Fun Aboard the Mayflower

In moviemakers' jargon, a "lap dissolve" consists of a movie scene slowly fading out while the next scene builds up right on top of it. According to M-G-M Production Boss Dore Schary, one of history's most fascinating lap dissolves happened in 1620 when the Pilgrims on the good ship Mayflower faded out at Plymouth, England, and appeared 96 days later, anchored off what was to be Plymouth, Mass. Nearly two years ago Schary set M-G-M Scripter Helen Deutsch to digging into all the facts and legends about the Pilgrims' mysterious voyage. The result, Plymouth Adventure, was finally on film last week.

If M-G-M has, as it claims, helped set the record straight, graduates of U.S. high-school history courses are due for a surprise. In the movie, only 40 of the Mayflower's 102 passengers are separatists from the Church of England, fleeing King James I's persecution. Even those refugees emerge as an earthy, red-blooded lot. The rest of the voyagers are as rowdy a band of adventurers and vagabonds as ever set sail. Aboard is a young cooper named John Alden (played by Van Johnson), who keeps the passengers' whisky and beer barrels in repair. Captain Myles Standish is below-decks most of the time; Researcher Deutsch decided that Standish was already married and probably not courting Priscilla Mullins.

None of the goings-on aboard the movie's Mayflower is in the popular tradition of the Pilgrim Fathers. The big romance is between Captain Christopher Jones (Spencer Tracy) and the seductive Mrs. Dorothy Bradford (Gene Tierney). wife of the colony's Governor-to-be William Bradford. By the time the ship drops anchor in Plymouth Harbor, Dorothy and the captain have done a little light romancing and she takes the easiest way out of the triangle by drowning herself.

All in all, the Pilgrims' transatlantic high jinks, may not be absolutely factual history, but Producer Schary hopes the film will be "a contribution to the American idea . . ." In Massachusetts, Henry Hornblower, president of Plimoth Plantation, Inc., a research group consulted by Scripter Deutsch, does not yet know the worst. "I suppose," says he, "that the movie will show Priscilla spinning. There is no evidence that a spinning wheel was brought over on the Mayflower."

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