by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Thunder
Afloat, a title which meant
nothing to me except that the word “afloat” indicated it would have something to do with sailing or seafaring. It turned out to
be a 95-minute production from MGM in 1939 — originally scheduled for release in
October of that year but moved up to September 15 after World War II was
declared in Europe and the isolationist strictures that had hamstrung
Hollywood’s efforts to deal honestly with the world situation were starting to
crumble. One imdb.com reviewer claimed there was actually a clause of the
Neutrality Act passed by Congress that forbade the movie studios from making
films sympathetic to one side or the other (the reviewer said “this law clearly
violated the U.S. Constitution,” but actually it didn’t; in 1912 the U.S.
Supreme Court had ruled that movies were strictly “a business” and therefore
were not covered by the First
Amendment, and it wasn’t until 1953 that the Supremes reversed that and said
films were a form of “speech” within
the meaning of the First Amendment), with the result that before 1940 the only
major-studio production to deal with the evils of Nazism was Confessions of
a Nazi Spy, and even that one focused
on the German-American Bund and its attempts at espionage and subversion in the
U.S. rather than an exposé of Nazi rule in Germany itself. Anyway, Thunder
Afloat got around the prohibition
(whether legislative or simply the studios’ own self-censorship for fear of
alienating a still largely isolationist movie-going populace) by setting its
story during the First World
War, when German U-boats were (at least according to this story) not only
sailing up and down the U.S. coast but boarding and blowing up tugboats and
other light vessels — one wonders why they were bothering with boats too small to carry cargo, since the
whole point of the U-boat war in the North Atlantic in World War I, as in World
War II, was to sink ships large enough to be carrying supplies and war materiel
to the anti-German countries.
It begins with tugboat owner/captain John Thorson
(Wallace Beery, overbearing as usual; in his finest film, Flesh, director John Ford got the performance of a
lifetime out of him by creating a character that was supposed to be overbearing but also giving him enough
naïveté to be bearable and even somewhat likeable) looking over his derelict
tugboat — it hasn’t quite sunk yet but it looks well on its way, and the
ancient hand pump and leaky hose available to him and his daughter Susan (an
appealingly spunky performance by Virginia Grey) to bail it out aren’t doing
much to get the water out of its hold so it can be refloated. The boat is
called the Susan H., and
Thorson feels particularly connected to it because he built it himself by hand
— all except the engines — and his daughter was born on it, while her mom died
when she fell overboard it and was washed out to sea (which makes one think he
would rather have been rid of the thing than cherished it!). Thorson is
convinced his boat was sabotaged by rival tugboat owner/captain “Rocky” Blake (Chester
Morris, who as William K. Everson once pointed out was giving James
Cagney-style performances before Cagney himself ever made a film; the fact that
MGM didn’t promote him as their
alternative to Cagney probably kept him from potential superstardom) so that
Blake could beat him out of a major contract. When the U.S. gets involved in
World War I and German submarines start patrolling the New England coast (where
this film takes place, on a marvelous series of sets that look like old
woodcuts of sailing villages), Thorson decides to eliminate the competition by
tricking Blake into joining the Navy — only when his own boat is boarded and
exploded by a German sub crew headed by Carl Esmond as the U-boat’s captain
(TCM was actually showing this one as part of a salute to the little-known
Esmond!), he’s determined to get his revenge by joining the Naval Reserve and
blowing up German subs.
The bulk of the movie is a Warners-style proletarian
drama — it’s mostly along the lines of the movies James Cagney and Pat O’Brien
made together, differing mainly in using the older actor, Beery, as the one who’s challenging the
Navy’s rules, regulations and discipline, and the younger one as his commanding
officer who’s trying to harness Thorson’s talents while getting rid of his
attitude and making him follow Navy rules. At one point Thorson sails away from
the other two sub-chaser vessels in his convoy (it’s not clear from the
apparent size of these craft on screen whether they qualify as boats or ships)
and chases a sub on his own, but he doesn’t have enough depth bombs to sink her
and ends up with the sub’s captain literally lassoing him and dragging him
underwater. For this he’s busted from captain down to ordinary seaman and
ordered to paint ships, and he’s humiliated and ready to desert when “Rocky”
catches him and assigns him to a so-called “mystery ship,” which is supposed to
look like an ordinary fishing trawler but is really a ruse to lure the German
sub (the same one) out of hiding: the trawler has a secret radio transmitter
inside so when the sub attacks it, its radio operator can call to the sub
chasers and they can come in and sink it. The Germans spot the trawler but also
find the hidden radio equipment and take Thorson hostage, thinking that the
Americans won’t dare sink the sub if one of their own is being held on board —
and where I thought this was going was that Wallace Beery’s character would
sacrifice his own life to make sure the German sub that sank his tugboat
several reels earlier went down with all hands. Instead the Navy takes the sub
intact and captures its crew alive, Thorson is rescued and restored to the
Navy’s good graces, and in the final frames “Rocky” and Susan Thorson end up in
a clinch even though there hasn’t been a hint of any genuine romantic or sexual interest between
them up to this point.
Thunder Afloat has the problem of any Wallace Beery movie — especially one in which
he’s the star — and that’s Wallace Beery: his bellowing line delivery and
old-salt attitudes (his early-talkie successes in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie got him typecast in these crusty-old-captain
roles) quickly get tiresome, while the physical displays of affection between
him and Susan border on the incestuous at times (but then I just heard the song
“Sweet Little Sis” from 1929 on the Grey Gull Rarities reissue CD and its lyrics had me wondering, “What
is this — Die Walküre, the jazz
version?”). But it also had a real-life Navy officer, Commander Harvey Haislip
(a name I’d seen before on films as a technical advisor), actually involved in
co-writing the script (the story with Ralph Wheelwright and the script with
Wells Root), and a movie that put some unusual “spins” on the general clichés
of Navy films. It wasn’t a cheap “B” either; the female role was originally offered
to Barbara Stanwyck and the Chester Morris part to Franchot Tone (and though
Stanwyck would have been even better Virginia Grey is quite good, capturing the
character’s butchness to perfection), the production budget was $1 million (at
a time when that was a substantial amount of money to spend on a film) and the
crew did location shooting outside Annapolis as well as off the Coronado coast.
