Souls at Sea is an intriguing 1930s film by Henry Hathaway about a man working as a kind of one-man army against the African slave trade in the 1840s. What's sort of weird about this – aside from Gary Cooper's more-than-a-little-wooden performance – is that the main import of the film is an explosion and shipwreck that have nothing at all to do with the slave trade. Cooper's character is on an anti-slavery mission, sure, but the boat that sinks is not a slave ship at all, and so the main thrust of the drama is about something else entirely.
The film's script seems designed to avoid Black actors. We get a few images of enslaved Africans killing a slaver, but although we know that the two heroes of the film disobey orders and unlock everyone enslaved aboard the ship, Souls at Sea doesn't show us any scenes of Black freedom, preferring to jump ahead in time to the men explaining what they've done to the enforcers of maritime law.
It's a strange movie – probably because it is produced for a segregated film industry that will distribute the film to segregated theatres during Jim Crow.
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