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Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf (1941) is spectrally salt-soaked, ferociously anti-fascist, and gives great Alexander Knox. On the first two of these factors much of its reputation justly rests; the third, if you ask me, is criminally overlooked.
Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.
Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?
"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"
The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.
The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.
Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.
Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?
"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"
The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.
The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.
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This is excellent and accurate! (I've just come home from a protest and was thinking that, although I wish it wasn't still necessary, the "all you fascists bound to lose" message is alive and well. There were lots of signs with that vibe, dedicated to our minister of security.)
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Thank you! I wish it were not necessary, either, but since it is, I am glad that you and that vibe were there.
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He's been on my radar in a semi-casual way since The Night My Number Came Up (1955), but The Sea Wolf has just catapulted him into an active interest and me into renewed anger at the Second Red Scare.
(His American career seems even more truncated than the rise of McCarthyism should account for, considering the impression he made in The Sea Wolf—I don't know if he preferred the stage or Warners just didn't have the sense to sign him. Wilson (1944) earned him an Oscar nomination and I still don't know what the deal was. He would have thrived once the '40's turned toward noir. In the UK, he had one of those character careers where he was always turning up in something, including four films with Joseph Losey, which should boost the chances of your having seen him. Now that I can place him in it, I want to rewatch The Damned (1960). I would have seen him first as Control in the 1979 BBC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.)
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I still need to see Accident. I have some some kind of actual hangup about Losey where I have liked or loved nearly everything I have seen by him and then I keep not watching a bunch of his movies and I have no reason why. It is not a problem I normally have with artists I like.
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Enjoy!
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And the film sounds great, not least because I can totally identify with this sort of sheltered character. I always HOPE I would rise to the occasion. It helps to hear about characters who do.
It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. --Yes indeed.
Here's a photo from 1984, 43 years after the film--I'll have to look for a trailer to satisfy my immediate curiosity to see "those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face." And yes, speaking personally, this sounds like much more the sort of role I'd like to see him play than Woodrow Wilson.
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You're welcome! I would have gladly let her read it. It's the kind of part he should be remembered by.
And the film sounds great, not least because I can totally identify with this sort of sheltered character. I always HOPE I would rise to the occasion. It helps to hear about characters who do.
Yes! I had read the novel years ago, which gave me absolutely no hint as to where the film's Van Weyden was going, and it was very satisfying to find out.
Here's a photo from 1984, 43 years after the film--I'll have to look for a trailer to satisfy my immediate curiosity to see "those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face."
Hah! Thank you for that photo. One of yours? For the benefit of posterity, I tried to take screencaps of The Sea Wolf. Very few of the official production stills really helped me out and he's best in motion besides.
Bonus: Van Weyden waking up for the first time abord the Ghost, looking relatably as I imagine most of us do these mornings:
And yes, speaking personally, this sounds like much more the sort of role I'd like to see him play than Woodrow Wilson.
Trying to reconstruct his initial career in American film is frankly maddening because from the outside it makes no sense to me. Warners was the most political of the major studios and had proven its literary as well as its social justice bona fides; given all the liberal causes and commitments that eventually rated him an entry in Myron C. Fagan's Documentations of the Reds and Fellow-Travelers in Hollywood and TV (1950), it should have been a good match for him. Instead he bounces around a little and signs with Columbia, which was the closest to a B-studio of the major players, not, I should point out, that it prevented them from producing some favorites of mine, but it's an odd choice if he'd made such a striking debut. (I looked up his notices. They were excellent. Variety said more or less outright that Hollywood shouldn't let him get away. Tell that to the Dies Committee . . .) He must have been on loan-out for Wilson (1944) since it was 20th Century Fox, but then he doesn't work with them again until right before he clears out for the UK. There are actually a couple of pictures in his filmography which must have been made after the move, presumably because they were outstanding in his contract with Columbia. But unless he had some preferable stage commitment or a real reluctance to embed himself in the studio system, I can't figure out why The Sea Wolf was his one shot with Warner Bros. There's a posthumous collection of some of his nonfiction which if I can get hold of it might shed some light. Possibly the real problem here is that I like uncategorizable people and the studio system did not. That said, no points to the blacklist.
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--AMEN
Thank you for these gorgeous screenshots!
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Unironically, a perpetual rallying cry.
Thank you for these gorgeous screenshots!
You're welcome! It is an incredibly good film to look at. Its only nomination in its year was for "photographic effects," which it did not in any case win. I love me some John Ford, but I would have redistributed some of the awards he picked up for How Green Was My Valley (1941).
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My sister got a masters degree at LSE, and she ended up becoming much closer to them ^_^
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Look, I'm just really happy that someone I tripped over in movies turns out to be someone connected to you, however the connection persisted.
My sister got a masters degree at LSE, and she ended up becoming much closer to them
If she would not find it weird, please tell her I think he was great!
(No shade to Doris Nolan, but I have only ever seen her in Holiday (1938) where she is as neat as ice cream and it turns out just as cold. That is another movie I love too much to know how to write about it.)
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(I will tell her! I did tell her--and I shared the movie screenshots and the review)
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It seems very unfair she should be remembered for Holiday, then, where she played—seamlessly, so hats off to her acting—the straight part in the screwball, who wouldn't have a sense of humor if you introduced her to it at a Christmas party.
(I will tell her! I did tell her--and I shared the movie screenshots and the review)
I hope she approved! It's all the other way round from the time I saw one of
(If she's the sister who does the sea-paintings, please tell her those are great, too.)
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It is one and the same! She'll be pleased and delighted. I *know* my dad (whom I've also shared the review with) will love it--he's already inclined to love things by you), but I'm betting she'll love it too.
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I would be tempted to burn a time machine credit for her Broadway debut in the original 1935 Night of January 16th if I could do it without giving Ayn Rand any money.
It is one and the same! She'll be pleased and delighted.
My favorite to admire is still Aquinnah Shallows, but all of her tumbled webs of foam and reflection remind me of less angular Vorticist paintings, there's so much motion in them. She is especially good at the way the sea changes color over itself.
I *know* my dad (whom I've also shared the review with) will love it--he's already inclined to love things by you), but I'm betting she'll love it too.
Thank you! (I had no idea! Please let him know the feeling is mutual.)
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You're welcome! Hooray!
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"And you know, it's a remarkable thing, but we get more calls for this book than any other adventure novel on our shelves."
Hah! Thank you. I had not actually tracked that down for myself. In fairness to the promotional materials, Edward G. Robinson actually is that good as Wolf Larsen. He would totally have deserved the Oscar nomination that in a universe that better conformed to the long arc of film history he would have lost to Orson Welles.
My favorite original trailer is probably for Picture Snatcher (1933), partly because I don't know why it only has the lyrics printed on the screen like a sing-a-long instead of the obviously catchy vocal track.