User Reviews

Captain "Black" Pawl and his son "Red" run a schooner. Pawl is a bitter, angry man, who has brought up his son to hate everyone. The two are constantly at each other throats. When the schooner arrives at a tropical island, Pawl agrees to give passage to a missionary and a young woman, Ruth Lytton. Dan Darrin, who is the schooner's second mate, falls for Ruth. Meanwhile "Red" eyes the girl with lust. Pawl confides in the missionary that he has abandoned God. In a flashback, we learn that years ago, shortly after Pawl went off to sea, his wife gave birth to a daughter and ran off with another man. Pawl and his son eventually found the man, and Pawl killed him in a fistfight. Now, a new conflict and a revelation await the Captain. How will it be resolved?

This is an entertaining but entirely predictable film. The big reveal towards the end is something anyone could have seen coming once the schooner had left the island. Yet, the film did keep my interest, partially because of the completely rotten characterization of "Red" Pawl by James Mason (not THE James Mason, of course). Character actor Russell Simpson also does a fine job as the Captain, although a few of his scenes are overblown. Most of the scenes are filmed aboard the ship, so we get some fine views and a wonderful shot of sunrise on the ocean. The print I watched was deteriorated in a few spots, but overall, it was very watchable. Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, in one of his earliest film appearances, has a bit part as one of the crew

The film was adapted from a Saturday Evening Post story entitled "Black Pawl," by Ben Ames Williams. A few years after the film was released, Williams published a novel entitled "Black Pawl." Williams might best be known for his 1944 novel "Leave Her To Heaven."

Despite two murders at the end of the film, the movie was passed by the National Board of Review, and also listed first on the board's list of exceptional photoplays. In watching the film, one might say that one of the murders was "justified." But an unusual incident occurred when the film was screened for a group of two hundred clergymen at the California Theatre in Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the film, one minister stood up and asked indignantly "Is it true that we are to sanction murder in this country? This picture should be stopped this very hour!" Most of the ministers in attendance did not agree.

The pairing of John Bowers and Helene Chadwick is a bit eerie. Bowers, whose career was pretty well washed up by the advent of sound, drowned himself in 1936. Bowers is thought by some to have been the inspiration for the Norman Maine character in "A Star is Born." Chadwick was married to William Wellman, the director of "A Star is Born," and has a bit part in the film. That was her last film appearance.

This film is attractively shot by Hilburn (apart from Reginald Barker's irritating taste for the "facial" close-up) and it is well acted in the sense that Russell Simpson is, as ever, grim, Jim Mason is, as ever, dodgy, Alec B. Francis is, as ever, a kindly old gentleman and Helene Chadwick is femaie. But, my goodness, what a bundle of clichés Barker has put together here - the sole woman amongst a group of men (nearly always, as here, on a boat), the old seamen with a secret sorrow, mutiny in the air, the inevitable storm.....

The undeniably useful word "melodrama" is conveniently sufficiently meaningless to cover a multitude of sins and, if one could find some sensible way of disentangling the pseudo-genre one could perhaps identify what constitute good melodramas (and they exist and remain as popular today as ever they were) and bad melodramas.

One of my least favourite types of melodrama is the type we have here - the "secret of birth" story. It wouldn't be so bad if the secret really was a secret but the trouble is it is nearly always, as far as the audience is concerned at secret, a secret de Polichinelle (ie no secret at all). For instance, if one is told that the old sailor has been abandoned by his wife along with baby daughter and if one is told that the lady passenger is an orphan whose father was "lost at sea" and whose mother subsequently died, well, one knows straightaway - I cannot even bring myself to count this as a "spoiler" - what the situation is going to turn out to be and one is simply waiting the entire film for the characters themselves to catch up with what one already knows.

In real life the chances of such a coincidence proving to be the case are of course so negligible as to be virtually nil. In the "secret of birth" melodrama, so formulaic is the genre, the chances that it will NOT prove the case are completely nil. And this makes for a rather tedious film.....

It wouldn't be so bad if there was anything much else to the story but the real mystery surrounding this infernal ship is why it should have gone to sea in the first place. They don't fish, they don't trade (their only stop is to stock up on water), they don't smuggle, they don't explore. They simply seem to sail for the sake of sailing. Moby Dick without whales. Treasure Island without treasure. It's no wonder the parrot is comatose.