Lording his wealth over the rest of the kids in his class. A real pain in the keester. No one likes this kid (Didn't we all know a creep like this?). On an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic with his father, Harvey falls overboard. Of course, no one on the liner even misses the little brat. Fortunately for Harvey, he's fished out of the sea by Manuel (Spencer Tracy). Manuel - who is fishing from a small dory - works on a Gloucester schooner that's heading out to the fishing grounds for the season. When Manuel gets Harvey back to the schooner, Harvey tries to bribe Captain Disco Troop (Lionel Barrymore) to turn around and take him back to shore. But the captain refuses. His greater obligation is to his crew who's livelihood depends on the fish they catch this season. So, like it or not, Harvey is stuck on the schooner for the next six months. And since there are no passengers on a working fishing boat, Harvey has to work. For the first time in his life. He's not a happy camper. Harvey soon discovers that all of the shenanigans that he got away with back home and at school don't work work out here in the world of hard, no-nonsense working men. It's a tough lesson. It's a tough school. One wrong move out here, and you won't be going home. But Harvey's a tough kid, and Manuel is a patient teacher. In time, Harvey learns how to work
with people rather than using them all the time. He sweats with the rest of the crew, bleeds with them, grieves with them. By the time the schooner gets back to Gloucester and Harvey's waiting father, he's a different person. He's one of the crew.
Filmed in 1937, Victor Flemming's Captains Courageous is another of those literary adaptations that utterly destroys the original story, but in this case it's all right. Since only about one in 10,000 Americans has ever read the original novel, it really doesn't matter. And it's such a good movie, that it stands solidly on its own feet. The cast is incredible: Spencer Tracy with curly hair, Lionel Barrymore in the last role before arthritis knocked him off his feet, Freddie Bartholomew in the only role in which he was ever allowed to play someone of less than impeccable character, Mickey Rooney as Captain Troop's good natured son, John Carradine as the surly Long Jack, and Melvyn Douglas as Freddie's tycoon father. This was the cream of Hollywood in its day. And this is a man's film all the way through. As someone else once said, it's the story of "wooden ships and the iron men that sailed them." All of the action centers around men and the boys who are becoming men with a suddenness that would shock us today, and they're all doing "manly" work under extremely harsh conditions. There's no mollycoddling of
children in this story, nobody's worried that the boys are playing with sharp knives and big hooks, no one seems to care that these boys' lives are in danger almost every minute of the day. There's work to be done, and all hands to it.
You may read this and think to yourself that it sounds barbaric, disgusting and gross. But this isn't about our time. It's a movie about an earlier time. A harder time. A time when men struggled against the elements to wrest a living out of nature, a time when women worked the house and waited for the men to come home from the sea, and a time when children stopped being children when they were still only children. Captains Courageous pays tribute to all of the Gloucester fisherman who didn't come home from the sea, while telling a wonderful story about one boy's reformation in the harsh world of hard work and harder men. It's worth watching just because it's a really great story. It's worth watching because it has a really great message.
Captains Courageous is rated G and is available in glorious black and white.
No comments:
Post a Comment