The actor Paul Muni didn’t have a role in the 1936 film, The Prisoner of Shark Island, but we’ll
let that slide. In that film, loosely based on the life of the physician,
Samuel Mudd, the main character sets John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, completely
unaware of the murderer’s recent historic activity, and is subsequently convicted of a
crime for it and sent to prison on Shark Island. He earns his freedom later
through heroic service controlling a yellow fever epidemic on the island. It
reminds us all that you can’t keep a good man down.
The plot is really about the consequences of blundering into
the path of roused and furious power. One’s innocence is utterly
inconsequential and actually quite beside the point. Contemporary examples
abound.
The poem is about aging, feeling out of step with the times,
and yearning for the signal comforts of a played-out youth. In Henry’s case, in
movie theaters, paying a nickel to watch pulp Westerns on Saturday afternoons.
Hashknife Hartley was a cowboy/crime fighter hero who righted wrongs that
black-hats perpetrated on the ranch, fighting off the dirty rats and winning
every time. That’s what makes it so satisfying, and it tells a kid that’s what
you can expect. Problem is, the dirty rats are tricked out in white cowboy hats
these days, they’re the sheriffs and lawmen, and they’ve got star badges on
their vests and loaded six-guns in their holsters, and when they draw them they
use them. Your innocence doesn’t matter quite so much as maybe it did in the
movies.
The rats are real now, and they're in control, and who the hell wants to learn that?
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