The Prisoner of Shark Island

source: The Prisoner of Shark Island

Falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND tries to maintain his dignity under vile circumstances. This is director John Ford's exciting and passionate tale of real-life Dr. Samuel Mudd, who, having set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg after Lincoln's assassination, was swept up in the hysteria following the President's death. Convicted of conspiracy, Dr. Mudd was sentenced to incarceration at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas south of Florida, a hellish, mosquito-infested prison where savage brutality was commonplace and escape attempts futile. In one of his best roles, Warner Baxter gives a searing portrait as Dr. Mudd. While some of the plot situations are purely fanciful, Baxter never lets the viewer forget that this is the story of a real man unfolding before us. Whether vociferously proclaiming his innocence, vainly struggling to escape his hideous confinement or valiantly attempting to fight back an onslaught of yellow fever, Baxter is never anything less than completely compelling. Equally fascinating is John Carradine as the sadistic prison sergeant who torments Mudd; with his gimlet eye and sadistic grin, Carradine sets the seal on the sinister persona he'd project for the rest of his career. The beloved silent Western cowboy star Harry Carey plays the warden of Fort Jefferson with realism & good grace. Gloria Stuart as Mudd's valiant wife and Claude Gillingwater as his fierce old father-in-law give firm support. Vivid character portrayals are given by O. P. Heggie as the prison's doomed doctor, Francis McDonald as Booth and Paul Fix as his accomplice David Herold. A cast standout is Ernest Whitman as Buck, Mudd's faithful field hand who attempts to rescue him. Movie mavens should recognize Jan Duggan & Dick Elliott as the performers on stage at Ford's Theatre and Our Gang's Matthew ‘Stymie' Beard as the lad come to fetch the Doctor to a birthing - all uncredited. Director Ford's love of American history is plainly manifest in this frequently factual film. His reconstructions of the death of Lincoln (movingly played by Frank McGlynn Sr.) and the execution of the conspirators all have the look of antique illustrations. The entire film has excellent production values, with the Fort Jefferson sets being particularly well conceived. ***************** The film depicts three of Booth's conspirators being executed for the murder. Actually, four individuals were hung on 7 July 1865: Lewis Powell (he stabbed & wounded an invalided Secretary of State Seward), George A. Atzerodt (he was assigned to murder Vice President Johnson), David E. Herold (who had accompanied Booth on his flight from Washington) and Mrs. Mary Surratt (she owned the boarding house where Booth met with his gang and may have been completely innocent). Two other men, along with Dr. Mudd, were given life sentences. The stagehand who held Booth's horse at the back of the theatre was given eight years. And what of the other three people in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre that fateful night? Already emotionally fragile, Mrs. Mary Lincoln would eventually go mad and have to be placed in an asylum by her son. The Lincolns' guests were Miss Clara Harris and her fiancé Major Henry R. Rathbone. They would marry, but Henry would also go insane and murder Clara in a fit of rage. Dr. Mudd's health was permanently affected by his time at Fort Jefferson, and, although released, he would die in 1883, the year of his 50th birthday.

Mmm… just saw this and noticed that there's an eerie correspondence between John Ford's slightly dated, but still superior, The Prisoner of Shark Island and some events today. Those unfortunates accused of Lincoln's murder are given a show trial (in which the judges are briefed to avoid such annoying legal niceties as considerations of guilt being 'beyond reasonable doubt'), as they shuffle, chained, hooded, and without rights, from hearing to internment and back again. Railroaded on the back of belligerent public opinion after an outrage that shocked a nation, guilty by association in the hasty eyes of the establishment, Dr Mudd is denied true process of law in the special military court hearings and ends banged up on the far edge of the States, just outside of the place where the presentation of a Habaeus Corpus would, we are told, ensure a fair reassessment of his case.. Ford couldn't have known of course, but as a study of a controversial case from the past his film is somewhat prescient of the Guantanomo Bay shame, a current and larger stain over the face of American justice

I caught this one on American Movie Classics as part of its John Ford retrospective and found it to be an extremely well-done film that stand up very well for its 60-plus years. Lots of tension, and the action is extremely well-paced. Good acting all-around, especially from Claude Gillingwater as Mudd's feisty father-in-law.

I chanced upon this movie today on television and could not stop watching it until its end. I am glad I did not miss much. It is a fascinating story of the doctor who treated President Abraham Lincoln's assassinator, John Wilkes Booth's broken leg. I feel that Mudd certainly knew it was Wilkes who came to his house that early morning--how could he not---but he was a doctor and thought that treating his leg was justified. Apparently, the court did not and sentenced him to a life term. In any event, he proved invaluable when a yellow fever/yellow jack epidemic ran rampant in the prison he was confined in on the island called Dry Tortugas in the Gulf Of Mexico, now a national park and monument in Florida, 70 miles west of Key West. For his selflessness and bravery in aiding his fellow man and his doctoring skill, he was pardoned by the President and was able to live the rest of his life as a free man and, of course, rejoin his family. It is debatable whether the real Samuel Mudd knew he was aiding an abetting John Wilkes, I feel, he did, but, as said, was just doing his service as a physician. This is a excellent old fashioned, good movie to watch and you should not miss it.

This is an extremely well made film, for its time, about Dr. Mudd's complicity (and knowledge) in aiding John Wilkes Booth in his escape after Lincoln's assassination. Factually, the film is very well done, though it tends to paint him as completely ignorant of who Booth was, and tones down Mudd's Southern sympathy and tries to make him look less "Southern" than he was. His work at the prison in Dry Tortugas is also very well done, and is also very factual, according to Union guards testimony at the prison, as well as during Mudd's parole board hearings. All in all, it is a very well made and factual film!

Most history buffs will like this though they may disagree with the portrayal of Dr. Mudd as being complete innocent after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians say Mudd knew John Wilkes Booth from often seeing the famous actor on the stage. However, it doubtful if he knew Booth had just assassinated Lincoln and was in flight from pursuing soldiers after breaking his leg while leaping from the Ford Theatre balcony onto the stage. It is now believed by many that Dr. Mudd allowed Booth to remain in his home overnight due to the strain put upon the recently set leg. The next morning Mudd went into town to get a newspaper and then discovered that Booth was wanted for Lincoln's murder. He was thus placed in the uncomfortable position of unintentionally harboring a murderer and if he had notified the police at that time he would never have been implicated in the tragedy. He unwisely chose not to do so and instead returned home to tell Booth to leave. The pusuing troops discovered that Booth had been at the Mudd home and the doctor was arrested and later tried. The movie does give a good presentation of the trial which was a travesty conducted by the military with orders from the authorities to convict and hang all those charged. Booth did luck out a bit by escaping the death penalty. Many legal experts now believe that the trial was illegal since the civilian courts were still functioning. But vengeance was to be extracted and what did befall Dr. Mudd could have been far worse.

I recently thought I would treat myself to a John Ford retrospective by viewing all the films of his in my collection (some 32) in chronological order. I was surprised at how little my rating of them had changed over the years, with the sole exception of "The Horse Soldiers" which seems to get better and better. I think my all-time favourites will always be "How Green was my Valley" and "The Quiet Man", while time can do nothing to redeem the sheer awfulness of "What Price Glory?" However, what really did surprise me about one of the most uneven of the great directors, was the tremendous visual flair of his films of the '30s. True there were some potboilers such as "Wee Willie Winkie" and "Submarine Patrol", but the period contains a Western, "Drums Along the Mohawk", that is right up there with the finest, "The Searchers" and "The Horse Soldiers", "The Hurricane", arguably the finest disaster movie of all time and "The Prisoner of Shark Island", a fascinating story of wrongful imprisonment. The latter is based on the true story of a country doctor who had the misfortune to treat the assassin of Abraham Lincoln during his flight, an action that prompted his arrest and incarceration in a prison island off the Florida coast. Anyone wishing to study action film montage at its most skilful need look no further than the first half-hour of "Prisoner". The reconstruction of the theatre assassination, Booth's flight, his encounter with Dr Mudd, Mudd's arrest and trial are shot with a breathtaking urgency of pace. If the last two-thirds seem a little conventional beside the whirlwind opening, this is partly due to the fact that the genre of prison drama with attempted escapes has become something of a cinema commonplace. It should not cloud the issue that this comparatively early example is still one of the best. Nevertheless the film is not without faults that largely arise from genre expectations of the period. John Carradine hams it all the way as a prison office oozing malevolence, Mudd's daughter is a Shirley Temple lookalike, simperingly coy and cosy and all the darkies, although thoroughly nice and obvious goodies in a troubled world, are portrayed as if they hardly possess a brain between them. Still, this is the sort of tosh it is wise to overlook in order to fully appreciate films as wonderfully crafted as this.

Viewers can tell that "Prisoner" is the work of a great director, and some of the performances are indeed fine; but this film is a lie, and it did a great disservice to the understanding of US history. Samuel Mudd knew John Wilkes Booth and almost certainly was aware of the identity of the patient he treated on the morning of April 15, 1865. Mudd got caught up in his own lie, and he later tried to change his story - not once but twice. His role as a medical doctor is certainly important, but the reality is that the other two surviving defendants who had been sent to Ft. Jefferson were also pardoned by Andrew Johnson at the close of Johnson's term of office. The portrayal of blacks in this film is nothing less than disgusting - way beyond GWTW and into "Birth of a Nation" territory. Mudd remains a fascinating figure, and watch this film - but don't be fooled into thinking it is at all historical. (Also, couldn't the filmmakers have at least given Mrs. Mudd her real name? and stuck to the very real drama of the military commission voting by a margin of just one vote to preserve Mudd's life?)

In general, Hollywood bio-pics of the 1930s bore me. So many of them stray so far from the real story or attempt to canonize the subjects that they just seem too fake and sickly to watch. This movie is a good exception to this rule of thumb. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was NOT all treacle and it was easy to find myself engaged in the plot. Plus, the subject matter of the movie is an enigmatic person in that NO ONE alive knows for sure what, if any, role he had in Licoln's death. It really got me thinking and as a result I did some research--and ultimately learned that this debate will probably never be decided! But, based on excellent writing and acting, I strongly recommend it. Plus, as a history teacher, I am happy that, in general, the facts seem to be presented well. THAT'S a rarity for any biographical movie!