Captains Courageous

Captains Courageous – This picture occupies the opposite side of the spectrum from Movie 43. Made in 1936 by the ever-versatile Victor Fleming, the movie concerns a spoiled and vicious rich kid who is redeemed by the love of Spencer Tracy playing a simple, if noble, Portuguese fisherman. Through a series of contrivances, the rich brat falls overboard from a transatlantic liner, is rescued by Tracy in his skiff, and, then, spends the balance of the movie working with the fishermen who catching cod on the Grand Banks. Tracy dispenses tough-love, the brat learns some valuable life lessons, and becomes a fine young man. Shot at the height of the Depression, with poverty a theme and plot-device (the brat threatens to have people fired and says “there are no jobs” on the market), the movie is surprisingly temperate and, even, fawning with respect to the vast and obscene wealth that the tycoon-father enjoys. The bad little boy bribes people with 50 dollars. We see that 50 dollars represents a week’s pay to the laboring fishermen. But the millionaire daddy is not portrayed as evil or greedy and the source of his wealth is never questioned. He is simply a neglectful father who is kindly and wise and, at the end of the movie, has become a proper papa to his little boy. Even with the country tottering on the brink of ruin, in America, no one seriously questioned the essentially benevolence of the Capitalist system – at least, this seems to be the case as shown by Captains Courageous. Sad to say, the film, despite its expensive production values and impressive acting, is not very good. It’s a museum-piece and, in fact, more than a little incoherent. Some of the fishing sequences are shot with a fine documentary rigor but the footage featuring the expensive actors – Tracy, John Carradine, Lionel Barrymore and the excellent Freddie Bartholomew – are all staged in the studio on obvious soundstages with rear-projection. Accordingly, the picture never seems plausibly real or authentic even though there are spectacular shots of fishing vessels plowing through heavy seas. Freddie Bartholomew, who plays the young boy, a superb actor, is too pretty, too slight, too effeminate for the film – he seems to be so intrinsically nice that we can’t really believe that he is the villainous little tyrant that the film’s first act requires. Spencer Tracy’s Portuguese accent is a hideous embarrassment and he’s completely implausible as a simple seaman – furthermore, the picture is egregiously sentimental, athough this is sometimes effective: I defy anyone not to shed a tear at the final scenes at the fisherman’s graveyard at Gloucester in which real widows and orphans toss flowers into the surging sea. The film’s principal problem is that it is so schematic and simple in outline that there is no real dramatic conflict – the little kid is a brat and, then, suddenly, he isn’t. So the screenwriters contrive a big climax involving a completely pointless and, ultimately, lethal race between two fishing vessels. This race is wholly gratuitous and completely out of character. Why would sober, industrious fisherman risk themselves and their precious cargo and their crews in an idiotic race, against high seas, to reach Gloucester first? The result of the race is the death of Spencer Tracy’s character, an effectively grim scene. No one seems to question the fact that Tracy’s death is the result of hubris and sheer, uncharacteristic, stupidity on the part of the otherwise intensely practical ship captains. The film is so fundamentally flawed that it must be viewed as an artifact of its time, interesting enough in that light, but not successful as a movie or drama.