Milton Sills is Wolf Larsen, Raymond Hackett is the despairing drifter whom he determines to beat until he has become a fit antagonist for the philosophical treatise he is considering, and Jane Keithley is the bone of contention. S.N. Behrman's script is a free translation of the Jack London novel that is in the right spirit, but there are problems with the script, or perhaps the performers.
Hackett is all right -- the fact that he plays his character as inert is probably accurate, because that's how depressed people are; unfortunately, it's not the least interesting. It makes me sympathize with Larsen's desire to beat him 'til he sneezes. Miss Keithley is uniformly stagey in her line readings. The real problem is Sills. In his attempts to maintain a constant tone of defiant masculinity, he varies from bathos to braggadocio in contrast. All through the movie, I was thinking of how Wallace Beery or George Bancroft might have played the role.
The print is in almost perfect condition. There's a bit of fogging on the right side of the screen in the first scene, set in Japan. After that, Glen MacWilliams' camerawork is wonderful, with the sequence of Hackett in the rigging the visual peak. I have some issues with the tinting. Japan is pure black & white; the ship's interior has a light amber wash, and the deck a light blue one. The buzz is that it was all from 35 mm. elements. I suspect they were from different elements. Cutting from deck to cabin convinced me of this fact.
So it was visually a fine movie. Hackett was growing too old to play the callow youth. Milton Sills dropped dead on the tennis court a week before the movie was released. And the director of the movie, Alfred Santell, married Jane Keithley.
