Phantom Ship

The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste

The actual mystery of the half-brig Mary Celeste is a true and tragic tale of the sea. Under her experienced master, Benjamin Briggs, she sailed from New York with a crew of eight on November 5, 1872. A month and a day later, she was found under full sail without a person aboard. The lifeboat and some navigational instruments were gone but the provisions and all the crew's belongings were still in place. The ship's log offered no explanation. No trace of the captain and his family or the crew was ever found, nor was there evidence of piracy or foul play.

This true mystery of the sea remains unsolved, although speculation which began in 1884 when Arthur Conan Doyle (pseudonymously) published "J. Habukak Jephon's Statement" continues to this day, fueled by the salvage of the wrecked Mary Celeste in August of 2001.

Phantom Ship, the American edition of the British 1935 Hammer horror film Mystery of the Mary Celeste, offers history's most fictitious solution to this famous seafaring riddle. It's an ambitious production with footage at sea taken aboard the Mary B. Mitchell, a period sailing vessel known for heroic duty as a U-Boat-sinking decoy in World War I. To assure distribution beyond the British empire, Dracula's Bela Lugosi was cast as seaman Anton Lorenzen, a religious zealot who goes postal as a result of being shanghaied years before, and does away with the Captain and the rest of the crew as his revenge. Buried in tiny parts among a quite competent cast of British stagers portraying American seamen are Gibson Gowland, Erich von Stroheim's unforgettable McTeague; and Gunner Moir, the Empire's former heavyweight boxing champion! Writer/Director Denison Clift was an American who also wrote Cecil B. DeMillie's excellent sailing adventure film The Yankee Clipper. His ripe dialogue in Lugosi's rich accent ("You mustn't be afraid of death. When this ship sails - death sails - on her") is reward enough from this DVD!