The Coffin Ship

The Coffin Ship

(One reel of approximately 1,000 feet, June 20, 1911)
Print source: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 14 minutes, 37 seconds.
Cast: William Garwood.
Original organ score composed and performed by musician Andrew Crow.

A love story filmed in Long Island Sound with a stowaway and a shipwreck.

Because of 1911 production convention, a sprawling adventure is truncated to one-reel length. Good location work, a strength of Thanhouser pictures, creates a visually strong seagoing story of a stowaway and a shipwreck. Long Island Sound locations were near the studio.

A review of The Coffin Ship in The Moving Picture World criticized at length errors of accuracy in the depiction of the merchant ship and its sailors, and technicalities of sailing and of the shipwreck, despite the good story and its dramatic effectiveness. Such criticism disproves the myth that critics and audiences accepted anything on the screen at face value.

This print's original German intertitles have been replaced by a new English translation.