a civilian court. The recommendation was rejected by Acting Army Assistant Secretary William D. Clark. Mudd attempted several other legal venues, ending in 2003 when the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case because the deadline for filing had been missed. The Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Portrayals Mudd's life was the subject of a 1936 film, The Prisoner of Shark Island, directed by John Ford and scripted by Nunnally Johnson. Mudd was portrayed by Warner Baxter. Film critic Leonard Maltin in his Classic Movie Guide (2015) described Baxter's performance as "superb". A radio adaptation of The Prisoner of Shark Island aired, as an episode of the radio series Lux Radio Theater, with Gary Cooper as Dr. Mudd, on May 2, 1938, in which significant dramatic license was used by introducing fictional characters and altering several of the known facts of the case for melodramatic expediency. For example, Fort Jefferson was never called "Shark Island". Another production, with the same title, aired on the radio series Encore Theatre in 1946. Another film, The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, was made in 1980. It starred Dennis Weaver as Mudd. At the end, a written message appears, incorrectly stating that President Carter gave Mudd a posthumous pardon. All of these productions espoused the point of view that Mudd was essentially innocent of any conspiracy. Roger Mudd (1928–2021), an Emmy Award-winning journalist, television host and former CBS, NBC, and PBS news anchor, was related to Samuel Mudd, but he was not a descendant, as has mistakenly been reported. Samuel Mudd's life was the subject of an episode of the TV western Laramie, "Time of the Traitor" which aired in 1962. On the episode "Swiss Diplomacy" on The West Wing, the First Lady and cardiac surgeon, Dr. Abby Bartlet commented on the duty of a physician to treat an injured patient despite potential legal repercussions. She responded to Mudd's conviction: "So that's the way it goes. You set the leg." Samuel Mudd's name is sometimes given as the origin of the phrase "your name is mud," as in, for example, the 2007 feature film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. However, according to an online etymology dictionary, the phrase has its earliest known recorded instance in 1823, ten years before Mudd's birth, and it is based on an obsolete sense of the word "mud"