Tangled Mind

Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf (1941) is spectrally salt-soaked, ferociously anti-fascist, and gives great Alexander Knox. On the first two of these factors much of its reputation justly rests; the third, if you ask me, is criminally overlooked.

Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.

Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?

"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"

The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.

The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.

Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.

During one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.

Exiled for the second night running on account of the bustedassedness of our air conditioning, I have been self-medicating with college radio, old movies, and pulp novels. WUMB netted me Cordelia's Dad's "Granite Mills" (1998) and WHRB Thanks for Coming's "Friends Forever" (2020). Killer Shark (1950) is pretty much the other way round from its title with its setting of the mid-century shark fishery in the Gulf of California, but its call-it-courage adventure makes a cute B-showcase for Roddy McDowall just aged out of his child stardom, all his scene-stealer's tilts and flickers in place even if he was directed to give his best shot at sounding like an all-American teen. Night Nurse (1931) remains one of my favorite and endlessly watchable pre-Codes: steel-true Stanwyck, Blondell cracking gum and wise, and Ben Lyon as the sweetest bootlegger in the business, the kind of romantic hero who lets the heroine take the lead while he takes her at her word. Nancy Rutledge's Blood on the Cat (1945) does contain a most excellent black cat, tester of gravity, router of dogs, unendangered throughout the novel despite its human body count. The number of monarch caterpillars is now something like sixteen.