The Prisoner of Shark Island

The Prisoner of Shark Island

1936 film by John Ford
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The Prisoner of Shark Island
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The Prisoner of Shark Island Approved | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama, History | 28 February 1936 (USA) - The story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was imprisoned after innocently treating President Lincoln's assassin in 1865.

—Will Gilbert

The Prisoner of Shark Island Approved | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama, History | 28 February 1936 (USA) - A few short hours after President Lincoln has been assassinated, Dr. Samuel Mudd gives medical treatment to a wounded man who shows up at his door. Mudd has no idea that the president is dead and that he is treating his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. But that doesn't save him when the army posse searching for Booth finds evidence that Booth has been to the doctor's house. Dr. Mudd is arrested for complicity and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served in the infamous pestilence-ridden Dry Tortugas.

—Alfred Jingle

The Prisoner of Shark Island Approved | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama, History | 28 February 1936 (USA) - On 09 April 1965, John Wilkes Booth breaks his leg after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. He flees with an accomplice and once in Maryland, they seek medical treatment with the country Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd that does not know that his patient has murdered the president. Dr. Mudd is arrested by the army for helping John Wilkes Booth and together with seven other suspects, they are sent to court. Dr. Mudd is a scapegoat and sentenced to life imprisonment in the hopeless prison in the Dry Tortugas, in Gulf of Mexico. When the prison is isolated due to a yellow fever epidemic, Dr. Mudd helps the guards and the other prisoners to disease.

—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Prisoner of Shark Island Approved | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama, History | 28 February 1936 (USA) - A few short hours after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (Frank McGlynn Sr.), Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter) gives treatment to a man with a broken leg who shows up at his door. Mudd does not know that the president has been assassinated and the man who he is treating is John Wilkes Booth (Francis McDonald). Mudd is arrested for being an accessory in the assassination and is sent to prison on the Dry Tortugas, described as in the West Indies and referred to in the film as "America's own Devil's Island".

After a period of ill treatment due to his notoriety, and an unsuccessful escape attempt, his skills as a doctor are requested by the Commandant of the prison. The island has been in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic and the official prison doctor has fallen ill. Dr. Mudd takes charge with the blessing of the Commandant and the cooperation of the soldier guards, and the yellow fever epidemic subsides.

In the end he receives a pardon and is allowed to return home.

The Prisoner of Shark Island Approved | 1h 36min | Biography, Drama, History | 28 February 1936 (USA) - Warner Baxter plays Dr. Samuel Mudd, American history's most famous victim of circumstance. In 1865, Dr. Mudd, a known Confederate sympathizer, sets the broken leg of a mud-caked stranger who stumbles into his home. The injured man turns out to be John Wilkes Booth, and Mudd is accused of conspiring to murder President Lincoln. Sentenced to hang with the genuine conspirators, Mudd finds his sentence commuted to life imprisonment at the very last moment. He is shipped to Shark Island, a brutal penal colony. Subject to the cruelties of a guard (John Carradine) who hates Mudd because of his "complicity" in Lincoln's death, the doctor suffers the torments of the damned, while outside Shark Island his wife (Gloria Stuart) campaigns desperately to get her husband pardoned. During a Yellow Fever breakout on Shark Island, Dr. Mudd performs heroically to save the survivors. For his humanitarian efforts, Mudd is finally released and reunited with his wife. While the script glosses over the fact that Dr. Mudd had never been officially pardoned by the US government (the pardon wouldn't be granted until years after this film was made), Prisoner of Shark Island strives long and hard to exonerate the man for whom the phrase "your name is mud!" was coined. Dr. Samuel Mudd's story was retold in the 1952 feature Hellgate, with Sterling Hayden as a (fictional) doctor, and in the 1980 TV movie The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, starring Dennis Weaver in the title role.

Synopsis by Hal Erickson

http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-prisoner-of-shark-island-v106712

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Nunnally Johnson
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Twentieth Century Fox
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  • February 28, 1936 (1936-02-28)
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96 minutes
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United States
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English
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