Port of Seven Seas (MGM, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I the next two films in the sequence of James Whale’s oeuvre last night, Port of Seven Seas and Sinners in Paradise. Port of Seven Seas began as a trilogy of plays by French writer Marcel Pagnol, which he turned into movies at the French branch of Paramount in the early 1930’s: Marius, Fanny and César. The stories take place in the southern French port of Marseilles (and happily this film leaves the “s” on the end of “Marseilles” instead of cutting it off the way Warner Bros. did in 1944 with Passage to Marseille) and deal with two middle-aged widowers, tavern owner César Ollivier and sail-maker Honoré Panisse, and the trouble they get into when César’s son Marius gets his girlfriend Madelon pregnant, then ships out to sea for what’s supposed to be a three-year cruise. Panisse, who’s long had a crush on Madelon even though she’s a young woman and he’s middle-aged, offers to marry her so her child will have a father and appear legitimate.

Carl Laemmle, Jr. bought the American remake rights in 1933 and tried to set up the project with Preston Sturges writing the script, though as James Curtis points out in his biography of James Whale, Sturges had very little original writing to do – mostly Sturges, who had spent part of his childhood in France and knew the language perfectly, just translated Pagnol’s original French dialogue into English. The project got put aside when the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency declared its holy war on Hollywood in 1934, the Production Code Administration got considerably tighter in enforcing the self-censorship the movie industry had set up to ward off government regulation (a real threat because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that movies were merely “a business” and therefore not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment, a decision that wasn’t reversed until 1952), and obviously a sympathetic story about a young woman who’d had sex outside of marriage and an older man who agreed to marry her and pose as the father of her child was a big-time problem under the new regime. Then in 1936 Laemmle and his father, who had founded Universal in the first place, were forced out and a hedge fund took over the studio. Junior Laemmle got a producer deal at MGM but only got to make this one film, and having sponsored James Whale’s career at Universal he wanted Whale as director.

Whale was coming off two big commercial flops, The Road Back and The Great Garrick, and though he still owed Universal two films on the contract he’d signed with the Laemmles in 1933, he really wanted to get away and work somewhere else. So he took on the Pagnol project, retitled Port of Seven Seas, and was originally promised a star cast including Margaret Sullavan as Madelon and James Stewart as her boyfriend Marius. Then MGM’s management fired Laemmle (who never even attempted to work again, though he lived until 1979) and his old Universal associate, Henry Henigson, took over the project as producer but wasn’t able to wangle the stars Whale had been promised from what was mockingly referred to as the “College of Cardinals,” the old-line producers at MGM who essentially formed a court around studio head Louis B. Mayer. In the end the only star name who got attached to Port of Seven Seas was Wallace Beery, cast as César and playing it in his usual boorish manner.

Panisse was Frank Morgan, best known today for the title role in The Wizard of Oz, who was a good enough choice except he turned it into yet another of the foofy roles that were his stock in trade – a far cry from the subtle, nuanced and genuinely emotional performance Whale had got out of him in their other film together, The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933). The part of Madelon went to Maureen O’Sullivan, best known as Jane in the MGM Tarzan series, but she turns in a surprisingly intense performance and takes the acting honors for this film. Her spectacular early scene as she rushes to the Marsellies docks in hopes of catching her lover Marius before his ship sails out, then faints in the street as she realizes she’s missed him, is the finest scene in the film and the only time this otherwise stage-bound piece becomes truly cinematic and actually looks like a James Whale movie. Otherwise, as Charles pointed out, for Whale Port of Seven Seas is a return to his stage-bound early films, Journey’s End (1930) and Waterloo Bridge (1931). Most of it takes place either in César’s bar or Panisse’s home (Panisse is depicted as the richest – or at least one of the richest – man in Marseilles, though there are so few on-screen characters Marseilles looks like a small fishing village rather than one of France’s largest cities).

At least Whale got to revert to Sturges’ original script – various writers had tried their hands on it in the meantime and had taken the story farther away from Pagnol and more towards traditional Hollywood melodrama – and though there are some of the usual euphemisms the script is relatively honest about the characters’ sexualities, especially for a film from the post-Legion period of strict Code enforcement. The early scenes of comic by-play between César and Panisse get pretty dreary (one wonders what Sturges could have done if he’d directed the film himself), but when Marius – played by actor John Beal, who’d got a star buildup at RKO which collapsed with the box-office failure of his film The Little Minister, co-starring Katharine Hepburn, who’s no great shakes but at least looks enough like Wallace Beery one can believe in them as father and son (a pet peeve of mine when movies cast people who don’t resemble each other at all and expect us to believe they’re biological kin) – suddenly returns home and demands that Madelon leave Panisse (whom she’s already married and is raising the child with) and run off with him to raise their child together, the dramatic intensity of the story goes up and pushes towards a surprisingly moving ending in which Madelon elects to stay with Panisse and continue the pretense that the baby boy is Panisse’s son. Much of the film revolves around Panisse’s long-frustrated desire for a child, particularly a son through whom he can carry on his business (a theme that must have resonated with Carl Laemmle, Jr.!) – he even has wooden letters that spell “et fils” which he intends to add to the signboard outside his sail shop, and the script is sensitive enough to raise the fraught issue of what he’s going to do if Madelon’s baby turns out to be a fille instead of a fils.

Port of Seven Seas is a worthy film even though it’s one of those movies that could have been better than it is – and certainly the theme of a middle-aged man raising another man’s child as his own and offering his name to the mother to salvage her reputation fits in with the theme of imposture that runs through so many of Whale’s movies (and as a working-class Gay Englishman who tried to appear as a straight aristocrat, Whale was drawn for obvious reasons to stories about people having to pretend to be what they are not). Noting the effeminacy of Frank Morgan’s performance, Charles suggested that it came off like a Gay man's fantasy of getting to raise and parent a child without the bothersome necessity of having sex with a woman first. He made it sound like the 1962 British film A Taste of Honey (1962), in which a Gay man takes in a woman who's been impregnated by a Black sailor, but the script of Port of Seven Seas contains a long monologue by Panisse reminiscing about his late wife Felicity – at first they avoided having a child (how? Did they used whatever primitive birth control methods there were in the 1930's, or did they just not have sex at all?).

Alas,the film was sold wretchedly (“It’s more exciting than Bad Man of Brimstone!” read the original ads, obviously trying to sell it to what remained of Wallace Beery’s fan base by 1938 and promising an action-adventure yarn quite different from what the film actually is), and it got a blah response from the box office that no doubt helped further sink what remained of Whale’s career.