by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Sea Devils,
an unusual 1937 RKO vehicle for Victor McLaglen and Preston Foster (reuniting
the two male leads from John Ford’s multi-Academy Award-winning 1935 film The
Informer) that story-wise was your typical
macho men fighting over a woman piece of tripe but gained novelty from the fact
that out of all the branches of the military service writers Frank “Spig” Wead
(a World War I aviator who was crippled in both legs in a plane crash and
thereafter went from flying planes himself to writing about people who did;
between them he and John Monk Saunders basically created the clichés of the
aviation movie and Wead was eventually the subject of a biopic, The
Wings of Eagles, in which John Wayne played
him), John Twist and P. J. Wolfson could have set their story in and around,
they chose … the Coast Guard. William “Medals” Malone (Victor McLaglen) is an
irascible officer aboard the Coast Guard cutter Taroe; at some time before the main action begins he must
have been married, or at least involved in a serious relationship with a woman,
because he has a daughter, Doris (Ida Lupino, midway between her native British
accent and the American one she learned after years of making films in the
U.S.). An obnoxiously vain ladies’ man in the Coast Guard, Mike O’Shay (Preston
Foster, acting with considerably more spirit than usual — enough that this is
one movie of his I didn’t sit
through wishing James Cagney had been playing his part, even though it would have been a better movie with the Warner Bros. team
for these sorts of roles, Cagney and Pat O’Brien), puts the make on Doris, much
to her initial disgust — and also her dad’s, since he’s already picked out the
man he wants her to marry: a quiet, bookish Coast Guard seaman named Steve
(Donald Woods) who’s studying to take the test for the Coast Guard’s officers’
academy because he thinks that only if he can get to be an officer and get the
higher pay therefrom will he be able to afford to marry Doris.
Needless to say,
Mike seduces Doris (in a decorous Production Code-approved way) away from
Steve, and Medals reacts by requesting that Mike be assigned to the Taroe, where Medals orders him to do the nastiest, most
makework jobs on board he can think of. The Taroe gets sent to Alaska to test new explosives aimed at
blowing up icebergs so future ships in those lanes don’t meet the fate of the Titanic (1937 was the 25th anniversary year of
the Titanic disaster and the Titanic is actually mentioned in the dialogue), only there’s
an accident caused by Medals and Mike getting involved in one of their periodic
brawls and Steve, trying to stop the explosion since the brawlers have let
their escape boat go adrift, is blinded and severely wounded in the process.
The crew returns to home base and Mike is indicted and tried in a court-martial
— where Medals and he get into yet another brawl that leads to Mike’s
conviction and sentence to the brig, while Medals is demoted and decides to
retire. There’s also the poignant character of Sadie (Helen Flint), who owns the
local bar at which Medals does most of his drinking (every time he walks in the
bartender slides him either a beer or, later in the movie, a shot of whiskey,
and he says, “Put it on the slate” — we get the impression that by now he
probably owes her something approaching the entire production budget of this
film — he also hits on her for money to redeem his medals when he’s had to pawn
them, and he strings her along with promises of marriage).
Anyway, just before
Medals’ retirement is scheduled to take effect all the Coast Guard personnel in
the area are called on to do rescue work in a severe hurricane that has, among
other things, put a yacht in imminent danger of foundering and drowning her
whole crew. Mike escapes from the brig so he can be part of the rescue effort,
and Medals also shows up; the two of them rig a “short line” — basically a long
rope with a sort of canvas saddle in it that can hold a person; by having each
yacht passenger get in this contraption and hauling the rope back and forth, the
Coast Guardsmen are able to save all of them by getting them off the boat one
by one, but with Mike and Medals both on the yacht and the mast about to
collapse, which will render the short line useless, Medals knocks out Mike,
puts him in the saddle and saves him at the cost of his own life. There’s a
postlude five years later in which Mike and Doris have had a son and Mike has
nicknamed him “Medals” and is teaching him to box. RKO made quite a few
attempts to poach on Warners’ territory in the mid-1930’s but this is one of
the very best of them, perhaps because Frank Wead was one of the screenwriters;
aided by a sterling directorial effort by Ben Stoloff — who for once gave a
film the fast pace of a Warners product instead of the usual pokiness of an RKO
melodrama, the writers create genuinely conflicted characters (though there are a few wince-inducing fallbacks to the old clichés)
and the movie is both attention-keeping and genuinely fun in a way few RKO
products of the time (outside of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals) were.
