by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Captain Hates the Sea, a 1934 Columbia production that turned out to be the
final film by John Gilbert, who’s become axiomatic of the great silent stars
who were supposedly undone by the talkies. It’s true that Gilbert’s career did
a big nosedive when sound came in — his first starring feature with sound, His
Glorious Night, was a major flop and it got
ridiculed both when it was new and later (it’s the movie that’s being parodied
in Singin’ in the Rain in the
scene in which Gene Kelly kisses his way up Jean Hagen’s arm saying nothing
but, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over and over) — but from the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen it’s also
clear that his failure had nothing to do with his voice per se. The problem seems to have been that Gilbert didn’t
know how to act with his voice,
how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. In his book The
Shattered Silents (which argued that
Gilbert flopped in the talkies while Ronald Colman succeeded because Colman and
his producer, Sam Goldwyn, realized that he’d have to cultivate a different
image and shifted him from romantic melodrama to comedy, while Louis B. Mayer
and Irving Thalberg put Gilbert into a talkie debut all too similar to his
heavy-breathing silents), Alexander Walker quoted a contemporary reviewer of His
Glorious Night, Frank Daugherty of the
trade paper Film Spectator, as
saying that Gilbert’s “supposedly fiery speeches have all the amorous passion
of an assistant director asking another … to stake him to a lunch at Henry’s.”
Gilbert’s MGM contract (negotiated by MGM president Nicholas Schenck behind
Mayer’s and Thalberg’s backs) finally ran out in 1933 with a Warnersesque drama
called Fast Workers, directed by
Tod Browning (of all people!), which cast him and Robert Armstrong as
construction workers in love with the same girl (Mae Clarke).
Then Greta Garbo
asked for him as her leading man in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 masterpiece Queen
Christina after the studio decided that
their first choice, John Barrymore, was too great a risk due to his alcoholism
and memory problems; and the second choice, Laurence Olivier, tested but Garbo
decided he couldn’t hold his own against her. In that film Gilbert wore way too much makeup — as if he were still thinking in
terms of the slow and insensitive films used in the early 1920’s — but turned
in a perfectly acceptable if hardly incandescent performance that doesn’t get
in the way of what’s otherwise a great movie. Gilbert then fell into the hands
of Harry Cohn, president of plucky little Columbia Pictures, who took great joy
on the rare occasions when he could one-up MGM: in 1934 he signed opera singer
Grace Moore after MGM had dropped her for being overweight, and made a movie
called One Night of Love that
despite its rather phony story (aspiring opera singer Moore hates her
ruthlessly authoritarian voice teacher, Tullio Carminati, but eventually falls
in love with him and they literally
make beautiful music together) became a blockbuster hit, the most popular opera
film to that time and for 17 years thereafter (until The Great Caruso). Cohn was evidently hoping that lightning would
strike twice and he’d be able to give Gilbert a great comeback role — at least
that’s how the director of The Captain Hates the Sea, Lewis Milestone, recalled it later when Charles
Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The
Celluloid Muse: “Cohn … welcomed Gilbert’s
prospective rehabilitation and promised him star treatment, provided he behaved
properly. But unfortunately Jack was a little too far gone. For a week he’d be
perfect, and then he started drinking. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it
hadn’t been for the fact that if he drank one day he couldn’t work the next,
because by then he had ulcers and would vomit blood and be very ill.”
The
legend is that Milestone thought that by casting Gilbert in a film that took
place largely at sea — on an ocean liner which takes a cruise from New York to
South America and then back — he could isolate him from all sources of alcohol
and thereby keep him sober, but he didn’t reckon with the other members of the
cast, including such celebrated imbibers as Victor McLaglen, Walter Connolly
(who plays the titular captain that hates the sea), Leon Errol (who actually
owned a bar in real life), Walter Catlett, and Alison Skipworth, who brought
their own liquor supplies and cheerily shared them with Gilbert. In Bob
Thomas’s biography Harry Cohn,
there’s a story that Cohn got worried when Milestone’s ship sailed and remained
at sea for weeks with no rushes back at the studio to show for it, and he sent
a radiogram to Milestone reading, “Hurry up. The cost is staggering,” to which
Milestone replied, “So is the cast.” What made the actual film seem bizarre in
light of those legends is that if the intent was to give John Gilbert a script
that would isolate him from booze and keep him clean, sober and on the way to
both personal and professional recovery, The Captain Hates the Sea is about the last story Cohn and Milestone should have picked, because
the whole movie is about
drinking! Gilbert plays, essentially, himself — he’s called “Steve Bramley” and
he’s just bombed out of a career in Hollywood (though as a writer, not an
actor), and as his part begins he’s in a taxi being taken to the dock by his
fiancée Gerta “Gert” Klangi (Tala Birell). He’s breaking their engagement while
assuring her that he’s sober and is going to stay that way. Meanwhile, on board
the ship former police officer turned private detective Junius P. Schulte
(Victor McLaglen) greets his old friend, ship’s steward Mr. Layton (Leon
Errol), and needless to say the first thing they and a third acquaintance of
theirs do once they get on the ship is share a bottle! Steve shows up at their
stateroom and the moment they offer him some Scotch, he makes a brief show of
refusal but then pours himself a big tumbler — and he just keeps getting
drunker and drunker all movie. About his only connection with reality is a
phonograph record of Gert which she recorded and sneaked into his trunk (along
with a pull-out phonograph to play it on), which fortunately keeps him from
getting too deeply embroiled with the multiple vamps on ship.
The main vamp is
supposed Boston librarian Janet Grayson (Helen Vinson), girlfriend of embezzler
Danny Checkett (Fred Keating), who comes aboard the ship, using the name
“Farraday,” with $250,000 in stolen bonds which he inexplicably gives her to
hold for him even though she’s a crook herself — her aliases include Blanche
Dilworthy and “Michigan Red.” There’s also a well-to-do couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Jeddock (John Wray and Wynne Gibson), who seem to be happy, only he’s abusive
and she’s a former prostitute who’s “outed” by Steve when he recognizes her as
someone who serviced him professionally. And if that weren’t enough, there’s
also a wealthy and aggressive widow, Mrs. Yolanda Magruder (Alison Skipworth,
coming off here as even more of a distaff version of W. C. Fields than she did
in their films together!), who’s after Schulte, while Schulte is after Janet,
which is just fine with Danny because that presumably means she can seduce him
into leaving them alone. There’s also a plot line involving a South American
general, Salazaro (Akim Tamiroff), who’s going to his native country to foment
a revolution — only as soon as he arrives he’s caught by the authorities and
killed by a firing squad, a rather jarring plot twist that just sits in the
middle of this movie and never gets resolved. In fact, the most bizarre thing
about The Captain Hates the Sea
is its sheer plotlessness: in the era in which most screenwriters took pride in
their ability to “plant” the ending throughout the movie and give audiences
clues along the way to how it was going to turn out, writer Wallace Smith —
adapting his own novel — seems to revel in the unpredictability of his plot
lines and his skill at keeping multiple story strands going, even though
there’s almost no resolution of any of them. Indeed, The Captain
Hates the Sea seems so much like a Robert
Altman movie four or five decades early — the multiple plot lines, the ensemble
cast (for something that was supposedly intended as a comeback vehicle for John
Gilbert it’s surprising that he’s only billed fourth — after McLaglen, Gibson and Skipworth, in that
order), the lack of conventional resolutions and the sense that the film
doesn’t end so much as it just stops
— it’s a wonder Altman didn’t remake it.
It’s also filled with marvelous
character vignettes and some offbeat casting, including Walter Catlett as the
seen-it-all bartender (once, when Gilbert gets into a fight with John Wray and
Wray knocks him down, Catlett opens a trap door at the bottom of his bar and
hands Gilbert a drink, which revives him and enables him to knock Wray out)
whose rotating sign — announcing variously that the bar will close at midnight
and will open at 8:30 (presumably a.m., the way these people drink!) — practically becomes a character in
the movie itself. There’s also a weird cameo by the Three Stooges (Greta Garbo
and the Three Stooges: one degree of separation!), who in 1934 were also MGM rejects who had just signed with Columbia for
the long series of comedy shorts for which they’re best remembered, and who
appear here as the ship’s band — Moe plays sax (either alto or C-melody, I
wasn’t sure which), Larry plays piano and Curly plays drums (later for a more
sedate sort of shipboard music Moe switches to violin and Curly to cello!) —
and their presence is welcome even though they don’t get to do any slapstick
and Larry is the only one who speaks. It ends with Steve and Gert getting back
together even though he’s neither sobered up nor written the novel he had
promised her he would write; Schulte pairing up with Janet, though it’s not
clear whether he’s interested in her or the bonds (ya remember the bonds?); Danny setting off after Mrs. Magruder and her $7
million; and Captain Helquist wearily readying himself for the ship’s next
voyage even though he hates the sea, thanks to his father and his father’s long
beard (there’s a weird story about that I’m not even going to try to synopsize, though on the voyage there’s been a
man with a long beard — Donald Meek, whom we’re used to seeing clean-shaven and
here wears so patently phony a fake
beard it reminded me of the hilarious scene in Buster Keaton’s Spite
Marriage in which, as an aspiring but untalented
actor, he desperately tries to get the hang of gluing false whiskers to his
face with spirit gum — who supposedly reminds McLaglen of his long-hated dad),
while any 1934 audiences who stumbled into theatres that were playing this film
probably left scratching their heads and wondering, “What the hell was that?” It’s a film you want to like, partly because it’s generally well acted
(though John Gilbert seems all too clearly to be playing himself!) and partly
because it’s trying so hard to be sophisticated and “different” — and because
much of the droll humor is actually genuinely funny — but it ends up a
sporadically entertaining and engaging mess.
