Corsair (Roland West Productions, United Artists,, 1931)

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

My husband Charles and I continued oru excursion from the night before into quirky early-1930’s gangster films with the 1931 movie Corsair, directed by Roland West (his final film; imdb.com credits him with 14 films as director, starting as early as 1916, but he made only three sound films, Alibi, The Bat Whispers – a remake of his 1926 silent The Bat – and this one) from a script he and Josephine Lovett co-wrote based on a novel by Walton Green. It’s about a young man named John Hawks (Chester Morris, who also starred in West’s two other talkies) who at the start of the film is a football hero at a small Western college who wins the big game against Yale with a spectacular touchdown pass following a long scoreless tie. He’s accosted after the game by vampy Alison Corning (Thelma Todd, for some reason billed for the first and only time in her career under a pseudonym, “Alison Loyd”), who invites him to a weekend party on board the yacht owned by her father, Stephen Corning (Emmett Corrigan). Hawks plans to return to the college where he just graduated and become a coach, but she persuades her dad to offer him a job in his investment company – only after a year, in a scene that strikingly anticipates the similar disillusionment Leonardo di Caprio’s character has in the recent film The Wolf of Wall Street, he gets fired for refusing to persuade an old woman to exchange her valuable bonds, which constitute her life savings, for worthless Venezuelan oil stock Corning’s company is pushing.

During his year on the job Hawks has learned that Corning has a lucrative and illegal under-the-table sideline importing illegal alcohol from Europe through a sailing ship, the Queseda, that moves it across the Atlantic. Hawks hooks up with Corning’s bootlegging partner, Big John (Fred Kohler), and learns enough of the business to go into it for himself, hijacking Big John’s shipments in a power boat called the Corsair that’s designed to look like an ordinary tuna-fishing boat. He learns where Big John’s shipments will be through two “moles” he’s cultivated in Big John’s organization, Slim (Ned Sparks) and his secretary Sophie (Mayo Methot, best known for having been the third Mrs. Humphrey Bogart – their relationship was highly intense and often involved physical violence, of which she gave as good as she got – the fan magazines called them “The Battling Bogarts,” he nicknamed her “Sluggy,” and at one time during the filming of Casablanca she gave him such a big black eye makeup couldn’t cover it and so for three days Michael Curtiz had to shoot around Bogart’s big black eye; her performance here is quite impressive, maybe not at the level of Bogart’s fourth wife Lauren Bacall but indicating she should have had a bigger career than she did). Sophie sends out the information about Big John’s shipments by apparently typing but really giving the locations in Morse code, and Slim takes down the info and relays it to Hawks on board the Corsair.

All goes well until the Queseda picks up a big shipment of French champagne and Hawks plants Slim on board as a cook – only in the meantime Big John’s assistant Fish Face (Frank Rice) – if the character has a normal name we’re not told what it is – has figured out there’s a mole in the organization and planted the fake job opening for a “cook” to find out who it is. Fish Face kills Sophie in one of those quirky murder-as-love-scene bits Alfred Hitchcock would specialize in later – her death scene is truly poignant – and he and Big John rig up a cargo made to look like the French champagne cases but actually containing dynamite. The idea is that Hawks and his crew will take the booby-trapped cargo aboard and then Big John’s men will blow up the Corsair by remote control and kill Hawks and everyone else on board, including Alison and her queeny fiancé Richard Bentinck (William Austin, who plays it so nellie one wonders why he isn’t trying to romance John Hawks instead), who’ve crashed the Corsair by swimming to her at sea. Only Hawks gets word of the booby-trapped cargo in time and orders his crew, including the two stowaways, into the Corsair’s one lifeboat and then somehow manages to hijack the Queseda despite Big John having three machine-gunners on board to defend his ship. Then Hawks and his crew take over the Queseda and sail her to Stephen Corning’s yacht, offer him his stolen goods for sale, but then Hawks virtuously tears up the check Corning writes him and accepts Corning’s offer of a job running his Venezuelan oil fields, which have turned out to be valuable after all. He also gets Alison and there’s a big smooch between them at the fade-out.

Corsair is a weird piece of filmmaking; some parts of it work brilliantly – like the performances of the two women. Thelma Todd, the off-screen romantic partner of director West, was mostly known as a comic foil for people like Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, as well as a comedienne in her own right in a series of two-reel shorts in which Hal Roach paired her first with ZaSu Pitts and then with Patsy Kelly, but here she turns in a quite remarkable performance in a part that (except for the so-called “happy ending”) anticipates the femmes fatales of film noir. Her character is essentially the spoiled brat Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grown up but still confident that her daddy’s money can buy her anything – or any man – she wants. She’s an electrifying screen presence, and I suspect the reason she was billed under a pseudonym was some contractual issue with Roach. Mayo Methot is also surprisingly good – usually she just got bit roles, often as the sleazy woman Bogart’s character dumped early on to make way for the one he really loved – so I wasn’t expecting her to be as good as she is here. The men are a bit more problematic: Chester Morris is good-looking and a real screen presence, but he’s not a strong enough actor to suggest the character’s inner conflicts; this is one more movie from the classic era that really cried out for James Cagney (even though with Cagney they’d have had to change the prologue from having him score the game-winning touchdown to having him kick the game-winning field goal) and his ability to do cockiness and pathos simultaneously.

Roland West’s direction is hit-or-miss; I suspect he never really felt comfortable making a film with sound – the silent version of The Bat strikes me as a better movie than its talkie remake – and Corsair has some quirky throwbacks to silent-film technique, including the extensive use of color tinting. This was a common technique in the pre-sound days – night scenes were often printed on blue stock, daylight exteriors on amber, jungle scenes on green, scenes involving fire on red, and so on – but it fell by the wayside in the sound era because coloring the film stock allegedly made it harder for the projector to read an optical sound track and thereby degraded the sound quality. In silent films the breaks for intertitles covered up the sometimes abrupt changes in the tints – but here they just seem arbitrary, especially given West’s penchant for long dissolves between scenes, in which the sudden change in color in the middle of a dissolve is jarring. (Tinting and its companion process, toning – in which one object in a scene was in a different color from the overall tint – were both attempts to give a sense of color to a basically black-and-white image; the 1933 film The Death Kiss used both processes so extensively its post-production took six months longer than usual, during which time the studio that made it went out of business and the film was sold to another company for release.) Corsair is the sort of frustrating movie because some elements work beautifully and others are just dull – Charles objected to the way it changed genres so often and never really settled into one groove, and didn’t have the courage of its genre-bending either. It was a curious way for Roland West’s career to end; he retired from films but intended to come back in 1935, only that year Thelma Todd was found mysteriously dead, possibly killed by the Mafia for not paying them any of the proceeds from her successful restaurant on Catalina Island, and West was so disgusted both by the murder and the lameness of law enforcement’s investigation of it that he dropped out of Hollywood and never returned for the remaining 17 years of his own life. The story sounds like it would have made a good plot for a Roland West movie!