Rulers of the Sea

It was good to see Margaret Lockwood (ML) again playing Will Fyffe's daughter as she did in "Owd Bob" (1938) when John Loder was her fiancé.This time the romance is between David Gillespie (Douglas Fairbanks Jnr)(DF) and Mary Shaw (ML) takes longer to develop as DF is very reticent to show his feelings to ML despite MLs obvious feelings for him.The reason is that DF has to make his way in the world and establish himself before he commits to a wife.Meanwhile ML is not too convinced her father should throw away his secure engineering job on Greenock on the Clyde for a speculative job designing steam engines for ships urged on by DF. Although a fictitious story, the scriptwriters do mention that "The Great Western Railway" is planning a rival designed to beat the Shaw and Gillespie steamship, "The Dog Star" in the race as first steamship to New York and cross the Atlantic non stop.

I presume this rival was the "The Great Western" which in the late 1830s was a paddle steamer which was designed before the much more famous "SS Great Britain" by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.The latter ship was launched at Bristol in 1843, as the first screw driven steamship to cross the North Atlantic.This ship was returned in 1970 to Bristol to the same shipyard whence it was originally launched after languishing in the Falkland Islands for many years.I have visited the site and toured this ship.

It is a pity ML abandoned the U.S. and returned to the UK after making just two films there, this and "Susannah of the Mounties" (1939) with Randolph Scott and Shirley Temple; as I felt (ML) and (DF) had a good on-screen chemistry together.Will Fyffe plays his usual crafty character role as an engineer of steamship engines who captures the imagination of a dispirited DF by his imaginative (but not mathematically correct) pioneer designer.