Terror Aboard - 1933

Terror Aboard (1933) is an eerie mystery that, though from the Pre-Code era, feels more like a noir film of a later period with its flashbacks and cynicism.  However, we have Charles Ruggles in a comedy relief role to break the omnipresent gloom, and that certainly anchors us to the Pre-Code days.

This is my entry into the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Early Shadows and Pre-Code Horror Blogathon,” and you can find many more terrific blogs participating here.

A ship, perhaps a fishing boat, travels through murky fog, blasting its horn to warn any unseen vessel.  As the fog clears, they see a yacht a short distance away, and they sound the warning again and try to make contact, but there is no reply, and the boat seems adrift.  

Curiously, from this distance, they can see no one on board.  The captain takes a small detail of men, including the ship’s doctor, and takes a launch over to the yacht to investigate.  The camera cuts to the other side of the yacht, where a man leaps into the water, unseen.  We will get back to him later.  This post, as usual, is awash with spoilers.

As the captain and his men cautiously roam about an empty ship, one of them is clubbed from behind.  They find passengers on the boat at last—dead ones.  A woman is found lying in a hallway—frozen to death.  A man is found hanging in a cabin. The captain mutters morosely, “This is some kind of devil ship.”

Suddenly, a fire breaks out in the engine room, and they quickly retrieve the bodies they’ve found and prepare to leave the yacht.  They also find a telegram addressed to a man named Krieg that had been sent two days earlier, which reads, “grand jury indicted you for forgery and grand larceny…”  This Krieg is bankrupt, and the police are after him.

Now we drop into our first flashback.  We meet Krieg himself, a dapper middle-aged man with a trim mustache, played by John Halliday.  He owns this yacht.  

As he reads the telegram he has just received, he ponders his situation—and we are launched into a second flashback, to October 1929, when the stock market crashes and mobs run on banks, and men swarm in panic on the stock exchange floor. 

The crash of 1929 made for a dismal and sickening backdrop for movies of the Great Depression.  Just its mention, or even the image of falling stocks on a ticker tape was easily recognizable shorthand for catastrophe.  Cinematically, it need not be explained. Certainly, through the decade of the 1930s, repercussions still stung from this event. 

Mr. Halliday, natty in his yachting cap and uniform jacket, visits the ship’s radiographer, played by William Janney, who sends and receives the telegrams.  He knows Janney has seen the message, for he deciphered the Morse code.  He has a companionable chat with him, talking of wanting to live on a nearby deserted island, lays out his plans to change course for it, but Janney seems obtuse either to what might be both a bribe and a threat. He only catches on when Halliday takes out a gun.  Because the camera is cut away from the instant the gun is fired, and we see only Janney’s expression of horror, we are teased into thinking that Halliday has shot himself, committing suicide. 

Then, after a long, rather agonizing pause, Janney falls, slumping to the floor, his white uniform covered in blood.  Halliday sets the scene to make it look as if Janney committed suicide.  Then he takes the guest list of passengers.

We get to meet them one by one, and their relationship to Halliday is briefly etched.  Verree Teasdale is an older woman, the wife of his business partner, encouraging ingenue Shirley Grey in Miss Grey’s forthcoming nuptials to Mr. Halliday.  Yet Grey seems troubled, and perhaps not entirely at the age difference between them. They will marry when the yacht reaches Australia.  We soon learn that she really loves Neil Hamilton, but they had quarreled.

Miss Teasdale will have her own marital problems come to the fore, as she is pursued in an adulterous relationship with Jack LaRue.  Morgan Wallace, Teasdale’s husband, will fight with LaRue and LaRue will knife him to death with a letter opener.  This violence is, however, subtly orchestrated by Halliday.  We come to understand he wants to eliminate his passengers.  We will see his hand scratch their names off the passenger list as they die.

Complicating his plans is the late addition to the guests on board when his fiancée’s former love, played by Neil Hamilton, arrives unexpectedly by plane, which he ditches in the ocean near the yacht.  He has been tracking down Shirley Grey to reunite with her.  We see a hand add his name on the passenger list, like an additional chore on a things-to-do list. Hamilton is handsome, rugged, flies a plane, and we assume he may be better equipped to cheat death on this cruise than the other passengers, perhaps even saving Miss Grey, to boot, but they end up getting locked in the engine room.  Where a fire breaks out. “It’s all right, darling.  We’ll get out of this somehow.”

Hamilton, you may recognize as the future Commissioner Gordon on the Batman TV series in the 1960s.

There is a poisoning, a hanging, and Verree Teasdale gets locked into the ship’s meat locker, where she freezes to death, and more names are scratched out.

Charles Ruggles has a prominent role as a ship’s steward, and he is comic relief, bumbling around, playing the amiable coward, terrified by all the murder around him, clutching at lucky charms.  We might assume that he will survive because God protects bumbling clowns, at least in old movies.

The captain of the yacht, played by Stanley Fields, begins to suspect Halliday of the horrific deeds.  Meanwhile, the crew grumble among themselves, worried and wanting to escape, and finally they rush a lifeboat, but Halliday shoots them.

Then a blast from a ship’s horn in the fog, and we are immediately taken back to the present when the yacht is seen drifting at sea.  The ship pulls up alongside the yacht, and captain and crew investigate.  Halliday, we discover, lurking about, is the one who smacked the sailor on the head.  He starts the engine room fire, and he is the man whom we earlier saw leaping from the yacht into the sea to swim for it.

Against all odds, Neil Hamilton and Shirley Grey are rescued from the fire, and all are speedily removed from the burning yacht to escape to the other ship.

John Halliday, whether driven mad by his indictment over the stock collapse or whether he was just a diabolical manipulator who was determined to win at all costs, is seen at the end of the film being pursued by a shark.  Horror begets horror, but it seems as if, as with many Pre-Codes, the just desserts are not a moral indictment, but a cheap thrill to round out the final reel. 

For more fun with spooky Pre-Code ne’er do wells, have a look at these great posts at the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Early Shadows and Pre-Code Horror Blogathon,” and you can find many more terrific blogs participating here.

Terror Aboard can currently be seen on YouTube.

 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

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