Not among Ford's best films, unfortunately. Warner Baxter is excellent as Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth's leg after he broke it jumping from the balcony in which he shot Abraham Lincoln. Like most Hollywood films, it completely ignores history. It's not generally believed that Mudd was a conspirator against Lincoln, but the truth was a lot murkier than this film presents. The beginning of the film is pretty good, with the assassination and Mudd's arrest and trial. Strangely enough, I thought it got much less interesting when it moved to the titular island, Dry Tortuga in the Florida Keys. I don't exactly know why, but I lost interest during the latter half of the movie, despite the wonderful presence of John Carradine at his hammiest. Love that guy. The bug-eyed Negro characters are pretty annoying in this one, although I thought the character of Buck, a former slave of Mudd's who aids him in prison, was one of the more positive characters of that type I've seen. Not that the depiction isn't fairly racist, but at least he's kind of a hero.
Review of The Prisoner of Shark Island
The Prisoner of Shark Island
(1936)
Warner Baxter is great, but the film is only so-so
16 December 2007