THE SEA WOLF

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 203, 14 May 1943, Page 13

|THE SEA WOLF

(Warner Bros.

OR 33 years Jack London’s Sea Wolf has been prowling round the cinema, making audiences’ blood run cold, Its first

appearance was in,an unauthorised version in 1910, which annoyed the author so much that he secured an injunction against it: this was followed in 1913 by a seven-reeler, starring Hobart Bosworth. In spite of fancy trimmings, an injection of pseudo-psy-chology, a cast of very capable he-men (Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Gene Lockhart, Barry Fitzgerald), one very capable woman (Ida Lupino), and buckets of gore, it is a rather tired old Wolf, mangy in spots, that now makes its sixth, but probably not final, screen appearance. Edward G. Robinson is Wolf Larsen, skipper of The Ghost, a sailing vessel which scavenges on the sealing trade, A sadist with an inferiority complex, he is afflicted by dizzy spells and threatened with blindness, and when he isn’t booting his crew around or bashing their heads in, he consoles himseli with Milton-with special emphasis on the line "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Not the least of Captain Larsen’s worries is the fact that he has an upright brother who has sworn to send him and his hell-ship to the bottom. Robinson does his best to make this combination of brute strength, literary taste, and pscho-analysis seem plausible, and sometimes he comes near succeeding, but the psychology (and the brother) prove too much for him in the end. The finale makes as clean a sweep of the dramatis personae as Hamlet does: the only two characters left alive are Garfield and Miss Lupino, as two warily-romantic young fugitives from justice (who were not on Jack London's original passenger list). And even thei: chances of continued survival are by »o means guaranteed. An interesting member of the crew against his will, is the author whom Larsen picks up out of the sea, and thereafter uses as the butt for a good deal of his eccentric cruelty. A newcomer, Alexander Knox, plays this part with calculated restraint, and his acting, in combination with the other performances, might have kept the film afloat if Hollywood had not overloaded the story with gory melodrama well beyond even Jack London’s Plimsoll mark.