Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 19, 1940

The Sea Hawk (Warner) is 1940’s lustiest assault on the double feature. It cost $1,700,000, exhibits Errol Flynn and 3,000 other cinemactors performing every imaginable feat of spectacular derring-do, and lasts two hours and seven minutes.

Any cinemaddict who after seeing it does not know enough to go home is probably capable of being initiated into the Odd Fellows twice on the same night.

The Sea Hawk is no relative of Rafael Sabatini’s book of the same name. The sea hawks, as students of English history and those who saw the 1924 version of their story will recall, are valiant English captains who, while Queen Elizabeth haggles over the cost of building a navy to face the Spanish Armada, wage an undeclared war on Spanish shipping wherever they find it. In history, deadliest of the sea hawks was Sir Francis Drake. In the picture, he is symbolized by Captain Geoffrey Thorpe. Sea Hawk Thorpe begins his career by a swashbuckling attack on a Spanish man-o’-war, carrying King Philip’s ambassador (Claude Rains) and his proud niece (Brenda Marshall). To appease Queen Bess (Flora Robson) for this shocking violation of neutrality, Hawk Thorpe gives her a pet monkey and some soft words, sets out to replenish her treasury and hamstring King Philip by hijacking the Spanish gold train in Panama.

His plan frustrated by the machinations of a lace-collared fifth columnist, Lord Wolfingham.* (Henry Daniell), Captain Thorpe is clapped into a Spanish galley. There he endures lashings so realistic that a lady tourist in the Warner studio who saw them being administered to Cinemactor Flynn fainted dead away. Just as the captain is about done in, he hears the greatest news in English history, is inspired to take over the ship, race to England, thrust and parry his way through the palace and Lord Wolfingham to warn his Queen in time that the Armada is on its way.

Produced by Warner’s Hal Wallis with a splendor that would set parsimonious Queen Bess’s teeth on edge, constructed of the most tried-&-true cinema materials available, The Sea Hawk is a handsome, shipshape picture. To Irish Cinemactor Errol Flynn, it gives the best swashbuckling role he has had since Captain Blood.

For Hungarian Director Michael Curtiz, who took Flynn from bit-player ranks to make Captain Blood and has made nine pictures with him since, it should prove a high point in their profitable relationship.

Ever since Michael Curtiz landed in Manhattan on the Fourth of July, 1928, and pretended that he thought the fireworks were in honor of his arrival, he has been a natural for joshing Warner press-agentry. Everyone in Hollywood knows that the first thing he did when he got there was to buy a Packard which he kept bringing back to the shop until a curious mechanic found that he never shifted the gears beyond second. Son of an architect, graduate of Budapest’s Royal Academy of Theatre and Art, a famed European director when the Warners tapped him to replace Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Curtiz (né Kertez) is the butt of more Hollywood stories than Sam Goldwyn. The only one Michael Curtiz bothers to deny is that he once worked as a circus strong man.

Warner jokers once hung signs on a Curtiz set reading “English Broken Here,” “Curtiz Spoken Here.” Some Curtizisms: “Next time I send some fool for something I go myself,” “Sit a little bit more femine (feminine),” “Act easy-go-lucky.” Prop boys on a Curtiz set are supposed to know that “boy cows” are not steers but cow boys. Malapropism is not Curtiz’ only peculiarity. He addresses everyone at Warner’s up to Bette Davis as “you bum,” gives the best borscht bawlings-out in the business. He takes no lunch, tried to coax actors to have an aspirin instead, uses “after-lunch actor” as his supreme epithet of contempt. When anything goes wrong on the set, Curtiz is immediately convinced that he is being jinxed by the presence of his personal secretary, whom he calls “Dracula,” stops everything to find him. Once John Barrymore, visiting a Santa Monica dance marathon as it passed the 200-hour mark, encouraged one of the contestants by remarking: “You don’t know what it is to be tired unless you’ve worked for Curtiz.” Big, balding, muscular Director Curtiz is married to but living apart from Scena rist Bess Meredyth. Only extravagance he permits himself on his $3,000 a week is his two-goal polo.

When The Doltons Rode (Universal), by the same studio and director (George Marshall) who made Destry Rides Again, attempts to repeat that highly successful picture’s formula of saddling a horse opera with a fresh script, riding hell-for-leather with a good cast. When elegant Kay Francis is discovered perched on a corral, counting steers and fluttering her false eyelashes at buckish Randolph Scott, the parallel with the picture which revivified Marlene Dietrich with a draft of Western air is unmistakable.

There the parallel ends, for When The Daltons Rode is no sly Destry but a fairly conventional Western whose big-city actors often are merely incongruous. Retelling the story of the famed & feared Dalton gang of the ’90s as the saga of a family of farm boys who are dispossessed by a land company and avenge themselves on their fellows by turning frontier bandits, it is good in precisely the ways hundreds of Westerns have been good before: the train robbery, the chase through the sagebrush, the last great scene where false men and true shoot it out until the gun finally drops from the villain’s luckless hand. Good shot: the Dalton gang, fully mounted, jumping from a speeding train.

Daybreak (French) is built on a dramatic foundation often tried and usually untrue: the device of discovering a character in a narrow corner, where he sits obligingly remembering his story for the camera. The story that passes before the blank eyes of François (Jean Gabin) in his garret room, as the police stand waiting for him on the street beneath, is strange and more worth remembering than most.

François is a happy workman on a sanding machine when he meets Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) on their saint’s day. Pursuing elusive young Françoise he meets worldly-wise Clara (Arletty). Over both women has been cast the dark and fascinating spell of Valentin (Jules Berry), an aging dog trainer who loves to tell lies and make simple people unhappy. When François climbs to his garret for the last time, Valentin has accomplished his masterpiece.

Not up to Grand Illusion or La Kermesse Héroique, Daybreak, perhaps the last major product of a cinema industry that was as long on brains as it was short on budget, is a worthy swan song. It has the same distinguishing Gallic qualities of artistic shrewdness and spiritual disenchantment that make most Hollywood pictures by comparison seem, for better or for worse, not quite grownup.

* Not to be confused with Elizabeth’s real and loyal Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham.