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A persistent position, the marine limbo after Men Without Women and Seas Beneath and before Mister Roberts. An amalgamation of four plays that begins with several minutes of silent cinema, the nocturnal air around the docked S.S. Glencairn heavy with tropical eroticism. "If I didn't know we were in the West Indies, I'd imagine we were anchored off some island of the dead." Native lasses with bottles of rum in fruit baskets, a shindig organized by the Irish bulldog (Thomas Mitchell) while the captain (Wilfrid Lawson) looks the other way, the steamer sails the next morning with explosive cargo. An empty bottle hurled out of a porthole is enough for the crew to peg the English loner (Ian Hunter) as an enemy spy, he's last seen in a bullet-riddled lifeboat with the tarp flapping like the Union Jack. The burly naïf (John Wayne) yearns for Stockholm, and is nearly shanghaied aboard the Amindra, "a starvation tub if I ever saw one." John Ford comparing fatalistic philosophies with Eugene O'Neill, a void painted in mist by Gregg Toland just ahead of Citizen Kane. (An anchor chain sprawled across the screen epitomizes the deep-focus camera, a view from inside a cabin finds shafts of sidelong luminosity made to undulate by the heaving ocean.) "Now I'm through with the land, and the land's through with me." Between Carné's Quai des Brumes and Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur, a procession of mental states made tangible. Ward Bond blowing smoke rings with a punctured lung, a languid day suddenly broken up by a dive bomber, Barry Fitzgerald's "pre-posterous!" A watery grave at the close, along with Mildred Natwick as Our Tavern Wench of Sorrows. "Is there no place in this dark land where a man who's drunk can find a decent bit of fun?" Fellini's E la nave va indicates a close study. With John Qualen, Arthur Shields, Joseph Sawyer, J.M. Kerrigan, Billy Bevan, Rafaela Ottiano, Jack Pennick, and Carmen Morales. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |