Ben Wright stars as a freshly hired first officer who, with other crewmembers, has a hijack plan for a tramp steamer run by an alcoholic captain who will be easy to remove from command once at sea. The Antony Ellis script was first aired on Escape on 1953-03-01. The hijackers were looking for an easy target for their for months, and they finally found the right combination of a ship that no one would really miss and an incompetent captain. They found it in Liverpool, and the captain is short on crew and will hire almost anybody, assisted by his poor judgment from his inebriation. The hijackers want to go to Dominica in the Caribbean. Once the ship is at sea, the captain eventually realizes that they are off course. The three men throw the cantankerous captain overboard, but one of the regular crewmembers saw what they did. Will they be able to keep the crew at bay or convince them to follow their plan?
That crewmember confronts the first officer, and says he told another member what he saw. They start to scuffle, but there is an explosion in the engine room that interrupts them. The ship has a hole in its side and they have to act quickly to save the ship with its pumps. They could not ask for help because if they did, word of the murder of the captain would lead to the arrest of the hijackers. It’s chaos on the seas of conflicting goals to save the ship, survive, and escape the law.
Not everyone finds nautical stories to be engaging, but this really gets going at the halfway mark and those noncongruent goals drive the plotline in interesting ways, and a satisfying conclusion. And, Joe Kearns is marvelous as the drunken captain.
The phrase “stone ginger” is used by Ben Wright’s character when he describes how well their plan is going. It is a slang term that means “a sure thing.” The name came from a successful New Zealand race horse in the early 1900s.
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THE CAST
Ben Wright (Arthur Jennings), Stan Jones (Seddon), Joe Kearns (Captain Blee), Charlie Lung (Winkle Jones), Raymond Lawrence (Bert Gowdy), Lou Krugman (Austin), Bill Sheppard (Underwood the Communications man), George Walsh (Narrator)
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