Sea Devils

For their maritime programmer Sea Devils (1937), RKO Radio Pictures relied on dependable B-picture director Benjamin Stoloff and star Victor McLaglen, a specialist in hot-tempered, two-fisted characters who was then on loan-out from the Fox Film Corporation. The England-born, physically imposing McLaglen had risen from the ranks of supporting players at First National after his emigration to the United States in 1924 to star in Vitagraph's The Beloved Brute (1924) and What Price Glory (1926) for Fox, while contributing memorable secondary performances to The Unholy Three (1925) with Lon Chaney at MGM and Beau Geste (1926) with Ronald Colman at Paramount. The actor's transition to talking pictures with the starring role in John Ford's The Black Watch (1929) was not uncomplicated, given his guttural cockney accent, but by the time he reported for duty on the set of Sea Devils in October 1936, McLaglen was the recipient of a "Best Actor" Academy Award for his starring role in Ford's The Informer (1935). A former vaudevillian, pugilist, and soldier (he had during his World War I service with the Irish Fusiliers acted as provost marshal of Bagdad), McLaglen saw no shame in signing on for a rote programmer such as Sea Devils. Having turned fifty in March of 1936, McLaglen enjoyed a generous Fox salary, a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, and a garrulous but congenial social life as the founder of a Hollywood polo club and motorcycle club. The broad-shouldered, 6'3" actor is well-cast as Coast Guard captain Bill "Medals" Malone, who attempts to save his only child (Ida Lupino) from marrying sailor Preston Foster. A former wrestler turned Broadway song-and-dance man, Foster was himself enjoying the jump to leading man status after villainous turns in Michael Curtiz' Doctor X and Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (both 1932). Foster had been third-billed in The Informer as the head of the Irish underground, his role greatly rewritten from Liam O'Flaherty's source novel to make Foster's character an inarguably heroic figure. Shot under a variety of working titles, which included Coast Guard, Coast Patrol and Rough, Ready and Handsome, Sea Devils is a standard military romance film on par with To the Shores of Tripoli (1942) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), all of which pit a crusty career soldier against a brash young cadet. Like McLaglen, leading lady Ida Lupino had come to Hollywood by way of England; at the age of 14, she had won the lead role in Allan Dwan's Her First Affaire (1932) when she accompanied her actress mother, Connie Emerald, to the audition. Put under contract to Paramount in 1933, Lupino was as unhappy with the roles offered by the studio as she was in frequent loan-outs, to Columbia for Let's Get Married (1937), to Pickford-Lasky for The Gay Desperado (1936) and to RKO for Sea Devils, the first of three films she made for director Benjamin Stoloff. Lupino would eventually quit Paramount for Warner Brothers, where she flourished in a run of hard-edged roles; she turned to filmmaking with Not Wanted (1949) after she took over the film from ailing director Elmer Clifton. Bookended by a pair of impressive special effects setpieces, Sea Devils also benefits immeasurably from a core of memorable supporting performances. Ralph Byrd, star of Republic's Dick Tracy serials and features, appears here as a seaman during a court martial scene while Charles Lane turns up briefly as a judge. Given more to do is Dwight Frye, cast as the wireless operator of a burning steamship who goes mad attempting to radio for help. Like Preston Foster, Frye came to Hollywood by way of Broadway and sub-specialized in savant-like characters who usually came to a bad end: the fly-eating Renfield in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), the mentally defective Herman Gleib in Frank R. Strayer's The Vampire Bat (1933), the murderous aerialist Flandrin in Roy William Neill's The Circus Queen Murder (1933) and a pair of evil henchmen in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Before he is knocked senseless by an anesthetic blow from gruff rescuer McLaglen, Frye's histrionics have a semi-comedic, effeminate aspect yet they anticipate with eerie prescience newsman Herbert Morrison's agonized reaction to the Hindenburg airship disaster in May of that year. Sea Devils was co-written by Frank "Spig" Wead, a decorated Navy aviator who turned to writing after a debilitating accident in 1926 ended his career as a Navy pilot. A novelist, playwright and author on books about the history and mechanics of aviation, Wead wrote his first screenplay, for MGM's The Flying Fleet, in 1928 and was nominated twice for the Academy Award - for Victor Fleming's Test Pilot and King Vidor's The Citadel (both 1938). A decade after his 1947 death, Wead's long-time friend John Ford spun Wead's life story as The Wings of Eagles (1957), starring John Wayne. Producer: Edward Small Director: Benjamin Stoloff Screenplay: John Twist, Frank Wead, P.J. Wolfson Cinematography: Joseph August, J. Roy Hunt Art Direction: Van Nest Polglase Music: Roy Webb Film Editing: Arthur Roberts Cast: Victor McLaglen (Bill 'Medals' Malone), Preston Foster (Michael 'Mike' O'Shea), Ida Lupino (Doris Malone), Donald Woods (Steve Webb), Helen Flint (Sadie Bennett), Gordon Jones (Puggy), Pierre Watkin (Commander), Murray Alper (Brown), Billy Gilbert (Policeman) BW-88m. by Richard Harland Smith Sources: Screen World Presents the Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors by Barry Monush (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2003) Pappy: The Life of John Ford by Dan Ford (Da Capo Press, 1998) Ida Lupino: A Biography by William Donati (University of Kentucky Press, 2000) Dwight Frye's Last Laugh by Gary J. Svehla, Susan Svehla and Jim Coughlin (Midnight Marquee Press, 1997) The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre by Jeanine Bassinger (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood by Wheeler W. Dixon