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Splendid idea, there. The Torture Ship chapter in Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2 was one of the last pieces George Turner and I composed together shortly before George's death in 1999. Irving Pichel had one of the finest voices in film, and a great versatility to match. Torture Ship retains a desperate intensity one seldom finds in PRC.

The revised and expanded edition of Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban is in preparation for publication during the fall of 2012. An earlier edition can be found via the online catalogues of www.oldies.com and www.amazon.com. A preview of the amended chapter on Torture Ship follows as a teaser for the forthcoming volume:

Torture Ship
(Producers Distributing Corp.)
“They sneered at the hangman, but a doctor’s needle sent them screaming to their doom!” declares the promotional campaign. The doctor in question is actor–director Irving Pichel, who had collaborated with Ernest B. Schoedsack (against Schoedsack’s preferences) on the helming of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and with Lansing C. Holden on She (1935). Pichel solo–directed the fine mystery Before Dawn (1933). He portrayed a memorable criminal mastermind in the 1933 Oliver Twist and an intense Josef Stalin in British Agent (1934); turned in an impressive pinch-hit job of villainy for an ailing Bela Lugosi in The House of a Thousand Candles (1936); and lent Dracula’s Daughter (1937) its creepiest presence. By 1939, despite acceptance as a preeminent character actors, Pichel had determined to concentrate more intently on directing—at which he would prove consistently prolific and proficient until his death in 1954. He continued to act, however, as the occasion suited, showing an abiding preference for offbeat roles including a top-shelf job of villainy in Dick Tracy’s G–Men (1939) and the sad, knowing off-camera narration that courses through John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941).
Little known even in its day, Torture Ship boasts a typically fine Pichel performance as Dr. Herbert Stander, a renegade surgeon who intends to prove that glandular tampering can eradicate the criminal instinct. Adapted from one of Jack London’s crueler short stories, “A Thousand Deaths,” the film finds Stander frustrated within the Medical Establishment. He outfits a yacht with a laboratory and hospital, promises asylum to several fugitives from justice, and puts out to sea. His subjects include Poison Mary Slavish (Sheila Bromley), head of a murder-for-insurance racket; Joan Martel (Jacqueline Wells), indicted as an accomplice to Mary; a modern-day Bluebeard named Ezra (Leander de Cordova); assassin Jesse (Skelton Knaggs); the sadistic Ritter (Wheeler Oakman); and Harry–the–Carver (Russell Hopton), who has claimed six victims. Lyle Talbot plays Stander’s nephew, Navy Lt. Bob Bennett, the heroic skipper who cannot develop a sympathy with the cause, and who falls in love with Miss Martel with only passing concern as to her guilt or innocence.
The ironies at play are grimly emphasized by director Victor Halperin (of White Zombie and Supernatural, among other films outside that narrow realm) as it develops that Stander is no crackpot—but that his subjects are becoming just as dangerously rebellious as if he were a quack. Amid uprisings that result in the doctor’s slaying, Stander manages not only to vindicate his theory—by putting tough dame Sheila Bromley under the knife and rehabilitating her in the process—but also to reveal Miss Wells’ innocence, to Talbot’s relief. The film takes its dramatic center from Stander’s dawning realization that he must experiment upon a normal person; he chooses Bennett. Talbot fares well with the character’s growing desperation at this point, feigning helplessness from an injection and then freeing the killers.
Second-billed Pichel dominates a strong cast, conveying an Atwill-calibre intensity but stopping short of thoroughgoing ruthlessness in his quest to alter the species. Anthony Averill, as Pichel’s assistant, seems more keenly attuned to the outlawry implicit in the radical quest. As the essentially respectable doctor, Pichel is chagrined to have been driven to such desperate measures, but his belief in a potential social boon is enough to settle any misgivings. Even so, Pichel displays sufficient megalomania to seem disturbingly akin to the vividly defined individual bad guys among his grotesque recruits. Their shared resentment comes across more as a seething, impersonal social force, and they manage a nice job of herd-instinct ensemble acting when, finally, panic drives them into Bob’s custody.
The romantic element is occasionally obtrusive, but Talbot and Miss Wells make a convincing match. Miss Bromley is properly brassy, but ultimately she gives in to sentimentality, as her nature proves altered, and delivers a dreadful speech asking forgiveness. “She’ll live—to prove my theory is right,” says the dying surgeon. “I feel as though I’ve been born again!” says Miss Bromley.
Halperin had by now—too late to do his faltering career much good—overcome the silent-era style that had plagued his work as late as 1936’s Revolt of the Zombies. He took on the picture in the stead of the originally announced director, Rex Hale. Halperin’s deployment of the uprisings is calculated to unsettle the viewer with a sense of dangerous randomness. The foreboding look of Torture Ship is surprisingly well textured and suitably dressed, despite the small budget that was business as usual for the conjoined Producers Pictures Corp. amd Producers Distributing Corp. (soon to become Producers Releasing Corp., or PRC). Jack Greenhalgh’s cameras capture a suitably dungeon-like atmosphere.
David Chudnow’s brooding musical score descends from Abe Meyer’s Meyer Synchronization Service, an old-standby source of prerecorded cues favored by the smaller studios. Chudnow at length would develop the MUTEL (Music for Television) Library—a godsend to the independent film-and-TV sector, but a chronic thorn in the side of the Musicians’ Union.

CREDITS: Producer: Sigmund Neufeld; Director: Victor Halperin; Scenario: George Sayre, with Harvey Huntley, after Jack London; Photographed by: Jack Greenhalgh; Art Director: Fred Preble; Editor: Holbrook N. Todd; Music: David Chudnow; Sound: Hans Weeren; Running Time: 62 Minutes; Released: October 22, 1939

CAST: Lyle Talbot (Bennett); Irving Pichel (Stander); and Jacqueline Wells, Sheila Bromley, Anthony Averill, Russell Hopton, Julian Madison, Eddie Holden, Wheeler Oakman, Stanley Blystone, Leander de Cordova, Dmitri Alexis, Skelton Knaggs, Adia Kuznetzoff, William Chapman, Fred Walton