Massacre (1934)

Massacre (1934) is a bold standoff against treatment and societal views of the modern Native American, as well as the industry that brought us westerns with little appetite for treating Indians as nothing more than stereotypes…and targets.

It manages, however, to be more than just a message film, for the story involves a lot of action, a fast-moving story line, and cool deliberation on the part of Joe Thunderhorse, a man whose two-fisted approach to life brings him away from the reservation so long that Sioux culture and its modern problems mean little to him.  He’s out for himself and very successful at it.  What brings him back to his tribe is a shock, and he brings the audience with him.

Richard Barthelmess, one of my favorites, is very good in this strong role.  He manages, as does his character, to straddle the world of hardscrabble make-a-buck early 1930s and the ancient culture into which he was born but left at a young age to make his way in the world.  For him, it is not just the “white man’s world,” it is his world.  He walks with authority, like the son of a chief, like a guy who wears his self-confidence as if it were a bullet-proof vest. He generally has a great time, but he is not afraid to challenge anyone.

We first meet him in Indian garb riding a horse in a procession at a wild west show at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, and the theme of the fair, “Century of Progress” is only part of the irony facing the audience when, sinking into the story, we immediately begin to consider the plight of the Native American in twentieth-century America.  Where is their progress?  

Barthelmess is the star of the show, and his pictures on programs bring in a lot of money to the stock company, run by Robert Barratt, a kind of Wild Bill Hickok knockoff.  Barthelmess does trick riding, fancy shooting at targets, and makes the girls swoon, particularly Claire Dodd, a wealthy sophisticate who has designs on him. 

Barthelmess earns the princely sum of $300 per week, and demands for $400 and will get it.  He has a valet played by Clarence Muse.  No jovial Indian sidekick, his manservant is Black, but seems more a pal than a lackey.  He calls Barthelmess “Chief” like everyone else does, not “Boss.”   Our first surprise is when the monosyllabic “Chief” rides out of the stadium, goes to the manager’s tent where his valet removes the wig with the long braids, and reveals a modern Joe, who changes into a suit and speaks English fluently.  We see he has only been playing a part.  He is suddenly almost like a cross between Clark Gable’s masculine polish and James Cagney’s Bowery toughness.  He smokes, he chews gum (sometimes at the same time), and strides out to his own sporty automobile with his name and picture emblazoned on the doors.  The ten-gallon hat he wears is so large and ostentatious, it probably really does hold ten gallons.

I like the shot of Mr. Muse's face in the obverse side of the hand mirror he holds for Barthelmess.

Mr. Barthelmess amuses himself with the adoration of the females in the crowd, and has a shallow romantic relationship with Claire Dodd.  It is interesting that while Hollywood would not stoop to his having a white manservant, he is allowed to have a white lady friend.  Their kiss, a long and seductive encounter between two races in America at that time we might consider to be a daring image.  Was it allowed because the audience was already familiar with the long career of Richard Barthelmess and knew he was not really Sioux, or is it because Claire Dodd is playing a coolly unsympathetic woman who collects men and marries on a whim?  We have to question her emotional and mental stability when, as Barthelmess arrives for a cocktail party at her mansion, she brings him to a room that is filled with Indian regalia and artifacts.  He looks at the objects, interested, as if he is on a museum tour, and will later confess that he realized at that moment he has gotten so far afield from his native roots that the significance of the pieces were lost on him and needed to be explained to him.

But it is her fascination with the objects and collecting them, the way she has collected men, that says a great deal about her.  She is not a historian, an anthropologist, or a scholar; she has created a fantasy revolving around Joe Thunderhorse that is more sexual desire than cultural interest.  She clings to him and murmurs her image of him as a wild, “red man” and she would like to be his “squaw.” 

This movie seems to straddle, perhaps knowingly, the conflicting images, tropes, of the Indian as a savage and as a noble and beautiful child of nature.  Joe Thunderhorse is neither, he’s a just guy. 

Massacre, like some of the previous movies covered (Heat Lightning, Employees’ Entrance), is a First National film, and we may reliably count on a frank, sometimes stark, socially conscious message.  The Vitaphone Orchestra and the opening credits with the cameo portraits of the principal players might momentarily distract us at the old moviehouse like a doily on a scratched tabletop, but we know what we’re getting underneath.  It’s wonderful, gritty honesty.

Spoilers at this point, naturally.

Barthelmess gets word that his father, still back on the reservation, is dying and is asking for him.  So he takes Clarence Muse with him and drives his outlandish auto out to the reservation, which he left when he was still a boy.  The government agent at the time he was there, played by Henry O’Neill, who is now working in Washington, D.C., sent him to the Haskell Institute, where he learned skills to make his way in the world.  But Barthelmess returns to a desolate landscape he had almost forgotten, and which seems to have gotten worse in the years since he’d left.  Even Clarence Muse notices and remarks, “White folks don’t give the Indian much of a break.”

The reservation is now run by unscrupulous managers.  There is Dudley Digges, the agent in charge, whose side hustle is graft and more graft.

Frank McGlynn, Sr., is the arrogant, posturing, bloviating missionary.  His funeral service for Joe’s father is all phony hype and brings no comfort to the family.  Joe will afterward insist on a Sioux ritual that is far more spiritual and sincere.  As Barthelmess looks to the night sky, he seems to truly mourn for his father, and perhaps for his people.

Sidney Toler, several years before his longtime gig as the kindly inspector Charlie Chan, plays the smarmy undertaker, whose crimes against the Sioux involve not only fraud and graft, but rape.

When Barthelmess arrives at the agent’s office on the reservation, he is all curiosity and impatience, and has no idea what corruption he has before him.  A poised, beautiful young officer worker, played by Ann Dvorak, catches his immediate attention.  She is Sioux also, and when she answers him in perfect English, he smiles in recognition and asks if she, too, had been sent to the Haskell Institute.  She was, but she came home to make a life on the reservation, and in her small way, to make a difference.  We don’t learn much about her character or her family, but she will prove invaluable to Barthelmess in helping him navigate this complicated world on the reservation.

The Haskell Institute, a real-life Indian school, was founded in 1884, and like many such boarding institutions, created an often harsh and even cruel environment for the Indian children who attended.  It grew into a land-grant college now known as Haskell Indian Native University, where some 140 Indian and native Alaskan nations are represented in its student body.  In February of this year, 2025, budget cuts as a result of the whims of the traitor felon currently residing in the White House have forced the lay-off of one-quarter of the staff.

Barthelmess renews acquaintance with his younger brother and sister, and cousins, but bristles at what he has observed in their miserable lives under the authority of the local agent.  He is not shy about complaining or throwing a punch or two, and Ann Dvorak warns him that he could be arrested and confined to the reservation and never be allowed to leave again.

He is enraged to discover that the unscrupulous undertaker, Sidney Toler, has raped his 15-year-old sister, Jennie, played by Agnes Narcha.  Lovely Miss Narcha plays the tragic role well, but has few lines and this was apparently one of only two movies she made.

Barthelmess hops in his car to go hunt down Toler, and we know he means business because he has bought the lariat off a cowboy on a horse in town.  Barthelmess speeds away, catches up to Toler’s car in one of a few car chases in this film, and lassos him from behind, yanking him out of the car and then dragging him along the dusty road, finally unleashing his inert, battered body.  He is unconscious and rolls to the side of the road, where Barthelmess leaves him.

Barthelmess is put on trial on the reservation in a kangaroo court, with three illiterate and docile Indians as judges to convict him.  Ann Dvorak sneaks him the key to the jail cell, and he and Clarence Muse drive off, away from the reservation. Cleverly, when the cop cars begin to chase his unmistakable auto down the highway, it is Mr. Muse they catch, wearing the ten-gallon hat as a disguise.  Barthelmess has taken Muse’s flat cap and hops a freight. 

Finally, he makes it to Washington, D.C., where he hopes to bring his plight to his old mentor, the former agent on the reservation, played by Henry O’Neill.  As he leaves the freight yard, we see the Capitol Dome in the distance over the top of an old wooden fence, and the familiar Blue Eagle of the NRA poster plastered on it.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was established the year before, in 1933, and was a popular start to the New Deal among distressed workers.  Participation in the NRA among businessowners was voluntary, and in part involved agreeing to establish a minimum wage between 20 and 45 cents per hour, to limit the work week from between 35 to 40 hours, and to abolish child labor.  In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. However, some of its features remained and were carried forward in other progressive legislation in those years. 

Barthelmess makes contact with Henry O’Neill, who sympathizes and takes his side when he is accused of the murder of Sidney Toler.  O’Neill acknowledges his fight for the Sioux has always been an uphill battle.  “Every move I make is blocked by the same organized group that have been bleeding the Indians for years…water power, oil rights, cattle ranges…whatever the Indian happens to own, they manage to get away from them through control of public opinion and legislation….”

O’Neill invites him to state his case in a congressional committee meeting.  Barthelmess explains life on the reservation in strong language when one of the committee members notes that Indians were granted American citizenship in the 1920s during the Calvin Coolidge administration in return for their services during World War I. 

Yes, they weren’t citizens until…the 1920s.

Barthelmess responds, “The Indian a citizen?  That’s funny.  He hasn’t any constitutional rights.  He can’t even hire a lawyer without the agent’s consent.  Oh, he’s given the right to live…on a wasteland.  He’s allowed the right to worship, but if he remembers that the Indian once had a religion of his own, he gets a beating for it.  He’s given the right to love, but a white man can violate an Indian girl and get away with it…You used to shoot the Indian down.  Now you cheat him and starve him and kill him off by dirt and disease.  It’s a massacre any way you tell it.”

These are strong words that probably a lot in the movie audience had never heard before or considered.  He is rewarded with applause, but taken back to the reservation to stand trial for murder.  Wallis Clark plays his lawyer, and they garner massive attention with headlines and crowds when the train pulls into the nearest town to the reservation. 

But Jennie, his sister, is missing.  She has been kidnapped to keep her from testifying about her rape.  With his usual fearless and no-nonsense manner, Barthelmess tracks her down, not afraid to use his fists or tell off anybody.  There is a buildup of suspenseful twists and turns right through to the end of the movie, with mob violence, where Barthelmess must keep his own people in check before they burn down the courthouse. 

The quiet ending of him standing on a cliff, surveying the wide reservation lands is another surprise, for he was shot down in an earlier scene.  Ann Dvorak joins him with a telegram giving him the appointment, should he choose to accept, of being the reservation’s new agent.  He remarks, “Just think of all the time I wasted shooting glass balls and signing autographs.  This is a real job.”

He and Ann will have, we assume, a happier future together, but not an easy one.  It is a satisfying ending, seeing how they are satisfied.

There appear to have been at least a few actual Native Americans in the cast in very small roles.  It would be interesting to find out what people from the native tribal nations thought of this movie, if any of them had been able to see it at the time in 1934. 

You can see it now on YouTube.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Adventures of Mark Twain - 1944

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) features a central figure so familiar as to be legendary, and the film leans heavy on legend.  We mark tomorrow’s anniversary of Mark Twain’s birth.

What we discover about Mark Twain through this movie is not so much facts about his life (particularly when the facts are toyed with and not in the order of their appearance), but rather how he fits into, and even represents, the grand mosaic of 19^th century American culture.  This is a rich story of a vibrant era. 

We are also treated to the rarely-presented world of history through literature. 

Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Rudyard Kipling all parade before us.  They are cameos, but they are presented as giants.  I particularly like that the film expects us to know who they are. 

A modern film might throw the answers to an ignorant audience the way a fellow student slips test answers to a pal beside him, which is ignominious, and unflattering both to ourselves and the great writers.

Mark Twain’s greatest struggle, apart from money worries, is to measure up to these literary lions.  That he finds his own place in popular literature and that the 20^th century lauds him with movies and stage plays and television programs, and does not do so for the aforementioned first-string players — this would astonish Twain more than anyone.

This is a film more of style than of substance, and for those dismissive of it I would suggest they consider that in classic film, a biopic is less like a Ken Burns documentary and more like an interpretive dance.

Yes, I am being facetious.

The movie is a series of events like tall tales, and even the introduction to the film cheekily warns us not to be too judgmental.  First we are on a hill watching Halley’sComet awe and terrify the townspeople as Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born into this world.  He will joke repeatedly throughout his life that he came in with the comet and will surely leave the earth when the comet is due to return in the next century.  In a life of quips and witticisms, and wry observations, that he actually did die on the occasion when Halley’s returned in 1910 is probably the biggest joke of all.

But a lot happened in the meantime, and the movie is stuffed with scenes that roll out a long carpet of experiences and adventures.  The director plunks us down in the 19^th century with beautifully staged settings, many of them artful miniatures, of the majestic Mississippi, its riverbanks bathed in moonlight.  We see the long gambling salon on the riverboat (too long to be realistic, but this isn’t a documentary, it’s a pop-up book), and the lordly riverboats that young Sam so admires.

We know he took his eventual pen name, “Mark Twain” from the call of the riverboat men who are testing the depths of the water for channels deep enough for the riverboats to pass safely.  Two fathoms is a safe depth, so when they mark “twain” on the measure, it is two fathoms.  The sing-song call, “MARR-R-K…T-W-A-A-A-I-I-N-N!” is used stirringly at dramatic moments, and is replicated in notes on the musical score of the film, a clever reprise.

Unlike most movies about great men, Mark Twain is not shown as a man born to greatness.  On the contrary, he’s a stumblebum who runs off to join a riverboat crew because he can’t stand working in his brother’s print shop setting type by hand.  (His aversion will later move him to invest, disastrously, in an early mechanical typesetter.)  He runs off to the western mining camps to get rich, and doesn’t.  He delivers a stand-up routine at a dinner for the aforementioned literary giants, and, trying too hard to be funny, insults them in a kind of Friar’s roast.  His act tanks and we see his panic as he makes a fool of himself.  We begin to wonder if this guy will ever do anything right.

His one stroke of luck seems to be catching a glimpse of a fellow traveler’s photo of a beloved sister.  Twain falls in the love with the picture, and eventually the woman, who as his wife will help him achieve lasting success as a writer.

Twain has a lower estimation of his talents, and wants to write something great and important, but the audience sees, even if Twain does not, that the body of his work adds up to a chronicling of America in its most expansive, confident, chest-thumping and stumblebum charm.

Fredric March, who we last saw here in I Married a Witch (1942), is the adult Mark Twain, in a spot-on performance.  It can’t be easy creating a character so well known, and relying in good part on mimicry and imitation.  It’s a tightrope to walk.  With the help of makeup man Perc Westmore, Mr. March is the very image of Mark Twain.  One of the fine achievements of this movie is the way the characters, Twain in particular, age so gradually and so realistically we may feel amazed by the end of the film that so much time has passed.  The aging of characters in other films of this era is usually something of a jolt, and artificial-looking. 

Alexis Smith plays his wife, and though we may note it’s another woman-behind-the-great-man role where she has little challenge, it’s still a nice piece for her.  This is a much softer role in contrast to the sophisticates she often played, and with little makeup in the early scenes, her natural beauty is quite lovely, more stunning than her glamour roles.

Miss Smith is a one-woman cheerleading squad for Mark Twain, but in real life Mrs. Clemens did more than just encourage him.  She actually edited most of his work and he came to rely on her judgment.

Alan Hale is along for the ride as Twain’s prospector pal in his patented jovial scamp gig.  John Carradine gets a marvelous brief scene as the writer Bret Harte who, in the famed contest between the jumping frogs, exhorts his frog, “Daniel Webster” with the plea, “If you love me…”  And repeated calls, “Flies!  Flies!” to encourage the magnificent amphibian to hop.  I don’t know if Mr. Carradine ever played a scene so intense with a human.

Donald Crisp is at Twain’s elbow as his manager, who also gets the impressive aging treatment.  Walter Hampden is great as Alexis Smith’s disapproving father in a scene where he tries to remove Twain from his home.

C. Aubrey Smith delivers a magnificent address at the end of the film when Mark Twain is honored at Oxford.  His scene is a standout.  That beautifully craggy face and his meticulous speech.

Joyce Reynolds, who we last saw here in The Constant Nymph (1943), plays Twain’s daughter, Clara, horrified at spotting the return of Halley’s Comet.

A few scenes of note:  I love when the teenaged Samuel Clemens is getting his first lesson in piloting a riverboat by grumpy Robert Barrat.  Dickie Jones is the youth, who has very few lines, but the scene is marvelous.  It runs quite a long time, with close-ups on the boy’s face as he nervously reacts to the dangers of the river and Mr. Barrat’s constant barking at him. 

He’s shaking in his shoes, and when at last he manages to pull into a safe channel and the crewman sings, “M-A-A-R-R-RK…T-W-A-A-I-I-N-N-N!” we see the tears glisten in his dark velvet eyes with wonder and gratitude, and love of this river.  I don’t suppose it’s necessary to the story as a whole, but I imagine director Irving Rapper kept the attention focused on Dickie Jones for so long because he fell in love with the boy like I did.  I think it’s one of the most powerful close-ups I’ve ever seen.

The anxious expression in his soft boy’s face, on the verge of manhood.  We last saw Dickie as a much younger child here in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) where he played the congressional page.

The scene where Mark Twain does one of his very first public speaking jobs.  Look at the hall filled with extras, and look at their costumes.  Such attention to the style and setting of an era is wonderful.  There don’t seem to be many shortcuts taken, as we sometimes see in other films where the sets or costumes, or hair is judged by the studio evidently as being “close enough.”

We may gag at Twain’s grotesque, “well done, good and faithful servant” joke, and note how African Americans, particularly the unfortunate Willie Best as a butler, get the stereotypical treatment in this film.  However, there is an aspect to their presence in this movie that I admire, and that is that they are indeed present.  We see them on hill watching Halley’s Comet, and as passengers on the riverboat.  They work on the river, and live on the river, and they are the boys on the raft.  If their story is not told yet, at least we see they are not invisible.  We see they are part of the mosaic that makes up America.  For Hollywood at this time, this is something.

We get a glimpse of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford.  See my post on my New England Travels blog for more on his home, which still stands a museum today.  This weekend, another actor famed for portraying Mark Twain, Hal Holbrook, will be honored at the Mark Twain House when a hall is dedicated in his name. 

As Mark Twain’s life unfolds it gets busier.  He and his wife lose a baby son.  They have three daughters.  He travels the world to earn money to pay back debts.  He saves the fortunes of Ulysses S. Grant when the former Union general and President is dying of cancer, and struggles to write his memoirs to provide for his family.  Twain, in his own fledgling company, publishes them.

March has a moving scene when he sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the piano as his wife lay dying.  Decades later in an interview Alexis Smith noted that Fredric March’s work in this movie was underrated.  In an article at the time of filming, she commented that she had a hard time, even though she was supposed to be dead, to keep from peeking at March to watch him in his scene.

Back to the pop-up book nature of the movie — the scenes where tiny figures of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim superimposed on the written page, or revisit Twain at the moment of his death and take him by the hand to a distant sunset are imagery we would not see in a biopic today. 

But this is a tale, not a documentary.  It captures the mood and the tragedy, and optimism of this man’s era.  We may be witnessing more Currier and Ives than Vital Records, but that is the nature of interpretive dance.

Remember also that during World War II the movies were reaching back to a comfortable American image to appeal to a frightened audience.  Twain’s speech, “our tolerance will never become indifference, and our freedom never come license.  Let’s respect each other’s rights…” reflects not only his progressive views, as cantankerously as he sometimes phrased them, but also speaks to a nervous America on the precipice of doom.

For more on The Adventures of Mark Twain have a look at Cliff Aliperti’s two posts on his terrific Immortal Ephemera blog here and here.  The movie was filmed in 1942, but not released until 1944.  For a more detailed explanation why, have a look at Harold Sherman’s “Behind theScreenplay” here.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.

Captain Caution - 1940

“Captain Caution” (1940) gives us a chance, if nothing else, to mark that this year is the 200^th anniversary of the War of 1812.  It was a puzzling, disjointed little war and this is a puzzling, disjointed little movie.  Victor Mature would rather not fight the war, and he seems to be the only one in this movie with any sense.

The year this movie was made, Great Britain was struggling for survival against Nazi bombing raids, and the US, still officially neutral in the early years of World War II, had not even started slipping aid through the Lend-Lease program, signed into the law the following year.  We just stood by and watched.  The War of 1812 was the last time Great Britain was our enemy, and though movies should be allowed to stand apart from current events as purely art, they often do not, intentionally.  A scene at the end of the film where a British sea captain agrees to a personal truce with Victor Mature’s crew so that they may join together to fight a common enemy might have been a convenient, palatable ending, or it might have been in the original novel.  I don’t know, but it is convenient.  Our real-life sympathies for Great Britain in their predicament were beginning to gnaw at us.

Victor Mature is First Mate on “The Olive Branch”, a symbolic enough name for a merchant ship sailing back to its home port of Arundel, Maine.  Robert Barrat is captain and owner of the ship.  His daughter, played by Louise Platt, is on board to keep the ship’s log on her beautiful lady’s finishing school handwriting, and to plague Victor Mature.  They were childhood friends, and now they are battling sweethearts.  One wonders what he sees in her, because she’s as petulant a shrew as ever sailed the seven seas.

A crew of lovable miscreants huddles below decks and swings in hammocks.  El Brendel is one of them, who plays a lute and sings very sweetly of the seaman’s sweetheart “Hilda”.

It is August, 1812, and they have been sailing from China for over 100 days.  They do not know that President James Madison declared war against Great Britain in June.  So, it comes as quite a shock when a British war frigate comes along sides, shoots cannonballs at them, and takes them all prisoner, except for the captain, who is killed.

Captain Caution is a bitter nickname Louise Platt tags on Victor Mature because he advises surrender and negotiation to get the men back home.  Especially since they are not armed to fight sea battles. 

Now that her father is dead, Miss Platt vows vengeance on the British and she’s willing to take up with anybody who will help her, including Bruce Cabot, who has an unsavory reputation as a slave ship captain.  He will do anything for money.

When they are rescued from the British by an American war frigate, Bruce Cabot joins the crew as Miss Platt’s First Mate.  She declares herself captain, and her brief scenes striding about the deck giving orders are the most interesting aspects of her role, however far-fetched they might be.  There were pirate queens back in the day who mastered their own ships, but Louise doesn’t seem to be the type who can suddenly adopt authority and a thorough knowledge of seamanship when she has spent her time before that pouting and shrieking.

Other newcomers on deck include Leo Carrillo, who we last saw in “History is Made at Night” (1937).  He plays his trademark bumbling, bombastic sidekick with the funny, over-the-top accent. 

Vivienne Osborne is his jealous coquette of a wife.

A young J. Pat O’Malley has his first movie role as a fishmonger; blink and you miss him.

Clifford Severn is the British drummer boy who is taken captive by Victor Mature’s band and has become such a mascot that by the end of the movie, he joins his new American friends.  Clifford and several of his siblings were child actors in many films, and you may recall his brother Christopher as Toby in “Mrs. Miniver” (1942).

Alan Ladd has a small role as an American sailor held captive on another British warship.  He helps Carillo and Mature to orchestrate an escape.  It wouldn’t be too long before he had starring roles and you can see why in this movie.  Ladd has a magnetic screen presence and he delivers his lines in a passionate manner.  Interestingly, he shows more emotion here than he would in his more famous roles when his characters were usually more buttoned up.

It is an occasionally odd movie, but there are two powerful elements going for it.  First, there are some good hand-to-hand combat scenes on fog-shrouded decks, with cannonball-splintered spars falling around them, tearing into square sails, and frigates on fire. 

Second, the trio of Victor Mature, Bruce Cabot, and Alan Ladd have got to be the most handsome set of fellows ever to eat hardtack.  You can’t keep your eyes off them.

Mr. Cabot is quite mesmerizing.  We know he’s the villain, his record speaks for itself, but usually villains are presented as ugly, creepy, mustache-twirling types.  Cabot is manly, rugged, intelligent, and has guts.  If he weren’t so evil he’d be a great guy to have on your side.  Mr. Ladd, despite a small role, comes off as a romantic hero with his abundant wavy hair and flashing eyes.  And Victor Mature is charming in a role unlike his usual sneering, haunted noir outings.  He’s funny and thoughtful.  He is careful and judicious, Captain Caution, as it were, but saves the day at the end when he makes a bold move. 

The only fault I can see in him is his love for Louise Platt.  He’s too good for her.  There’s a lot that's clunky in this movie, but as Leo Carillo hopefully says, “Nothing is impossible if it’s possible.”

Arundel, by the way, though an old place name for this area of Maine, was part of Kennebunkport when novelist, and Kennebunk boy Kenneth Roberts wrote “Captain Caution”.  He specialized in historical novels, (he also wrote Northwest Passage) often with New England slants.  A popular novelist of his day, after the last of his series Chronicles of Arundel was finished, the community was officially re-named Arundel in 1957.

Have a look at my New England Travels post this week for more on the War of 1812, and the USS Constitution.