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It begins like Melville and blossoms into Brontë, at its center is Poe's "The City in the Sea." The titular sorceress is a 19th-century schooner, its captain (John Wayne) nurses dark moods and "some hidden story," at one point remembered adrift, crucified and encircled by sharks. A divine presence to Pacific islanders and a tenacious nemesis to the Dutch trading honcho (Luther Adler), who married the melancholy belle he loved (Gail Russell). A vessel suspended between ocean and sky, a truculent skipper seized by poetry. "He seems to see himself as a kind of spider, with this island as a web." Romantic adventure with flashes of noir, just the mix to excite Edward Ludwig's peculiar hallucinatory streak, as richly beguiling here as Tourneur's or Ulmer's. Trading treasure for freedom in burgeoning business networks, the hero finds himself tangled in tentacles during an aquatic ceremony and rises to the surface in a puff of blood and ink. The fable repeats itself, pearls become gold just as the affair is mirrored between the captain's mate (Gig Young) and the heroine's niece (Adele Mara). "Looks like you're going to be richer than you expected." "Yeah... just so I ain't deader." Curtiz's The Sea Wolf and DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind are related, so are Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson and Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. A vision of sunken riches and unconquerable yearnings, a sail across the Gothic subconscious, a reverie among the potted ferns of Republic sound stages. It all leads to the bottom of the sea and the edge of the world, with Wayne's gaze shifting from terror to serenity as water fills his diving helmet, cf. De Palma's Mission to Mars. "Yeah, kind of childish, naïve. But this is beautiful." With Henry Daniell, Eduard Franz, Grant Withers, Paul Fix, Jeff Corey, Duke Kahanamoku, Dennis Hoey, and Erskine Sanford. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |