THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND

by Kevin Koehler

The years have at last removed the shadow which rested upon the name of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd of Maryland, and the nation which once condemned him now acknowledges the injustice it visited on one of the most unselfish and courageous men in American history.

- George L. Radcliffe, United States Senator, Maryland (1935-1947), as quoted in the opening to The Prisoner of Shark Island

This really is a subtly detestable film at times.  The presentation of history, the martyring of the Confederacy, the characterization of black people, the absurd straw men constructed for so much bayonetting.  It's too much, especially in the hands of an expert craftsman like John Ford, a guy who can shovel so much bullshit down your throat and convince you it tastes good afterwards.

Poor, innocent Doctor Samuel Alexander Mudd, M.D. (Warner Baxter), victim of kangaroo courts and mob justice.  A proud Southern gentleman, loving husband and loyal American (he has a portrait of George Washington in his study, after all), just fulfilling the duties of the sacred Oath of Hippocrates on a weary traveller with a broken leg, an injured man who said he was on his way to visit his dying mother.  By God, Mudd's only crime was kindness.  Who could refuse medical service in these circumstances?  How was he supposed to know this man was infamous Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, making his escape from Ford's Theater of Death after he put one in the brain of the Great Emancipator?

There's no way, this film will tell you.  Dr. Mudd liked Lincoln.  Further, Shark Island insinuates that John Wilkes Booth acted alone.  There was no conspiracy.  Even Mudd asks: "Does as assassin confide his plans to anyone?"  Well yes, sometimes they do, but forget that for now.  Per another interestingly-phrased title card, after his death in a Virginia tobacco barn:

"John Wilkes Booth left responsibility for his mad crime to fall on eight strangely assorted suspects, and the innocent as well as the guilty faced an angry and heart-broken people."

Don't you see?  These people were practically chosen at random off the street.  Their fates had already been decided.  Those on the tribunal are told: "You must not allow your judgement and decision to be troubled by any trifling technicalities of the law or any pedantic regard for the customary rules of evidence.  You must not allow yourself to be influenced by the obnoxious creation of legal nonsense, reasonable doubt."  A parade of witnesses proceed unchallenged (mostly liars wearing Union army uniforms), giving circumstantial evidence that juries would laugh off in any real court of law.  Saint Mudd never had a chance (Ford really did have a thing for Civil War-era hagiographies).  "Was I, a physician, in the plot because it was part of John Wilkes Booth's plan to break his leg and need me?"

This is not justice!  This is not America!  Dr. Mudd should be given a medal, statues erected in his honor, his family home turned into a museum with a giftshop that sells coffee mugs and magnets.

While the other guiltless patriots are hung to satisfy our bloodlust, Mudd is given life in prison in a most inhospitable place called Fort Jefferson, described as "a burning white hell...where life imprisonment was an ironic term for slow death" (yes, it's located in Florida).  In case the surrounding ocean were not impediment enough to escape, there's also a moat.  With sharks.  And the sharks don't take kindly to people who conspire to kill the nation's president (even if you are falsely accused).  Neither does the prison's sadistic Commandant (Harry Carey, giving an inspired performance), who feels Mudd should have swung with the rest of the traitors.  If the Commandant can't shorten the Doctor's borrowed time, he can certainly make it unpleasant.  Mudd soon finds himself confined in a dungeon (with an exceptionally devoted ex-slave named Buck), left to rot in darkness.  However, fate's fickle hand intervenes once more as a yellow fever outbreak overruns Fort Jefferson.  The only thing that can save prisoner and guard alike is Dr. Mudd's expert healing touch.  Sure, he could have stayed in isolation and let his persecutors die, but Mudd chooses instead to expose himself to disease, delirium, and possible death.  Damn it, that's just what a man does.

It's all very effective, even uplifting: a wronged man who triumphs over adversity/hardship/oppression due to the strength of the human spirit and his intrinsic goodness.  If Shark Island purported to be fiction, it would be a compelling motion picture, albeit one blighted with racism and a nostalgia for the Antebellum South and its Lost Cause.  Take the way Mudd's (ex)slaves reject an abolitionist's entreaties of liberation and voting rights, chasing the man off the plantation at their master's request.  That the sequence (and their animalistic cries) is played for humor makes it even more abhorrent.  Particularly in early scenes, Ford finds the lives of former slaves to be the source of much comic possibility, whether it be their curious speech patterns, minstrel show affectations, or the unrivaled pace with which they become pregnant with "chilluns."  When Mudd compares a farmhand's newborn child to a farm animal, it is said without irony.  He means it as a compliment and so, apparently, do John Ford and scripter Nunnally Johnson.  The tired refrain that the Civil War (sorry, I mean War Between the States) "was not a question of slavery...it was a question of states' rights" is also trotted out as absolute truth, uncontested by no one.

But Shark Island does not purport to be fiction; it claims to be a true story based on fact, this fact being Doctor Mudd's good name removed from shadow.  The historical record suggests otherwise.  Of course, the Lincoln assassination occurred almost 150 years ago; passing time brings with it the fog of uncertainty.  But what we do know is this: at 4 o'clock in the morning on April 15, 1965, an injured John Wilkes Booth found Dr. Mudd's farmhouse.  How was he able to find Mudd's farmhouse in the darkness?  Simple: he had been there before, having stayed the night a few months before the assassination under the auspices of buying property from the Doctor.  We know this because Mudd admitted as such.  He also admitted that he had met Booth in Washington a short while later and had drinks with he and another Lincoln conspirator, John Surratt (a dick who hid in Canada during the Lincoln conspiracy trials, letting his mother take the fall for him), in Booth's hotel room.  He denied it to investigators but later came clean when contradicted by eyewitness testimony.

We also know that Dr. Mudd did not tell the authorities of Booth's post-assassination visit until the day after he had left.  It was almost a week before Mudd turned over a boot he had cut from the "stranger," the one with J. Wilkes inscribed inside it, finally confirming his identity to investigators.  Again, maybe this is all coincidence.  Perhaps Mudd didn't recognize a famous actor who had stayed in his home less than six months prior.  The problem is, Shark Island addresses none of these points, opting to present the case against Mudd as one of judicial tyranny, a scapegoat sacrificed to sate a public who had not its fill of rebel blood.  Dramatic license only extends so far - it's disingenuous and intellectually dishonest, undermining the rickety foundation on which Shark Island is built.  Sure, it's just a movie, not a history lesson; but it's a movie tinged in racism, brimming with untruths, and perpetuating a lie.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.