The Captain Hates the Sea

A rather innocuous comedy The Captain Hates The Sea marked the farewell performance for silent screen star John Gilbert. After failing to make a comeback with his greatest co-star Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, Gilbert was given his walking papers by MGM. He was fourth billed in this film whose star was Victor McLaglen.

Given the incredibly good cast of familiar character players The Captain Hates The Sea should have been a lot better than it was. But it's hampered by a confusing script.

The main plot line involves former cop now turned private detective Victor McLaglen after some stolen bonds and he believes that Fred Keating and Helen Vinson have them. If one is used to seeing McLaglen as some of the oafish characters he played in later John Ford films, you'll be in for a surprise. He's by no means a dummy in The Captain Hates The Sea, though he does think a bit with his male member when it comes to Vinson.

John Gilbert who by this time had descended into alcoholism in real life is cast as a dissolute playboy looking to take the cure on the sea voyage. It was a part hitting too close to home, but that may have been the reason he was so good in it.

Another story line involves married couple John Wray and Wynne Gibson. She was a woman of easy virtue whose self righteous husband never lets her forget it.

Such familiar people as Walter Catlett, Donald Meek, Alison Skipworth and even the Three Stooges get their moments in the film. Presiding over all of this is Captain Walter Connolly who is constantly berating steward Leon Errol. Leon Errol who was born in Australia in the only time I ever heard him on film actually uses an accent from the land of his birth. Which makes me wonder if that was his natural speech or did he lose it in his years on stage and screen on both sides of the pond and only recall it for this film.

With such a colorful cast of familiar players The Captain Hates The Sea should be viewed. You'll probably like it as I did, but can see definite room for improvement.

...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.

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.

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.

Lewis Milestone, ace director-for-hire, seems to have been having a terrible year in 1934: between the fascinating train wreck of HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM and this one, he seems to have, temporarily at least, lost his way.

Anyway, this picture is another fascinating failure because while there are many wonderful performers and performances in it -- Jack Gilbert, who would die shortly, was not the only actor whose career was on the slide and thus available on the cheap: Victor McLaglen and Wynne Gibson undoubtedly did not command as much money as they would have a few years earlier. Everyone gives fine performances, but they never quite come together as a whole, the way GRAND HOTEL does with its sense of fatality. THE CAPTAIN HATES THE SEA remains a series of vignettes linked by location. Perhaps too much landed on the cutting room floor.

Others have commented on Gilbert, so let me note one of my favorite talents behind the camera: Joseph August. In a third of a century as a director of photography, from William Hart westerns in the 'Teens through PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, he showed you beauty with every shot, and never -- or rarely -- so that you noticed the work that went into it. His traveling shots moved only to tell a story, his compositions focused your attention where it should be, his lighting let you see peoples' faces -- take a look at the Three Stooges, away from the flat light that they worked in for all their shorts. They are suddenly human beings for their few scenes here -- and August was one of the masters of framing. If you have the patience for a second viewing, notice how windows, plants, people, every detail changes the effective shape of the frame, often to superb psychological purpose.

To sum up, this movie as a whole does not work -- normally I would rate it a five out of ten, as another mediocre, derivative work. But the talent on display makes it substantially better than average.