THE CAPTAIN HATES THE SEA (1934)

A pretty good idea and a pretty good cast can’t float this comic riff on GRAND HOTEL, even on a cruise ship.*  Wallace Smith’s script sets up the expected multiple storylines (a lush, a dick, some hidden securities, senior sexpot, even a captain who hates the sea!), but they don’t so much intersect as occasionally bump into each other.  Meanwhile, director Lewis Milestone (not known for a light touch in spite of winning the one-and-only Oscar ever given for Comedy Director on TWO ARABIAN KNIGHTS/’27 and his excellent early Talkie THE FRONT PAGE/’31) never finds a proper comic rhythm.  Yet, weak as it is, still an enjoyable watch thanks to some gorgeous lighting from lenser Joseph August and as sad swansong for the unfortunate John Gilbert.  Fourth-billed in spite of having the largest role, he’d recently bid adieu to his long M-G-M contract playing second fiddle to ex-amour Greta Garbo in QUEEN CHRISTINA.  Looking a bit frail and lightheartedly drinking himself to death (on and off screen, dead in just over a year at 38), he’s rather charming within the role’s limits.  (It’s as close to Ronald Colman as he ever got.)  Victor McLaglen’s a tough cop gone P.I.; Walter Catlett a sympathetic bartender; Wynne Gibson an ex tart trying to be the good wife; and Walter Connolly as a captain amused at the foibles of his passengers.  Tame stuff, but watch Milestone hit form in the film’s one serious sequence with Akim Tamiroff’s rebel leader arrested and summarily executed after getting off at a port city where he expected to lead a revolution.  Suddenly, everybody seems to know what to do, particularly Milestone, in his element, if only for five minutes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Next year, M-G-M made their own ocean-bound GRAND HOTEL in CHINA SEAS/’35.  Expert entertainment with Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell & Wallace Berry, dir. Tay Garnett.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *And speaking of M-G-M: Buster Keaton got nowhere with production head Irving Thalberg pitching a comic riff on GRAND HOTEL for himself & Marie Dressler.  (Buster as the slow dying Lionel Barrymore; Dressler to play Garbo’s balletic swan.)  Keaton biographers have for some reason poo-pooed this as a tired idea from a played out Buster in decline, ignoring the constant delights of THREE AGES/’23 which took off on D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE in much the same way.