Captain Benjamin Briggs (Arthur Margetson) takes the ship Mary Celeste on a sea voyage to England and has decided to bring along his new wife, Sarah (Shirley Grey). He should have spent more time gathering a proper crew as his current one includes a sadistic first mate (Edmund Willard), the mysterious Anton Lorenzen (Bela Lugosi) whose life had been destroyed by previously being shanghaied on this ship, and a sailor sent by Sarah’s previous lover. Soon people die or vanish, and it seems likely that a member of the crew is responsible. But which one?
The Mary Celeste was a real ghost ship, found abandoned and adrift a month after it had left port in New York. Its lifeboat was missing, but its cargo was still on board, as were the possessions of the sailors. No further clues have ever been found, which has lead to wild speculation in stories told in every medium. This particular version is a thriller, explaining the disappearance of the sailors due to a murderer. It also ignores facts, making up its own crew and changing the history of the captain.
Is this a horror film? Not really. But it does have some atmospheric moments. It also has Bela Lugosi in the cast, and is one of the first features from Hammer Films, twenty years before they became a horror company, so it is of interest to horror fans.
Docudrama, thriller, or horror, is it any good? Not much. The first half of the 62 minute film is mostly focused on the generic and almost undefined captain and his love triangle with the barely-written girl and another generic and almost undefined captain. I neither cared what happened to these people or knew who they were. Without Lugosi popping in briefly, you’d have a lullaby. Things improve greatly once the bodies start to appear and our perverse crew become more important, but then there’s a different problem.
The film’s original name was The Mystery of the Mary Celeste and it had an 80 minute runtime. It was cut with a hatchet for the US market with 18 minutes removed, and no one involved was concerned that the result made any sense. That butchered version was titled Phantom Ship, and in the years since, the British cut has been lost. So in the film we have, necessary characters never appear and two main ones simply vanish from the story. They aren’t murdered or jump ship. They just aren’t there. There’s also a gap in time. How much? We don’t know. What happened? We don’t know. There is an ending, but with so much missing, it doesn’t matter.
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste could never have been great. Major characters are too weak, the pacing is off, and the beginning is dull. But it likely was decent thanks to some excitement in the later half and the presence of Lugosi. However all we have is tatters, and except for someone doing research on Lugosi or the history of Hammer, there’s no reason to watch.