Vessel of Wrath

(aka The Beachcomber, Erich Pommer, UK, 1938)

The Eastern Archipelago droops like a great green necklace over the throat of the equator from the Bay of Bengal to Australia – the colonial Empire of the Netherlands.

That flowery preface may lead some viewers to expect the worst of this British comedy about missionary colonialism. A quite different film, however, unfolds – and mercifully so.

Like many projects with which the great Charles Laughton was involved – and here as producer as well as actor – this is a striking, intelligent entertainment, full of unexpected mood swings and barbed asides.

It was also the final directorial effort of Erich Pommer, the legendary film producer sent on the hop from Germany by Nazism; he here replaced playwright Bartlett Cormack (who had worked on Fritz Lang’s Fury the previous year), to whom the screenplay is credited.

Laughton is brilliant in the role of Ginger Ted, a social dropout and natural anarchist who, in his liberated, childlike swagger, appears to be the spiritual brother to Michel Simon in the French classics L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) and Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932).

The film’s attitude to sexuality is conservative – but its take on colonialism is far less so. Elsa Lanchester gives a wonderful, satirical performance as a repressed and repressive missionary – fully earning Ginger’s poetic description of her as a “corked-up hen” and a “sentimental suction pump”!

© Adrian Martin 8 October 1991