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Arrowsmith is a clear precedent, though the kinship is with Lang's Fury. The compressed prelude sees Lincoln (Frank McGlynn Sr.) asking for "Dixie" after the war, then slumped and slain and abstracted in iconic close-up as the veil of history dissolves to storm clouds. Freshly reunited, the nation burns effigies and howls for culprits, the physician who unknowingly treated the assassin's shattered limb will do just fine. So it goes with Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), who doesn't recognize John Wilkes Booth one night and finds himself on trial for conspiracy. No use for "the trifling technicalities of the law," off to "a bit of white burning hell" on the Dry Tortugas, John Carradine's sadistic grin awaits: "Hiya, Judas." A horror movie about the perversion of John Ford's beloved American rituals, a nightmare of hysteria, injustice and sickness. The protracted excruciation of the gallows is an effect emulated by Kubrick in Paths of Glory, the yellow fever outbreak is one decade ahead of Camus (La Peste). Escape is foiled, the convict's test is to follow the same Hippocratic Oath that got him there in the first damned place, "once before, I was a doctor. I'm still a doctor." A tremendous set of images—the sorrowful wife (Gloria Stuart) reflected on the courthouse's bulletin panel, prison searchlights glinting off Carradine's crescent-moon face, stormy winds blowing out a ward's pestilent air once the windows are smashed. The harrowing portrait includes black soldiers more terrified of a Southern voice than of the plague, the system's cravenness is confronted amidst heavy rain and cannon fire. "Us can't fire at the flag!" The solemn and diminished homecoming is complemented by the jubilant and bountiful one. Cinematography by Bert Glennon. With Claude Gillingwater, Harry Carey, Ernest Whitman, Arthur Byron, O.P. Heggie, Francis Ford, John McGuire, Francis McDonald, Douglas Wood, J.M. Kerrigan, and Joyce Kay. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |