Derelict

George Bancroft and William "Stage" Boyd are merchant officers for a shipping line, who fight over everything, especially Jessie Royce Landis. Boyd goes to visit her when they put in to Havana. Bancroft cuts him out by promising to get her a cabin on the ship they're officers on, heading to Rio, where she can make some money as a singer. When he gets the master's spot on a freighter, he tells her he can't do it: no passengers. Boyd sneaks her on, then he and Landis lie about who broke the rules, which gets Bancroft fired.

It's a boisterous buddy comedy from Paramount. The sound is still a bit primitive, and Bancroft can't speak without roaring, which is a bit off-putting, but there's an exciting sequence of a storm at sea in which directors Rowland Lee and Louis Gasnier seem to think that if they drown all the actors, studio head Adolph Zukor will be happy about the salaries saved.

Miss Landis was making her first movie, and her last for 19 years. While she's good in the role, I guess once she got the water out of her lungs, she decided she was less likely to be killed on Broadway. She did very well by herself, but her one starring film role shows an actress who might have done pretty well by the movies, if the directors didn't kill her.

George Bancroft stars as a seaman who fights his rival (William "Stage" Boyd) over a Havana saloon singer (Jessie Royce Landis) who is trying to get to Rio.

But when Bancroft gets promoted to captain, sparks fly when the ship grounds in a dense fog. Bancroft is at first commended for saving the ship but is fired when they learn that Boyd sneaked the woman on board.

When Boyd ships out to Rio with Landis, Bancroft signs on with a banana boat and follows. In a raging hurricane (great sea storm effects) Bancroft commandeers the banana boat to help rescue the sinking ship Landis is on.

Bancroft is good as the rough sailor. Boyd (not to be confused with the other William Boyd) is OK as the rival. Landis, in her feature film debut) sings a couple songs and is quite good as the woman. She wouldn't make another film until 1949 and is best remembered for her "mother" roles in Hitchcock films of the 50s.

...because the word "derelict", at least to me, conjures up images of some drunken chronically unemployed person living the life of a vagabond. Instead the title probably should have been "dereliction of duty", but that likely would not have sold as many movie tickets as a film titled "Derelict".

The film is basically about a kind of Popeye versus Bluto rivalry between two sailors on two different commercial ships run by the same company. They both talk about how much they want to put the other one in the hospital, and they do come to blows once, but most of the time they just annoy one another.

Like Popeye and Bluto you never really know why these two guys dislike each other, yet seem to have some kind of mutual respect and admiration going too. Bancroft plays one of the sailors, Bill Rafferty, and William "Stage" Boyd plays his adversary, Jed Graves. Boyd's part looks like something that in the silent era would have gone to Clive Brooks, but Brooks' aristocratic British voice would simply not have gone with the part.

The feud between the two sailors escalates when Rafferty gets promoted to captain over Graves because Graves has brought a woman on board before and the shipping company is afraid Graves might do it again. The great irony here - Rafferty has just stolen Graves' date during shore leave, accidentally fell in love with her, and invited her to stow away on board the next morning, all happening BEFORE he gets the promotion. Complications ensue.

There are some very realistic scenes here of ships at sea cast adrift on the waves of a bad storm. It has quite fluid motion for an early talkie. I'd say it's probably worth your time.