It is most commonly cited as silent superstar Clara Bow's first substantial film role. A girl of sixteen, she had recently found a sort of fame as the winner of the Fame and Fortune Contest, a talent search sponsored by a fan magazine. However, the title proved of little value in the film industry, and Bow was soon initiated into the tedious grunt work of the aspiring actor. "Winnin' the contest hadn't seemed t' mean a thing," Bow later recalled, "I wore myself out goin' from studio t' studio, from agency t' agency, applyin' for every possible part. But there was always somethin'. I was too young, too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat."
When she auditioned for Down to the Sea director Elmer Clifton, she crudely dolled herself up, hoping for a romantic lead. After Clifton dismissed her as too old for the role, Bow wiped away the makeup and changed into her everyday clothes in order to prove herself an ordinary girl. Her feisty determination won her the role of "Dot," the film's "restless, mischievous child of the sea."
Down to the Sea was not exactly Bow's first film. She had acted in Christy Cabanne's Beyond the Rainbow (1922) but her scenes were entirely cut from the film prior to its release. Remarkably, once Bow became a major star, Cabanne re-edited the film and reinstated all of the actress' scenes, and promoted her star billing to capitalize on her fame.
Although Bow appears prominently in Down to the Sea, she is not its star. Set in the 1800s, in the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, its central focus is Patience Morgan (Marguerite Courtot), a young widow who suffers under the guidance of her overprotective father, Charles Morgan (William Walcott), a devout Quaker. When Patience encounters a childhood sweetheart, her situation brightens, but her father insists that she instead marry a Quaker. Little does he know that the prime candidate, Samuel Siggs (J. Thornton Baston), is no Quaker at all, but a roguish criminal who intends to bleed Morgan of his modest wealth.
To intensify Siggs's villainy, the film employs a dash of xenophobia. Siggs is hardly a pure New Englander, but is of mixed race. Even though he dresses himself in the Quaker's vestments, the "almost white" Siggs harbors a "sinister yellow strain hidden by sheep's clothing," according to the intertitles. Melodramas of the 1910s and early '20s often introduced the threat of miscegenation, or race mixing, to make the emotional pot boil a little more vigorously. Examples of this regrettable practice can also be found in the works of Cecil B. DeMille (The Cheat {1912}) and D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation {1915}) among others.
And if this threat to purity were not enough, Clifton has one of Siggs' brutish cohorts (Patrick Hartigan) abduct and threaten to defile the adolescent Dot.
Aside from the presence of the teenage Ms. Bow, Down to the Sea (shamelessly billed as "A WHALE of a picture!") is noteworthy for its depiction of the practices of 19th-century whalers. Producing and directing the film under the aegis of the short-lived Whaling Film Corporation, Clifton endeavored to paint a completely accurate portrait of the New England whaler.
The film's centerpiece is a lengthy sequence in which the tall ships spot their prey and launch oar-driven boats to pursue the whales. Filmed under arduous circumstances by A.G. Penrod and Paul H. Allen, these scenes rank alongside the finest work of Robert Flaherty, whose arctic reality-based film Nanook of the North was released the same year and is generally credited as the first great American documentary.
The process of harpooning the leviathan and refining its oil over an open flame (on a wooden ship!) are presented in a very precise manner, making Down to the Sea a rare document of the techniques of the American whale-hunter. The prolonged sequence -- photographed in the Caribbean where whales were more readily found -- is tense and riveting, but perhaps a bit barbaric to those sensitive to the spectacle of whales and porpoises being ruthlessly "harvested."
An article in The Literary Digest reported, "It was the hardest working assignment that any motion picture company has ever undertaken. Every morning at daybreak, on a special platform rigged outside the bulwarks, the two motion picture cameras were mounted and made fast...Then the actors who were to play sailor parts were busy just as a member of the crew would have been learning the job, lowering the whale boats, taking them in again, casting them loose and lashing them fast."
Clifton further enhances the authenticity of the film by shooting sequences on location in historic buildings. The formalities of the Quaker worship service at the Apponegansett Meeting House are recreated, including the movable wooden dividers that separate the male parishioners from the female. The producers also visited the Seaman's Bethel and photographed the parchments and plaques that adorned its walls, commemorating the lives of those killed or lost at sea. Particularly moving is a scene in which the youthful Bow is overwhelmed by these somber monuments and sobs in the chapel pew.
More verisimilitude is provided by quotations from literary sources, such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and The Whale and His Captors (1850). The film's title is a reference to Psalm 107:23-24, "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord; and his wonders in the deep." The orchestration of these quotations endows the film with the rich historical texture of a salt- and tobacco-stained leather bound book. Less effective in establishing the 19th-century milieu are the "thee's" and "thou's" which are injected awkwardly into the intertitles, but are excusable in the face of so many more subtle devices.
Clifton began his career as an actor, first on the stage, then appearing in several D.W. Griffith films, including Intolerance (1916). He spent most of his career as a journeyman director, specializing in tightly budgeted action melodramas for a variety of studios and independent producers. Down to the Sea in Ships was clearly Clifton's greatest accomplishment, a project of special personal interest that endeavors to do more than tell an exciting story. It serves up a fascinating slice of American history that is remarkably authentic.
Producer/Director: Elmer Clifton
Screenplay: John L.E. Pell
Cinematography: Paul H. Allen, Alexander G. Penrod
Music: Henry F. Gilbert
Cast: Marguerite Courtot (Patience Morgan), Raymond McKee (Thomas Allan Dexter), William Walcott (Charles W. Morgan), Clara Bow (Dot Morgan), James Turfler (Jimmy), Leigh Smith (Scuff Smith).
BW-83m.
by Bret Wood
