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A bunch of very rich people - Lady Daley (Zeffie Tilbury) and her
daughter Dorothy (Kay Johnson), Dorothy's boyfriend Howard (Conrad Nagel),
their mutual friend Paul (Holmes Herbert) and his wife Viola (Carmel
Myers) - with nothing to do really but to waste their time drinking
cocktails and treating everybody like shit decide it would be fun to
travel to the USA from Shanghai per yacht ... where they spend their time
drinking cocktails and treating everybody like shit. But eventually, the
ship's steward Ted (Louis Wolheim) snaps, and he's less and less willing
to take the rich folks' abuse no more and he plots revenge. His big hour
comes when a storm wrecks the ship, and suddenly everything has to be
rationed - much to the dismay of our rich folks, but when it comes to
rationing water, Ted knows the whole crew behind himself, and thus water
is rationed, to the dismay of our rich friends, who now and again try to
steal water. Soon, Ted somehow manages for the whole crew to bail ship on
a longboat so he and cook Pete (Ivan Linow) can take control of the entire
situation, also by shooting the ship's captain (Jack McDonald) dead.
Illusions of grandeur soon kick in with Ted, and since he has long fallen
for Dorothy, he eventually figures it might be best to injure Howard and
announcing to kill him and starve the others, while he's got plenty of
food and water. The rich folks soon enough decide to sink the yacht, but
Dorothy manages to prevent them from doing so - and that night, she pays
Ted a visit, with the intent to giving herself up to him ... but then she
convinces him that he's raving mad, and as a consequence, he throws
himself to the sharks ... A film about the class struggle ...
that somehow manages to take the wrong side. Basically, despite all the
abuse the rich folks lash out on their underlings, The Ship from
Shanghai sides with them from square one and for no reason paints Ted
as the baddie early on - which gets especially disturbing when he's the
only one to suggest rationing food and water to give everyone equal chance
to survive while the useless upper class people think they deserve more
than their fair share. This though is only one of the problems of the
movie, another one is that Louis Wolheim is hamming it up way too much to
still come across as a good baddie, while all other characters in the
movie remain disappointingly flat. Plus, somehow the film is trapped way
too much in its romantic subplots and pointless innuendo to really create
tension and suspense. Rather a disappointment, really.
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find The Ship from Shanghai at adultvideouniverse.com
