by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a download of a movie
called Windjammer, a quirky but rather
dull 1937 “B” produced under peculiar auspices (by George Hirliman, head of
Grand National Pictures, who made this and three other films with George
O’Brien, who as a silent actor had appeared in major films like Murnau’s Sunrise, Ford’s The Iron Horse and Three Bad Men, and Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark but in the talkie era got relegated to “B” movies,
mostly Westerns, but the films themselves were released by RKO. They were
almost certainly not made by RKO,
however, since they carry Abe Meyer’s credit as music director. Meyer ran a
company called Meyer Synchronizing Service which offered stock music tracks for
rent to independent producers, but had Hirliman made these films at RKO he
wouldn’t have needed Meyer since RKO itself would have had stock music
available from their own library. My guess is that the chronically cash-poor
Grand National company Hirliman owned sold O’Brien’s contract to RKO and threw
in four completed but as-yet-unreleased O’Brien films for Grand National.
(Grand National had an uninspiring end in 1939 for a company that had aspired
to major-studio status and had even landed James Cagney for two films, Great
Guy and the musical Something to
Sing About — a film to which Cagney devoted
an entire chapter of his autobiography because it was the only musical he made
between Footlight Parade and Yankee
Doodle Dandy, and he said in the book his
one career regret was he’d made so few musicals. They got Cagney after he
successfully sued Warner Bros. to break his contract over a billing issue, then
lost him again when Warners got the judgment reversed on appeal.) Windjammer was a singularly dull movie that failed to live up
to the sailing-ship romance (in both senses of the word) promised by the title.
There seems to be some confusion whether the term “windjammer” is a generic
term for any large sail-powered
vessel or a specific genre of
sailing ship, and Wikipedia isn’t much help: their definition is “a commercial sailing ship with
multiple masts that may be either square rigged or fore-and-aft rigged or
a combination of the two. The informal term arose during the transition from
the Age of Sail to
the Age of Steam.”
Wikipedia also notes that in the 19th century the term “windjammer”
sometimes was used to refer not to sailing ships themselves, but to the members
of their crew — and it was an insult sailors aboard steamships hurled at their
behind-the-times sailing brethren. The most famous film called Windjammer was the large-format documentary made in 1959 about
a Norwegian sailing ship, the Christian Radich, that for some reason had been kept in service by
the Norwegian navy as a training vessel even though obviously members of the
Norwegian navy weren’t going to be using sailing ships in their actual service.
(This seems to be the same principle by which airplane pilots who enlisted in
World War II trained in biplanes even though all the aircraft used in actual
combat on both sides were monoplanes.) The 1959 Windjammer was produced by a short-lived company called
Cinemiracle that attempted to rip off Cinerama’s format — three separate images
on three different films, plus a fourth film carrying the soundtrack, to create
a super-wide image that would reproduce the entire range of human direct and
peripheral vision — without violating Cinerama’s patents by bouncing the images
off mirrors onto the screen. Alas, Cinemiracle lost the patent-infringement
suit Cinerama brought against them, and Windjammer, the only film actually produced in Cinemiracle, was
taken over and re-released under the Cinerama logo. Unfortunately, the 1937 Windjammer was hardly as prestigious (or as long — 58 minutes
compared to 142 for the 1959 Windjammer) as its successor. Directed by Ewing Scott from a screenplay by Daniel
Jarrett and James Gruen from an “original” story by Major Raoul Haig (“major”
of what, one wonders), Windjammer
actually begins in the California state capitol, where the state attorney
general wants to serve a subpoena on utilities magnate Commodore Russell T.
Selby (Brandon Evans) to force him to testify before a state legislative
committee.
The attorney general assigns the task of serving Selby — who’s
called “Commodore” because he owns a yacht that’s about to set sail from
California to Hawai’i as a contestant in an annual yacht race he’s been trying
to win for five years — to a young assistant in his office, Bruce Lane (George
O’Brien), who first attempts to crash a going-away party being given on the
yacht but is discovered and thrown off the boat. Next Bruce hits on the idea of
sailing out in a small boat, pretending to be shipwrecked and forcing Selby’s
captain (Lee Shumway) to pick him up according to the laws of the sea, and
Bruce’s stratagem works — he gets to Commodore Selby and hands him the subpoena
— but it turns out he’s done so outside the three-mile limit of U.S.
territorial waters (in those days — now it’s 12) and therefore he hasn’t
completed the legal requirements for service and he won’t have another chance
to do so until they get to Hawai’i and are once again within U.S. territory.
Selby and his daughter Betty (Constance Worth, delivering a quite tough and
effective no-nonsense performance suggesting that Hirliman and Scott were grooming
her to be another Katharine Hepburn) announce that they’re going to force Lane
to work for his passage — and of course they assign him to wash dishes and do
other demeaning tasks on board. As if that weren’t enough plot for you, the yacht springs a leak and the crew
members demand that Selby “unseal” the ship’s diesel engines, which will enable
them to get to the nearest port safely but will also disqualify them from the
yacht race (ya remember the yacht race?), which has to be conducted exclusively on sail. And just in case you
needed any more complications, they come in the form of another yacht crewed by a bunch of crooks who are sailing to
Macao with a mysterious cargo labeled “Farm Implements” — but we know from the
scene in which the captain, Morgan (William Hall) — the writers seem to be
doing an in-joke reference to the real-life Caribbean pirate Henry Morgan —
warns one of his crew members not to smoke in the hold that it really contains
either armaments or explosives, probably for one side or another in the
multi-pronged civil war that was then going on in China.
The crew of Selby’s
yacht bails in the craft’s one lifeboat, the four remaining people (Selby, his
daughter, her typically hapless spoiled-rich fiancé and Our Hero) try to
continue to sail her, but they’re wrecked by the bad guys’ ship and pressed
into service as part of his crew
— only Our Hero, carrying an oil lamp for illumination, “accidentally” sets the
hold on fire and the four good (or at least not-so-bad) characters escape in
the bad guys’ lifeboat and watch on while the bad guys’ ship picturesquely
blows up from whatever it was in that hold. The 1937 Windjammer really isn’t that much of a movie, and anyone coming
to it expecting to see sailing ships and the crews that run them in action
would be disappointed — there is a bit of business involving a “balloon jib” (a
particularly large, bulbous and dangerous sail — the correct term is “balloon
spinnaker” but the writers got it wrong) that makes the boat goes faster but at
the risk of knocking crew members overboard — but not much in the way of
sailing action, or of action of any other kind for that matter. Grand National
made some surprisingly interesting movies during their short existence,
including the two Cagney credits as well as Reefer Madness (whose connection to Grand National is exposed by
the movie theatre seen during one of the film’s marijuana-fueled chase scenes,
which is advertising Any Old Love,
the film Cagney’s character stars in as part of the plot of Something
to Sing About) and the surprisingly
haunting Tex Ritter Western Rolling Plains, but Windjammer is just
another late-1930’s “B,” not really awful but not especially interesting either
— though Constance Worth’s edgy performance is fun and even makes the typical
hate-at-first-sight-that-blossoms-into-love plot line of her and George
O’Brien’s relationship at least faintly believable.
