Last night’s “feature” was the 1958 semi-documentary Windjammer, or as its full title reads, Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich. (The last word in the subtitle is pronounced “Radik,” by the way.) She was designed in the mid-1930’s by Yngvar Kjelstrup, who also served as her first captain from her maiden voyage in 1937 to her final cruise along the western coast of Europe, to the West Indies, then up the east coast of the United States before re-crossing the Atlantic to come home. That last cruise is the one depicted in this film. When I first ordered this film I did some research, assuming that a “windjammer” was a particular kind of sailing ship; it turns out the name was used for any sail-powered vessel in the 19th century, and it was often an insult hurled by sailors on steamships at their more technologically retro brethren who were still “sailors” in the most literal sense. Windjammer was the first — and, as it turned out, the only — film ever made in Cinemiracle, and I first heard of both the film and the format in an unlikely source: John Culshaw’s Putting the Record Straight, his posthumously published autobiography about his years as a classical record producer for British Decca. He called the process “a rather poor attempt to duplicate the effect of Cinerama without violating Cinerama’s technical patents,” and dismissed Windjammer as “a hack documentary.”
The main difference between Cinerama and Cinemiracle was that, while both used three cameras simultaneously filming the same image, the right and left cameras bounced their images off mirrors before they were recorded on film. The reason for that was to smooth out the often obvious “join lines” where one camera’s image ended and the next one’s began, which had bedeviled Cinerama’s inventor, Fred Waller, and his technical people since they originally developed the format. Like Cinerama, Cinemiracle projected its films onto a curved screen — though I have been unable to find out online if they used the vertical Venetian-blind style panels on the Cinemiracle screen that were used in Cinerama. (The Cinerama screen was made of 150 silver-painted strips — you could actually walk through their screen — which was designed partly so that you could see the image equally well no matter where you were in the theatre, and partly in an attempt to smooth out those join lines between the images from the three cameras.) Flicker Alley, the company through which this film was reissued on Blu-Ray and DVD (which was something of a surprise since they usually only do reissues of silent films, hence their name), issued it not in letterboxed format but in something called “Smilebox,” which attempted to reproduce the effect of the original Cinemiracle showings on a big curved screen. Fortunately we have a large enough TV that, even though it could hardly reproduce the theatrical effect, at least could come within hailing distance (a nautical metaphor!) of doing it justice. Windjammer premiered at the fabled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and was such a success it ran there for 36 weeks, but ultimately Cinerama filed a patent lawsuit against Cinemiracle and National General Theatres, which had backed and bought the process, and won. As a result of the verdict, Cinerama took over the rights to Windjammer and reissued it as a Cinerama production in 1962.
Windjammer was a production of Louis de Rochemont, an interesting figure in movie history who emerged with a vengeance in 1935 as the producer of a weekly newsreel called The March of Time, backed by Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time magazine. It was supposed to be a sort of Time magazine on film, and each episode was introduced with a stentorian narrator (Westbook van Voorhis) intoning, “The MARCH … of TIME!” Intellectuals liked to disparage it for its slovenly editing and heavily editorial commentary that told you exactly what de Rochemont and his crew wanted you to think about what they were covering — they preferred the more abstract and more artistically filmed documentaries from Britain — but The March of Time became enormously popular. It was satirized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as “News on the March,” the fictional newsreel that gives us the basics of Charles Foster Kane’s life and serves as a sort of table of contents that both sets the mood and helps us keep straight the sequence of events, told in flashback by people who knew Kane, that forms the bulk of the film. In 1944 de Rochemont cut a deal with 20th Century-Fox to start making feature-length dramatic films. Most of them were either espionage or suspense thrillers, and they made at least the pretense of being based more or less (usually less) on actual stories — first about Axis agents trying to steal American military secrets, and then when the war’s end pretty much killed the market for those sorts of stories and de Rochemont moved his production schedule to a more conventional sort of thriller like Call Northside 777 (a quite good1948 film noir starring James Stewart as a reporter who’s contacted by the mother of a death row inmate who’s convinced (rightly) her son is innocent and wants Stewart to solve the crime. In the 1950’s he worked with the Cinerama company on one of their early showcase films, Cinerama Holiday, and produced The Miracle of Todd A-O for Mike Todd’s company to promote its own rival wide-screen process, before signing with Cinemiracle and National General to produce Windjammer. He fired the original director of Windjammer, Bill Colleran, midway through the shoot and hired his son, Louis de Rochemont III, to take over. Windjammer depicts the 1957-58 voyage of the Christian Radich as a so-called “school ship,” training Norwegian teenage boys (we’re told in the commentary, delivered by Erik Bye in understandable but noticeably Norwegian-accented English, for careers in the country’s merchant marine.
While they’re out and about in the ocean they meet similar sail-powered training ships run by Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries (“Every place but Bolivia seems to haveone!” my husband Charles joked — in case you didn’t get it, part of the joke is that Bolivia is landlocked), and on their way they stop at various islands, including Madeira, Curaçao, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, before stopping at New York and Philadelphia and doing a training run with a squadron of U.S. Navy ships, mostly destroyers but including at least one submarine. The guys from the Christian Radich get to board the Navy sub (in a rickety metal chair sliding on a plumb line of cable stretched from one ship to the other, something like the rickety metal seat with which Jean Peters was rescued from Niagara Falls in the 1953 film Niagara), and when one of the U.S. Navy’s harmless practice torpedoes (we know it’s harmless because the front of it is painted yellow to distinguish it from ones which actually contain explosives) falls to the ocean floor, a deep-sea diver from the Christian Radich wearing a SCUBA tank (still a novelty item in 1958) is sent to retrieve it. Windjammer is a film alternately exhilarating and annoying, at its best when the narration and Morton Gould’s music shut up and let us enjoy the stunning visuals. It begins with a 12-minute credits and prologue sequence in which we see on a normal non-wide screen the process by which the Christian Radich’s sailors are recruited (we’re told that hundreds of young men apply but they’re winnowed down to 50, and that most of them are 17 but two of the crew members are as young as 14), the crew is organized and the Radich sails down the coast of Norway (we get some predictable shots of Norway’s fabled fjords) — and then when the ship hits the open sea the curtains (animated effects added for this reissue) open up and we see the full width of the Cinemiracle image (with the join lines less noticeable than in Cinerama but still all too visible in some scenes). Charles noted that this is what I like to call a portmanteau movie, containing something likely to appeal to everyone in the audience; every port of call the Christian Radich visits is an excuse for some FitzPatrick-esque travelogues of some exciting vistas, and there are also oddball guest celebrities.
One of the quirkier aspects of the ship is that one crew member, Sven Lübeck, is alsn an aspiring classical pianist, and his mom gave him permission to sail with the Radich only on condition that a piano be loaded and carried on board so he could continue to practice. At one point Lübeck is shown writing a letter to Arthur Fiedler, founding conductor of the Boston “Pops” Orchestra, hoping to be featured as soloist with them — and, lo and behold, eventually we see Fiedler himself, along with his orchestra set up on a pier, with Lübeck as soloist running through (what else?) the opening movement of the piano concerto by Norway’s most famous composer, Edvard Grieg. There are also other celebrities involved: when the ship reaches Puerto Rico we see famed cellist Pablo Casals (who had fled Spain after Franco’s side won the nation’s civil war in the late 1930’s and settled in Puerto Rico because there he could live under U.S. jurisdiction, be in a Spanish-speaking environment and, since Puerto Rico is a U.S. “commonwealth” instead of a state, not have to pay U.S. taxes on his worldwide concert earnings) giving an al fresco open-air concert in which he plays the “Song of the Birds,” a piece he composed based on an old folk lullaby from his native Catalonia. (It was also recorded by Joan Baez on her late-1960’s Christmas-themed album Noël as “Carol of the Bells.”) And when we get to New York, just after we see three of the young Norwegian sailors get off the vessel and we think it’s going to turn into On the Town, Windjammer takes a sudden turn into abstraction; we see alternating streetscapes (with a surprising number of Nash cars as part of New York’s traffic) and kaleidoscope patterns, and instead of forming one continuous image the de Rochemonts show discernibly different views on each panel and make it obvious that we’re actually watching three separate movies at once. During the New York scenes we also get a Dixieland band led by trumpeter Wilbur De Paris playing a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — the trombonist in the opening looked like Kid Ory (though later a younger trombone player seems to take over) and the clarinetist was almost certainly Barney Bigard.
We also get quite a few songs in the movie, ostensibly traditional fare sung by the Norwegian crew boys but really by a vocal group called The Easy Riders (Americans who affected slight Norwegian accents for the project) led by Terry Gilkyson, American songwriter who composed them (Gilkyson’s most famous credit is for writing Dean Martin’s hit “Memories Are Made of This,” and his daughter Eliza is a modern-day contry-folk singer-songwriter), and of course when we’re in Trinidad we also get two different singers singing calypso songs, one in the street and one on board the Radich when they’re invited there for a party with the boys. Windjammer is also a good movie for beefcake fans: first we get a scene of the boys in their bunkroom slipped down to their undershorts as we’re shown how they get into the hammocks in which they sleep (a quite different view of hammocks than the one we got in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, probably the most famous film containing them); then we get a scene of them in a pool on one of their Caribbean stops in swimsuits and nothing else, and then we get another scene of them going about in shorts. One of the boys reminded me of the young Elvis Presley — his facial features were similar enough (remember that Elvis was of Norwegian immigrant ancestry — the name “Elvis” is a corruption of the Norwegian “Al wyss,” meaning “all wise”) that I had the feeling he looked like Elvis would have if he’d kept his natural blond hair instead of dyeing it black all those years — and though Gilkyson’s songs kept telling us that the big thing the sailors wanted to do when they got off the ship and had shore leave was to hook up with women, that’s not what the images tell us. I suspect the de Rochemonts were so afraid of running afoul of the Production Code people that the few scenes we see of the sailors going out with women are so decorous the film comes off as considerably more homoerotic than its makers intended!
Windjammer has its flaws, and most of them can be traced to Louis de Rochemont — in 1938 he had produced a March of Time segment called Inside Nazi Germany, only instead of filming inside the real Nazi Germany he staged most of it in the U.S. with refugee German actors playing Nazis, and while we can readily understand why he wouldn’t send cast and crew into Nazi Germany and risk having them arrested (or worse), The March of Time was notorious for such pseudo-documentary fakery. There’s plenty of it in Windjammer, too, including actual scripted dialogue for the sailors — James L. Shute is credited with writing the film — which they appear to be delivering themselves, since one of the locales on board is the boys’ clubhouse, in which they’re supposed to speak only English and anyone who slips up and speaks Norwegian has to put some coins in a coffee jar as a fine. (Charles told me that the Norwegian denomination in which the fines were paid was so small that by the time he went to Norway in the late 1970’s it was no longer in circulation, sort of like what happened to the British farthing or what’s happening to the U.S. penny.) Part of the problem is Morton Gould’s musical score, which features way too much “Mickey-Mousing” (a movie term meaning the very close synchronization of picture and sound — the term comes from Walt Disney’s decision when he was making his first sound cartoons that audiences would “buy” the idea of a sound cartoon only if picture and sound were very tightly locked together) and, like the narration, insists on telling us what we’re seeing instead of letting us just ease back and see it. I could have wished for a more atmospheric, less literal musical background for this film — something more like Debussy’s La Mer — and I’m sure Gould could have provided one, but that wasn’t what the de Rochemonts wanted.
Windjammer is a fun movie overall, with scenes of spectacular beauty alternating with the sort of cheesy Hollywood silliness one suspects the de Rochemonts knew the folks at National General wanted to show off their process and attract crowds; according to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, director David Lean said that the scene of the U.S. sub going underwater next to the Radich was the most beautiful shot he’d ever seen in any film. (It’s an interesting comment given that Lean’s first film as director, In Which We Serve from 1942, featured the crew of a British vessel reliving their past lives as they try to stay alive following the sinking of their ship in the English Channel.) I loved the effect we got just after that, in which we got to see a sub’s-eye view of its descent in which we first saw a waterline, then watched it disappear as we went under water — and just how they got underwater shots with the ridiculously complicated Cinemiracle camera (since they did the three-screen effect by lashing together three standard Mitchell 35mm film cameras instead of building their own camera the way Cinerama did, their equipment was a lot larger, bulkier and more cumbersome) is beyond me. I’m not sure what to make of Windjammer as a whole — I enjoyed it but I could see a lot of areas in which it could have been even better — and this post is as long as it is at least partly because I’m still trying to come to grips with this spectacle that shows us great chunks of the world but tries to make it look as much like the U.S. as possible: throughout the film you get the impression that its creators are constantly tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Hey! They’re not that different from us, after all!” — 7/4/20
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I spent most of yesterday afternoon writing a long blog post
about the movie Windjammer (in which I
failed to mention two of the most curious credits of people involved in it:
Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was listed as the photographer of the almost abstract
New York cityscapes in the film — during those scenes I joked, “Windjammerqatsi” — and while the imdb.com page on the film lists only
two cinematographers, Joseph C. Brun and Gayne Rescher, the actual credits list
a third: Gordon Willis, who would become a major “name” in the 1970’s, shooting
such instant classics as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (for which he pioneered the dank brown-and-green
look that worked in The Godfather
as a sort of continuous visual metaphor for the criminal underworld in which
the characters lived, but has since been done to death and become the default
look for virtually everything)
and Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
There’s also a story only tangentially touched on in the film Windjammer about a German sailing ship called Pamir, whom the sailors of the Christian Radich encounter while on their cruise — we don’t see the Pamir or any of its crew members, but they radio fraternal
greetings to each other as they pass each other in the West Indies. At the end
of Windjammer, just as the hot
blond Norwegian 17-year-olds are leaving the vessel and carrying on with the
rest of their lives (whatever those are going to be), the Radich crew members get news that the Pamir has sunk in a storm (Hurricane Carrie) off the coast
of the Azores Islands and only six of its 86 crew members have been rescued.
The Wikipedia page on Pamir
begins with this paragraph indicating how and why it sank:
Pamir, a four-masted barque,
was one of the famous Flying
P-Liner sailing ships of the German shipping company F. Laeisz. She was the
last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn,
in 1949. By 1957, she had been outmoded by modern bulk carriers and
could not operate at a profit. Her shipping consortium’s inability to finance
much-needed repairs or to recruit sufficient sail-trained officers caused
severe technical difficulties. On 21 September 1957, she was caught in Hurricane Carrie and
sank off the Azores,
with only six survivors rescued after an extensive search.
The rest of the page about the Pamir is even more curious: the ship was built in 1905 at
a shipyard in Hamburg, the fifth of 10 in her production line, and when World
War I started she was stranded in the Canary Islands and did not return to
Germany until 1920. Then she was seized by the Italian government as war
reparations (remember that Italy and Germany were on opposite sides in World War I even though they were on the
same side in World War II), but her original German owners, the F. Lasker
company, bought her back in 1924 to move nitrate fertilizer — the same thing
she’d been doing before the war. In 1931 they sold her to a Finnish company
which used her to import wheat from Australia to Europe, and in 1941 it was
seized while in port at Wellington, New Zealand. The New Zealanders used her
mostly as a cargo vessel but also made 10 passenger trips with her, five to San
Francisco, three to Vancouver, and two between Wellington and Sydney (which
makes more sense than sending her across the Pacific Ocean during World War
II). She was going to be scrapped when a German who’d formerly been a Pamir crew member in the 1920’s bought her, remodeled her,
added an auxiliary diesel engine (which leaked oil and lost its propeller on
the Pamir’s maiden voyage with
it, apparently much to the delight of the sail-favoring crew); alas, she could
no longer compete economically with the big diesel-fired steam freighters, her
decks deteriorated and she sailed on what turned out to be her last voyage with
an inexperienced captain and a crew of sailors more accurately described as
interns than trainees who didn’t know how to keep a ship upright in a severe
storm. The sinking was considered a national tragedy in Germany and made
headlines around the world — though in the rather antiseptic view of sea life
we get in Windjammer (as one
imdb.com reviewer wrote, “What made this film a hit was the fact you could not
take it seriously. No military discipline was portrayed in this film. Every
cadet, man and boy, was having a good time even when they were doing their
chores”) the Pamir disaster comes
off as just a blip of pathos leavening a light-hearted portrayal of sea life
that totally ignores the myriad dangers faced by a ship — especially one
powered by the chancy medium of wind — on an nine-month cruise on the high
seas. — 7/5/20
