John Ford may have made several masterpieces in his long career but sometimes, particularly in the early days, by letting his heart rule his head he had a tendency to go off the rails. "The Prisoner of Shark Island" may well have been an honest and heartfelt attempt to right a judicial wrong; to show that Dr. Samuel Mudd was completely innocent of the charge of conspiring to assassinate the president after unwittingly treating Lincoln's assassin.
It's a very melodramatic picture that's not helped by Warner Baxter's over-the-top performance as Mudd. Baxter was a star of the silent screen, as well as an early Oscar winner, who hammed his way into the talkies. Indeed the acting throughout this melodrama is pretty woeful with the exceptions of those two great, and mostly underrated actors, John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard and Harry Carey as the warden. Of course, you could say no Ford film was completely negligible and there are a few scenes here worthy of him, (the execution of the conspirators is particularly fine), and there are a few moments that are pictorially interesting but for the most part this mostly forgotten Ford film deserves to remain forgotten.
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