of the era, either firsthand or through family or acquaintances. The dockside bar and it’s inhabitants is notably vivid.
Lugosi is excellent and very moving at times, at others, laughable, amking one realise that all along he had a kinship with Ed Wood, but I feel the director is more at fault for this, for letting him go too far, and not cutting prudently. One could be kind and say editing was in it’s infancy at this point, and resources were obviously as scarce to the filmmakers as decent chow is to the hapless sea voyagers. But excuses are so much wind in sails.
The threadbare values actually add to the desolate atmosphere of this mnor but interesting film. That sounds like special pleading, and that’s exactly what it is. Consider though, here we have prime pre
-Hays Code entertainment. A brutal voyage, in which every participant dies, decades before Night Of The Living Dead supposedly innovated such bleak fare. The final three surviving crew are locked in a triangle of paranoia that is like The Thing in microcosm – though obviously, in a much worse film.
The ending sees a not-quite guilty, but culpable and immoral man go unpunished, when the character who sent a man aboard ship with instructions to kill the captain gloats over his death and that of the sweetheart both vied for. The attempted rape scene, while not explicit, has a real charge, and one second of invention from the filmmakers, when they overlap the sound of a tearing sail caused by the storm lashing the decks with the would-be rapists pursuit. A lot can be acheived through suggestion, perhaps enough can be acheived.
Furthermore, one can’t help but reflect on the barbarous practices of international trade, in this case the practice of shanghaiing men onto crews, and their brutal treatment on board during dangerous voyages.
Thanks for your review, and for allowing me the opportunity to share some thoughts, which in an better world I would have done so in a comfortable bar with a pint in hand.
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There’s nothing wrong with being a “bad film apologist” – some of the best film times I’ve had have been with films most people would regard as bad! And thanks for your fascinating analysis of this film – plenty to mull over there. Keep ’em coming!
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