By Michael Bayer
Water, water everywhere. From Noah’s Ark to the Nautilus, from the Pequod to the Poseidon, seafaring vessels are seemingly ubiquitous settings across arts and literature. Perhaps the most important innovation in human history, boats of all types — battleships, galleys, cruise ships, canoes — have brought extraordinary triumphs and catastrophic trials, the wave of life illustrated in a single sailor’s voyage.
Read on or click here for a complete list of nautical noir titles.
Then there’s noir. Unsurprisingly, in film noir, boats — and the open water on which they sail — are often used as tools of death and crime. For example, a pregnant girlfriend is thrown overboard in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), a young boy is abandoned to drown in John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and a struggle with a ship’s doctor sends a dishonest husband plunging to his wet death in Joseph M. Newman’s Dangerous Crossing (1953).
Whether deadly or not, scenes on watercraft are extremely common, but a whole subset of noirs take place primarily at sea or revolve around criminal seafaring endeavors. (And, of course, crime on the high seas is far more menacing because there’s nowhere to run.) These films we categorize as nautical noir. In them, the isolation of the open sea symbolizes both danger and freedom in equal measure, a paradox perfectly suited to noir. Indeed, even before any criminal element is introduced, the threats are everywhere: mutiny, madness, sharks, storms.
Hints of nautical noir emerged early in the cycle with titles like United Artists’ The Long Voyage Home (1940), based on several Eugene O’Neill plays, and Warner Brothers’ The Sea Wolf (1941), based on the Jack London novel, but the banner year was 1943, when RKO released both Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship and Norman Foster’s Journey into Fear. RKO by now had mastered what would become known as the noir aesthetic, including expressionistic B&W cinematography and low-key lighting, but in these films, the moonlit ocean’s surface replaced rain-slick city streets as the primary canvas for visual mastery. RKO emphasized the open water as black and hidden just like the fate of the noir protagonist.
In The Ghost Ship, produced by the legendary Val Lewton, a young merchant marine (Russell Wade) joins a crew whose captain (Richard Dix) appears to be slowly going insane, leading to several crewmember deaths, including a particularly brutal scene in which a sailor is crushed to death in a chain locker. Donald Henderson Clarke’s script is notable for avoiding one-dimensional, horror-like tropes, instead adding complexity to the murderer’s character through his confession to a female friend (Edith Barrett) about his killer instincts.
In Journey into Fear, based on a popular novel by English author (and future husband of noir producer Joan Harrison) Eric Ambler, Orson Welles haunts the film in a relatively minor role as a Turkish secret police colonel who forces an average American engineer (Joseph Cotton), who has suddenly and inexplicably become an assassination target, to flee Turkey undetected on a ship curdling with mysterious characters from various European countries. The man who wants the engineer dead, of course, is on board too.
Nautical noir sailed through the 1940’s with releases like Andre de Toth’s Dark Waters (1944), Edwin L. Marin’s Johnny Angel (1945), Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and plenty of others, including a truly fascinating Japanese offering, Woman in the Typhoon Area (1948), about a ship of thieves who take over a small island, including the crew of a weather monitoring station, while unaware of an approaching storm.
One of the greatest in the category is Michael Curtiz’ brilliantly intimate The Breaking Point (1950), easily the strongest of three film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, To Have and Have Not (Don Siegel’s 1958 The Gun Runners is an admirable effort.) In this case, the main character is a desperate war veteran (John Garfield) trying to survive and raise a family as a charter boat captain, his need for cash (and a femme fatale played by Patricia Neal) pushing him toward increasingly illicit gigs.
Noir on the open seas navigated an international course in the 1950’s, with titles like Gordon Douglas’ Mara Maru (1952), Harold French’s Forbidden Cargo (1954), and Georg Tressler’s Ship of the Dead (1959), sailing around the Philippines, France, and Spain, respectively. A standout of this period is Basil Dearden’s PT Raiders (1955), whose UK title, The Ship That Died of Shame, is infinitely more descriptive and accurate since Dearden and cinematographer Gordon Dines take pains to anthropomorphize the little motor gun boat, once a war hero but now reduced to transporting a handful of slimy smugglers looking to get rich quick.
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