The Sea Wolf

source: The Sea Wolf

Mildly interesting sea drama. An assortment of characters are travelling on a passenger boat when it is accidentally rammed and sunk by a freighter. The survivors are picked up by a ship, captained by the callous, ruthless Captain "Wolf" Larsen... Reasonably interesting but not overly so. Plot doesn't always develop in a coherent or plausible fashion. Still, quite intriguing and exciting at times. Performances don't help the movie. Edward G Robinson puts in a good, suitably dark and sinister, performance as Captain Larsen. However, much of the remaining performances feel quite hammy - grandiose language, speech-like dialogue, overly dramatic, like a play. John Garfield and Alexander Knox are particularly bad. Ida Lupino is reasonably convincing in he role though.

This classic version about known novel by Jack London deals about two young people, a writer named Van Weiden(Alexander Knox, in his screen debut) and a beautiful girl(Ida Lupino, a future filmmaker) escaped from reformatory. They're shipwrecked and picked up aboard by a ship called ¨The Ghost¨ commanded by captain Wolf Larsen(extraordinary Edward G Robinson), a tough man with a meglomaniacal ego and a gaze piercing. Larsen is a cruel sailor but also is thoughtful and clever reader of Darwin,Shakesphere, Nietzsche and Milton (Lost time). They're forced into working and suffering humiliation and punishments .They become accidental passengers confronting wits and facing off cruel sailors, such as a brutal cooker. This interesting movie packs noisy drama, ships adventure, and stunning performances. Intelligent character studio and stunningly playing the tale. Edward G Robinson is excellent as the maniacal captain obsessed to track down his brother. Alexander Knox is magnificent as his nemesis. Special mention to Gene Lockhart as the good but drunk medic, John Garfield as the sailor who tries to rally his shipmates into resisting against malevolent captain and Barry Fitzgerald as the nasty informer cooker. Shot completely in studio with abundant fog and scale models though looks filmed in exteriors. The motion picture is well directed by Michael Curtiz(1888-1962).He's a Hungarian-born became one of the most reliable and the finest directors of Hollywood's golden years who extracted performances from his stars that have left some of the most indelible impressions on our minds such as Edward G Robinson ,and directed several classic films : Casablanca, Captain Blood, Robin Hood, The charge of thee Light Brigade, among them. Another adaptation about the Jack London novel are the following, with various titles, as ¨Barricade¨, version (1958)with Barry Sullivan, Italian rendition(1975) with Chuck Connors and Barbara Bach, ¨Wolf Larsen¨ with Stacy Keach and for TV with Charles Bronson as Larsen and Chistopher Reeve as Van Weiden and directed by Michael Anderson. The motion picture will like to seafaring adventure genre buffs and Edward G Robinson fans.

In San Francisco harbor a giant ship on a foggy night crashes into a passenger ferry and apparently all are killed except for two passengers clinging to a raft. Apparently there is no rescue effort and they are allowed to drift to who knows where, where they are picked up by an ocean schooner which kidnaps them and continues the mysterious voyage to who knows where. If the captain is on such a secret mission why would he pick up the two? On board it appears that except for the captain and his mate, all hate the captain and his cruelty and to beat all know nothing of the nature of the voyage. A few mutiny and throw the captain overboard but with super human strength the captain climbs back on board! He then confronts what looks like the entire crew and fights them off in the hold of the ship, this from the smallish old captain that has just been beat up and thrown overboard. He then tells the men he will make them rich not by fishing but by stealing seals from other boats but no explanation how this is to be done as no arms are ever shown on the ship. Apparently he has done this before and has many former crewmen now wealthy and comfortable living on land. And then there is the brother that apparently has been sailing the seas since the beginning of time with a canon ready for the Sea Wolf. And at the end the ships is in ruin apparently from the brothers canon but the captain is still with the ship waiting for the end. Apparently the brother was after the ship and not the captain. If this is an example of the kind of stories that captured America in those days, it shows the naiveté of people that were setting themselves up for the tragedy of the early 1940's. Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, and Ida Lupino are superb but what a ridiculous story.

The Sea Wolf is typical of Hollywood movies of the time in that it is radically different from the book. In the novel, Wolf Larsen was a large, muscular, strikingly attractive man. In the movie, he is played by Edward G. Robinson (as I think about it, I realize that all the famous thugs of the 30s and 40s were played by short men; if you were tall and muscular, you played heroes). The book details a soft, well- born writer changed forever by the hard life of the Sea Wolf; in the movie, he is a secondary character, with Jack Garfield's tough good guy given prominence. The girl is changed from another well-born writer to another tough with a past. The story itself is almost entirely different. Only Barry Fitzgerald, in an atypically sleazy performance, reflects the intentions of the author. He was excellent. None of these changes make The Sea Wolf a bad movie. Hollywood often took a few basic ideas and spun something very different out of them to great effect. The problem with this movie is it's just not very interesting. The Hollywoodization has made it trite and conventional, but as conventional movies go, this one is too talky and loosely formed. I didn't care about the characters nor did I care about the thin story.

Jack London led a life easily as interesting as most of his characters. Started out as an oyster pirate near Oakland, then a writer, journalist, and socialist in -- well, all over the place, London, Alaska, the Orient, and back to the artists' colony in Carmel, California, before it became unaffordable for everyone but cosmetic surgeons, then alcoholism, and heroin addiction, before winding up in a mountain hideaway near Napa. His socialist tracts are forgotten; his short stories survive in high-school compendia, but his best-known novel is probably "The Sea Wolf." (Unless you favor dogs.) The opening of the novel is unforgettable for anyone who has crossed from the City to Sausalito on the ferry through the fog. The collision that sinks the ferry and puts Humphrey Van Weiden aboard the Ghost is supposed to take place, I think, in 1904, but it could have happened yesterday. London has that opening down pat. And not just the opening. The San Francisco waterfront at the time was filled with Scandinavian skippers -- a repetitive slew of Larsons and Carsons -- so much so that each had to be given a nickname so he could be distinguished from the others. What nicknames! Red Dog Carlson is a real one that comes to mind. Wolf Larsen is London's most famous character, for good reason. The book's Wolf Larson doesn't look much like E. G. Robinson, though. The novel's Larson is tall, blonde, and deeply tanned, except that when he removes his clothing he's revealed as white all over except for his weather skin, and he bulges with muscles. He calls Humphrey "Hump," a nice touch. Robinson is actually quite good in the role. He can be domineering and nasty when it's called for. And he's one of those guys who quotes Dante and has copies of Nietzsche and other eggheads stashed below in his cabin. Alexander Knox is fine as "Hump." But London befouled his novel with a love story that simply does not belong in the narrative. And, worse, his prose gets all mawky and purple as Hump falls in love with a girl they pick up. The movie pretty much keeps the captain's character intact as well as the general story line of Hump's brutal socialization, but the romance which is a blemish in the novel is blown up in the movie until it is an integral part of the plot from the very beginning. Characters such as Leach, the very recognizable John Garfield of the 1940s, are added for box office punch and maybe as compensation for Knox's more effete qualities. It's a good story, a very good story, and hardly needed the embellishments of the Hollywood hacks who worked it over. Still, the movie is well worth seeing. There are several other versions of the tale. I think I've seen two of them and neither is as good as this one. Jack London was never a great novelist. He died young but it's doubtful that he would have produced much more of value. But at least two of his adventure tales -- "Call of the Wild" and "The Sea Wolf" -- are accurate reflections of particular points in place and time. They're sort of embedded in our literary history, and they deserve to be. Maybe some teenager will watch this movie out of boredom and, when it's over, think, "Hey, there's a lot of action in this! Maybe I ought to get that book out of the library and READ it." Can you imagine a teenager being stimulated enough to read a book?

One of the great classics Directed by the gifted tyrant Micheal Curtiz. Every performance is excellent with Edward G. giving one of his best. Curtiz did not make boring films, this speeds along at under 90 minutes without a dull moment. The miniature work is even good, note the scene near the beginning with the row boat in the bay. That is a miniature in a tank but pretty damn convincing. Flawless and gripping.

Edward G. Robinson puts his own brand of cruelty on the role of a freighter captain who tyrannizes his crew and some unexpected passengers (Ida Lupino, John Garfield, Alexander Knox) in this taut, suspenseful psychological melodrama with no shortage of brooding atmosphere. Based on the famous Jack London story of Wolf Larsen (Robinson), the callous and inhuman skipper of a schooner, who proceeds to make life hell for his crew and his unwilling passengers rescued from a sinking ferryboat. Lupino and Garfield are a couple of losers with a past; Knox is a mild-mannered novelist. The romantic angle between Garfield and Ida is underplayed with the accent more on the brooding tension aboard the schooner. Under Michael Curtiz' direction, all the performances are first-rate and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's intriguing score helps sustain the tense mood of passengers adrift on a fog-shrouded sea. Alexander Knox's restrained portrayal of an intellectual is a perfect foil for Robinson's bombastic megalomaniac skipper. Stand-outs in the large supporting cast are Gene Lockhart as a nervous, cowardly doctor and Barry Fitzgerald as a crafty cook, a sinister departure from his usual comic roles. Absorbing all the way, well worth viewing, this represented a step up the ladder for Ida Lupino's career at Warner Bros. Watch for my full-length career article on Ida Lupino scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of FILMS OF THE GOLDEN AGE.

The Jack London book on which the film is based is rich in characterizations and philosophy, but rather poorly constructed and plotted. Rossen has substantially and quite artfully turned this into a rather taught seaborne suspense picture. What we lose is much of what makes Wolf Larsen into one of the greatest anti-heroes in literature. That is really only alluded to in the film. What we gain is the integration of the Maud story-line, correcting the worst flaw of the novel. It's a masterful solution showing just how good of writer Rossen was. Don't watch this to write a book report on the novel though. The plot is completely reworked. Garfield and Robinson are tremendous. Ida Lupino is too, for what little we see of her. Her power helps make the Maud character big enough to make sense. Any lesser actress would have been as submerged as... Well I can't say, that would spoil it.

The London classic has been filmed many times, but never better than here. It's Warner Bros. operating on all 8 cylinders, from casting, to directing, to art department and special effects. So who better to play the maniacal captain than Edward G, Robinson at his snarling prime, or the rebellious ex-con than John Garfield at his defiant prime, or the downtrodden girl than Ida Lupino at her soulful prime. Together they're a dynamite cast, and even the snobbish Alexander Knox manages his literary role in fairly sympathetic fashion. It's atmospheric the whole way with the aptly named Ghost slipping through one fog bank after another. The Robert Rossen adaptation is less philosophical than others. Robinson's Wolf Larson acts more out of psychological compulsion than philosophical principle. His battle of wits with Knox's Humphrey van Weyden is more about Freudian ego than the merits of a Nietschean superman. Larson desires power to prove his own self and not to prove a larger point about ruthlessness and the struggle to survive. I suspect that had the movie been made a few years later, Hitlerian comparisons would have been drawn. Then too, when there's talk of the ship's "downtrodden" crew being freed at last, it's likely the leftish Rossen has more than a ship's crew in mind. Too bad that the commanding Howard deSilva doesn't have a larger role which would have made the outlaw ship even more hellish. Note the informal wedding vows exchanged between Lupino and Garfield at movie's end. The lines are rather clumsy and out-of-step with the rest of the script. I suspect the censors required some such vows before the couple were allowed to live together on a deserted island after leaving the ship. Even though this seems a reach, I gather censorship concerns could indeed reach to such an implied level. Be that as it may, the Robinson performance is powerfully riveting and not to be missed. All in all, the movie remains a fine example of ensemble film-making and a tribute to Hollywood's old studio system.