Save your money for something good and enjoyable

As Good As It Gets

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

1937's "Slave Ship" looks today as gritty as it must have been shocking to audiences 80 years ago, a script concocted by several writers, including William Faulkner, who admitted that he merely doctored certain scenes that hadn't come off. George S. King's 1933 novel "The Last Slaver" was the basis for a story that remarkably pulled no punches in depicting the odyssey of the newly launched ship Wanderer, tasting blood on the runway as Lon Chaney delivers a stinging unbilled cameo as a doomed laborer unable to escape its path. Three years, and as many names later, the rechristened Albatross is now commanded by Jim Lovett (Warner Baxter) and first mate Jack Thompson (Wallace Beery), with cabin boy Swifty (Mickey Rooney) willing to fight anyone for what he believes in. The slave trade had fallen on hard times by 1860, officially a hanging offense, so after their most recent trip back from Africa, Lovett meets and marries young beauty Nancy Marlowe (Elizabeth Allan), deciding to start over with a new crew and sail to Jamaica in the business of trading goods instead of lives. This does not sit well with the crew, willing to continue their trafficking on human suffering despite the risks involved, forcibly taking control of the ship after a successful mutiny. Unable to prevent the six week voyage back to Africa, Lovett reveals all to his wife, who finds that she still loves him and is willing to forget about his past and work out their future. What they don't know is that Thompson plots to leave his captain behind while the fully loaded ship returns to America, only for the intended victim to turn the tables on his captors, producing a climax as rich in excitement as it is unpredictable. If not for the poorly done romantic scenes involving the little dog it might have been an enduring classic, but it's still a real find, quite unexpected for 1930s Hollywood. MGM's "Souls at Sea" may have earned all the accolades but Darryl Zanuck's pluck produced the better picture, under the assured guidance of director Tay Garnett, both John Ford and Howard Hawks proving unavailable. Beery actually plays the villain, George Sanders in support, Mickey Rooney the true standout.

WARNER BAXTER is a Yankee sea captain who goes to church on Sundays and shyly courts pretty Elizabeth Allen as time permits. His cargo happens to be slaves purchased in West Africa for sale in America. In this movie, slaves are purchased matter-of-factly from Black Africans, get some brutal treatment on board (but not much), and the crew is happy with their work and waay dirty too. None of the slaves are portrayed as brilliant or courageous. Trouble comes when throwing the "evidence" overboard becomes an issue between the captain and the crew. Since this film was made 60 years ago, it's blessedly free of the Political Correctness spin job which sunk "Amistead." It simply never occurred to Hollywood back then to re-write history to conform to wacky leftist viewpoints which distort facts. Obviously Hollywood today is in a tizzy over the "slavery issue" and thus dozens of films like this one and such as Walt Disney's wonderful "Song of the South" --- a film depicting only former slaves --- are kept out of sight. Hush!

William Faulkner must have envisioned "Slave Ship" as a dark commentary on the curse of slavery(the "cursed ship" element is abandoned early on) and the studio tried to turn it into a typical adventure yarn. The results are strangely tasteless, unsettling, and facinating.This is a bad movie, but one I highly recommend. The movie seems to be saying "these people veiwed things in a different way, but the best of them rose above slavery." We feel almost as much distance to movie makers, as Wallace Berry is mostly viewed as a roughish but likeable scoundrel; though we learn early on he is a genocidal mass murderer.Though only seen in short glimpses, the inhumanity of slavery is fairly well expressed. It's the fairly casual context of subject that is allmost chilling. But see it for yourself and decide.

SLAVE SHIPAspect ratio: 1.37:1Sound format: Mono(Black and white)Any film which opens with an unbilled Lon Chaney Jr. being crushed to death during the launching of a ship can't be all bad! And, indeed, Tay Garnett's SLAVE SHIP gets off to a cracking start with a hellish vision of the slave trade along the West African coast in 1860. Sadly, the long middle section is bogged down by muted dramatics and a number of soggy romantic interludes (Warner Baxter and Elizabeth Allan provide the offending drippery), but the rousing climax makes up for some of the longueurs. George Sanders turns up, horribly miscast, in one of his pre-stardom roles as a villainous sea-dog.