The Captain Hates the Sea

"The Captain Hates The Sea" is an entertaining but dated offering from Columbia, with touches, as has been noted, of "Grand Hotel" and "The Love Boat". The feel is of a somewhat confined stage play despite taking place at sea, and the overall impression is of a competent but minor picture that is overrated by virtue of the fact that it is the last movie John Gilbert made. He was good but not memorable, but at least proved that he had a good enough voice for talking pictures.

Today's moviegoers would be somewhat put off by the cast of actors, who are familiar to us of a certain age but would be strangers to them. They may not have heard of John Gilbert, or Victor McLaglen, Helen Vinson, Leon Errol or the marvelous Alison Skipworth, for that matter. Add in the customs, styles and social disparities between now and then, and you have a filmed museum piece of interest to us older, savvy moviegoers only.

I thought it was good enough for a rating of 6, and I will leave it at that.

This is a poorly paced and scripted little drama, that might have inspired the creators of "The Love Boat". It's all about the passengers and the crew aboard a cruise ship, and their various misadventures and intrigues.

It is the cast that redeems this picture from being a forgettable piece of mediocrity. All put in good performances - although I wasn't sure what The Three Stooges were doing in the film!! Alison Skipworth is especially memorable as a rather flirtatious rich widow.

But the film is made unforgettable by a magnificent performance from the great silent star John Gilbert, in his final film. Having fallen from super-stardom with the coming of sound, he had descended into alcoholism, and would die just two years after this film was completed. Ironically he portrays an alcoholic trying to reform - and he plays it with such dignity, grace, charm and wit, that he makes us realise today what a great screen actor we lost in John Gilbert. A sad final role perhaps, but he at last proved to the world that he could have been a fine talkie actor.

As another poster has stated, John Gilbert had taken to heavy drink after his dismissal from MGM for having a less-than-adequate speaking voice, at least according to Louis B. Mayer. Director Milestone convinced irascible Columbia Studio chief Harry Cohn to hire Gilbert for this movie, promising Cohn that he would keep Gilbert sober by shooting at sea, away from bars and nightclubs. Problem was, many of the other actors in this film also had tremendous thirsts- Victor McLaglen and Leon Errol, to name a couple- and they found ways to hide their bottles even while filming on water. It wasn't long before the drinking began holding up the shooting, prompting a telegram from the studio: "What's holding up production? The costs are staggering." To which Milestone replied: "So is the cast."

Walter Connolly applies his curmudgeon-with-a-heart screen persona to the character of a ship's captain whose hatred of the sea stems in part from the bad behavior of most of the passengers he encounters. After establishing this fact, we witness the trajectory of a huge number of characters during the course of a voyage from New York Harbor to an unnamed Latin American destination and back again. The cast list alone tells you almost all you would need to know: Besides Connolly there is Leon Errol, John Gilbert and Walter Catlett as a trio of mutually enabling tipplers, bossy harridan Alison Skipworth and sourpuss Charles Gillingwater, Wynne Gibson and Helen Vinson as two very different kinds of requisite pretty young things, Victor McLaglen as a private detective, a very mannered Arthur Treacher as an English major, and the little- known darkly handsome Fred Keating as a rather wimpy crook who resembles various other, better known performers like George Raft or even Russ Columbo, but then you find out he is actually Fred Keating. Added to the mix are Donald Meek as a solitary traveler whose long beard becomes the peculiar obsession of the captain, Akim Tamiroff as a Latin-American revolutionary and even the Three Stooges, playing it straight for a change, as the musicians of ship's dance band! (One of the numbers they play is identical to a number from "Horses' Collars," one of their Columbia short subjects released the following year.)

Sprinkled throughout are some marvelous bits of dialogue, including a series of witty remarks made by Gilbert who keeps rationalizing why he needs to take another drink. For example (and I paraphrase), "This is no time to be drinking…and no time to stop either." Some of the camera setups are also imaginative. When Gilbert, standing at a bar, is punched to the floor by John Wray, we next see him at ground level through a small door under the bar. When characters stop to chat in a ship's corridor, we hear the echo of their voices as we would if we overheard their conversation in that kind of space. When a woman jumps overboard we see her fall from multiple points of view, including vertically through the frame to the shock of people one deck below her leap.

The main thread of the plot, as in Grand Hotel, has to do with people needing money and what they will do to get it, including breaking the law. Subsidiary plots touch on various human foibles and all are touched with humor at one point or another.

If I didn't know better I would bet that Frank Capra or his oft-used screenwriter Robert Riskin had a hand in this effort because the casual yet detailed approach reminds me of their work.

...and this is the final entry in the filmography of one of those people - John Gilbert - so legend has it. This was Gilbert's last film, having been released by MGM just the year before after a prolonged and ignominious fall from the pinnacle of fame over a four year period, starting with his ill-fated first talkie starring role in "His Glorious Night".

The captain (Walter Connally) certainly hates being captain here, though it is not clear so much that he hates the sea. However, he certainly is bored with life in general and his job in particular and wants his steward Layton (Leon Errol) to bring him juicy tidbits about what is going on between the passengers on his ship. The captain never passes up an opportunity to abuse the poor steward. However, the captain is really not the center of attention here at all. The emphasis is on the different passengers and how they interact. Central to the theme is John Gilbert as Steve Bramley, a writer who is losing a battle with alcohol, partly because he won't even try. His constant drinking hijinks are supposed to be funny, but in the context of what was going on in Gilbert's life it just turns out to be poignant.

Actually pretty funny is Victor McLaglen as a private eye who is after a pair who have stolen some bonds. The private eye begins to fall for the female half of the thieving team. A wealthy matron casts a romantic eye at the male half of the thieving pair although he is at least twenty years younger than she. On the dramatic side there is a verbally and quite possibly physically abusive wealthy older man who has wed a girl from the other side of the tracks and won't let her forget it. Columbia always liked lots of mayhem in their 30's comedies, so joining the fray is The Three Stooges as a trio of musicians and Donald Meek as a character whose only point in this film seems to be his beard, which looks entirely fake but is not. That beard captures the imagination of several of the passengers in the way of pranks and bets.

Some have called this a take on the "Grand Hotel" formula, but it isn't sewed together quite that neatly. Also, note that although this film is clearly past the precode era it has plenty of precode devices oddly left in. Although this movie was thoroughly entertaining, Gilbert's performance haunted me not only because of what he was playing - an unrepentant alcoholic - but how he played it. If you look at Gilbert's past talkies he was thoroughly engaged in the parts he was playing. Here he seems tired and worn and just taking everything that he observes as a joke, as if nothing really matters to him at this point. Perhaps he was directed to play it that way, but it did make me sad. The ending did make me glad for Gilbert's character, as there did seem to be at least one constant in his life upon which he could depend.