Devil and the Deep

Devil and the Deep contains a fascinating performance from Charles Laughton as a submarine commander going nuts with the conviction that his sultry wife (Tallulah Bankhead) is cheating on him first with Cary Grant and then Gary Cooper.

The physical production features a claustrophobic studio recreation of a North African town (reminiscent of Von Sternberg's "Morocco" but without the dazzling shadow play), a romantic scene in a starlit desert oasis (said to have been filmed in an actual desert but looking exactly like a painted backdrop) and finally the laughable spectacle of toy boats bobbing around in a tank of water that we're supposed to believe is the Mediterranean.

Bankhead, like other female stars of that historical moment, is made up and coiffed to look like a Garbo clone. The style suits her without overwhelming her innate, distinctive qualities of voice and manner. Laughton's performance prefigures his later Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I prefer his work here to his Bligh, which was sometimes too messily overwrought. This is also the second 1932 film (the other being "Payment Deferred") in which he plays dementia with mad laughter. Cooper is wooden and awkward (and handsome) as usual and Grant does well in a smallish supporting role.

Devil And The Deep finds Tallulah Bankhead cast with two Hollywood icons, Gary Cooper and the up and coming Cary Grant as the wife of a submarine commander who has a fling with both guys. But the one who really steals the film in what was his American film debut with Paramount is Charles Laughton.

Although The Old Dark House was made first, Paramount held up its release for Devil And The Deep, the better to give Laughton exposure with a proved box office champion in Gary Cooper. Laughton is stunning as an insanely jealous husband.

I think a lot of Devil And The Deep may have been left on the cutting room floor. In the beginning it's made quite clear that Tallulah is a woman of easy virtue. But later on the tone of the film abruptly shifts so that your sympathies shift from Laughton to her. The story loses a lot of coherency with that.

Still the performances are great and the climax on board the submarine is very well staged. Definitely a must for a fan of any of the stars in the quartet.

Paramount, at the height of its sophistication in the early 30's, could recycle its sets from MOROCCO and fashion a stylish production out of a passable triangle melodrama. Unfulfilled wife Tallulah Bankhead --frustrated at home, humiliated in front of her social set by her pathologically jealous husband -- stumbles into an Arab marketplace crowded with whirling dervishes, and into the arms of Gary Cooper for a romantic liaison under the desert stars. Conflicts ensue, of course, and then all three find themselves on a crippled submarine.

Viewers who know Tallulah Bankhead only from her caricatured role in LIFEBOAT will be startled by her intensity and bruised glamour: slouching in Travis Banton gowns, she looks sometimes like Garbo, sometimes like "Margo Channing". Meanwhile, she gives a crash course in how to hold a melodrama together, commanding every scene, inflecting every line with subtle nuances. When she must deal with menacing Charles Laughton, the air between them vibrates with tension. Laughton [billed as "the eminent English character actor"] does his share as well, but he seems mannered in a familiar way, a dry run for his Captain Bligh.

Only the radiant young Cary Grant in a dazzling naval uniform steals attention from the leading lady in a brief appearance. Gary Cooper, though persuasive as the romantic hero, soon gets submerged in a disappointingly shallow character.

The eye is seduced by cameraman Charles Lang's repertoire of shadows, the heart is stirred by a star performance, but in the end the head may resist: the terse dialogue tries for Hemingway but remains stubbornly pedestrian and remarkably humorless: the script owes its sole laugh to Bankhead's line reading while buying a billiard cue. The devil is in the dialogue!

With a cast like this - Cooper, Bankhead, Laughton, Grant - I just had to check out Devil and the Deep. This is the earliest Grant film I've seen and he has already established his trademark speech patterns and carriage that would be with him for his entire career. Needless to say his does a fine job. Cooper looks great but his performance is a bit flat, mostly due to the script and direction. Laughton is very good and his character brings a lit to the film. Bankhead does a fine job but her character is so weak willed and passive that it's hard not to get a bit frustrated with her character let alone root for her. It is an odd little film for sure but one that I think is still worth checking out mostly for the cast.

Bankhead made a handful of silent films before she became the rage of the London stage in the late 20s. Back in Hollywood, she made 7 films in 1931 and 1932. The Devil and the Deep was the penultimate one. She was not a success. It would be more than a decade before she would "face the cameras" again in 1944's brilliant Lifeboat for Alfred HItchcock.

The few of these early talkies I've seen have been fascinating because Bankhead was a STAR, and no one was quite like her. She had the allure of Garbo or Dietrich, but she was closer to Davis or Crawford or Constance Bennett in her temperament. In Faithless, Tarnished Lady, The Cheat, and Devil and the Deep she plays basically the same character: the woman who goes wrong but is saved in the end. Bankhead suffered in her 30s films from lousy directors. In Devil and the Deep, Marion Gering mis-directs by letting Charles Laughton ham it up as the husband, while Gary Cooper as the lover is boring. Bankhead holds center stage and is really very good in this VERY strange film.

It's a submarine movie set apparently in Algiers or some such place. She is the commander's bored wife. He's nuts. After her fling with Cary Grant (yes it's quite the cast), Laughton has him transferred. Cooper's fate is worse since they're all aboard the sub when all hell breaks loose.

Bankhead looks great in stylish clothing and slinks about the house and the club , the streets (amid whirling dervishes), and on the sub. Laughton is menacing and his final scene is memorable. But they're not a very believable couple. Cooper is oddly boring and is given awful lines to say. Grant, in a small part, is, well, Cary Grant. Paul Porcasi is the shop keeper, Henry Kolker and Juliette Compton are the catty club denizens. One problem is that the film is underlit so it's hard to see a lot of detail. Amusing scenes with Cooper and Bankhead staring up at the stars, buying cheap perfume, and buying a pool cue.

With a better director and better writers, this could have been a blockbuster. But it's neat to see Bankhead in her prime, before she became a campy professional star.