Cinevent notes: THE SEA BEAST

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Richard M Roberts
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Cinevent notes: THE SEA BEAST

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu May 16, 2013 4:33 am

Todays Cinevent note if for THE SEA BEAST (1926) starring John Barrymore.


Okay, might as well admit it right off the bat, will make things easier later: this is a stupid movie, no really, no way to argue it, this is a REALLY Stupid movie. You’re Warner Brothers right? You’ve scored the rights to Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK, because it’s a known classic, lots of prestige, sounds like great movie material, guy chases a big fish, action, adventure, high seas stuff. Then you have somebody actually read the book and----like---well, there’s a bit of a problem.

First off, there’s this Ahab Character, obsessed, kinda creepy guy but charismatic, perfect for John Barrymore except------you know, with all the money being spent on him, Broadway legend, Shakespearian actor, lots of class, but dealing with the booze and the broads as well--- still has a reputation for being a ladies man and a romantic idol and all that------and------there’s no women in the damn book! Lots of smelly, weirdo sailors, plenty of divine rhetoric about evil and obsession but-----this damn thing’s supposed to sell tickets to Women too…..

Simple Solution: REWRITE!!!!! Put in a main squeeze for JB, heck, put his current real-life main squeeze in the part if it will keep him happy and soberer. Say, that ending’s a bit of a downer too, ain’t it? I mean, the leading man’s already lost a leg, now he’s going off into the deep blue tied to a whale------Keep scribbling Script Doctors! Can’t have the Audience going out with a frown on its face, it’ll kill the word-of-mouth……

So, what we have here is Melville with a Babe and a Happy Ending inserted (and if you whine “Spoiler Alert”, I’m going to slap you. Just admit you haven’t read MOBY DICK and take your lumps). But hey---that title’s not going to sell in Kansas City either. MOBY DICK-------sounds like a social disease------Call a meeting! New Title!-------ahm-----new title------THE FISHING TROUBADOUR!-----------nope--------BLUBBERING ROMANCE!--------next-----A WHALE OF A TALE!-------dangit-------THE SEA BEAST!---Bingo! Boffo! Get the Art Department on the poster, we need it Tuesday!

So Melville Fans will gnash their teeth and bang their fists at the very little left of MOBY DICK to be seen in THE SEA BEAST, but John Barrymore Fans will be very happy indeed because his Captain Ahab is a wonderful tour-de-force from the actor in his prime. With that romantic stuff mixed in with all the creepy, Barrymore gets to strut the whole gamut of all his stuff, forty-six years old, Richard III under his belt, so now The Great Profile was consolidating his movie stardom after dabbling on and off with the Silver Screen for over a decade. Signing with the fledgling Warner Brothers in 1924, the success of his first Warners feature, BEAU BRUMMELL had given Barrymore the gravitas to demand a role more meaty and a story stronger that he can sink his scenery-nibbling bicuspids into. Warners was willing to make their then-biggest human star (don’t forget Rin-Tin-Tin) happy to some degree, but, as we see from the end results, something got corrupted in Bess Meredith’s Scenario. However, JB gets his mad scenes, and his preferred left-side facing the camera in what is perhaps the longest sustained kiss with leading lady Dolores Costello.

It had indeed taken a decade for John Barrymore to become a full-fledged movie star. First starring in light comedies for Paramount starting with AN AMERICAN CITIZEN in 1914, Barrymore had made a number of films very much of the kind Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would also make in the teens, of which today, only THE INCORRIGIBLE DUKANE (1915) and RAFFLES, THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN (1917) survive. Successful though they were, Barrymore considered them secondary to his stage career, even though much of that up to that time had also been spent as a light comedian. As he turned to more serious performances and the Bard in the late teens and early twenties, his film work became even more sporadic but less comic, an acclaimed 1920 film version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE for Paramount, a kinda silly romantic comedy for Marshall Neilan called THE LOTUS EATER (1921) and a 1922 version of William Gillette’s stage recreation of SHERLOCK HOLMES for Goldwyn were added to his Filmography.

Warner Brothers, wanting to spend some of that money Rin-Tin-Tin had earned for them, took a shot at the Big-Time in signing Barrymore, and spent the cash making his films for them elaborate costume dramas that were the next-step in that Studio’s expansion, even if the Dog Pictures were still raking in more coin. Yet, despite the end result of THE SEA BEAST being more Meredith then Melville, the film’s success proved that the Warners gamble and investment in Barrymore had been a sound one, sound enough to have the Brothers Warner use the Actor to head their next major investment and gamble that would also prove a sound one; the Vitaphone!

John Barrymore’s next Warners Feature would be DON JUAN, the first film released with a full orchestral score and sound effects in the Vitaphone process, and though he would return to the Stage one more time in 1926 to play what was then considered to be the Ultimate Hamlet in Arthur Hopkins Broadway and London Productions, John Barrymore was now first and foremost a Movie Star, and at forty-six already tipping towards the downside of his self-destructive behavior, something not particularly hindered by a Hollywood Lifestyle, but he would still have fifteen years of fabulous film work, and, if sad, at least an interesting and entertaining decline. Like Errol Flynn, John Barrymore was a magnificent train-wreck.

Actress Pricilla Bonner was originally signed to play this newly-added leading lady in THE SEA BEAST, but apparently Barrymore looked at her screen tests and deemed her “unsuitable” for the part. Yep, JB wanted his still-temporarily current girlfriend and former leading lady from BEAU BRUMMELL, Mary Astor, but Warners had loaned her to First National and she wouldn’t be available. Innumerable replacements were tested, but Barrymore would have none of it, or them. One morning, while pacing like a caged leopard on Jack Warner’s office balcony, hoping to convince the Producer to hold up production until Astor was free, he spied an older woman emerging from a taxi, followed by a young pretty brunette and a riveting golden blonde. In his instantaneously intensive amour, the Profile proclaimed the blonde to be “the most preposterously lovely creature in the World!”, and demanded that Warner give him the name of this divinity, and the name of Mary Astor was unceremoniously dropped.

The divinity was the nineteen year old Dolores Costello, younger sister of Helene Costello and daughter of Maurice Costello, who had been a very popular leading man at Vitagraph from the late 1900’s to the early 1920’s. Dolores and her Sister had been child-actors at Vitagraph as well, and she had worked as a model for many of the leading commercial artists like James Montgomery Flagg, and most recently, had toured in the GEORGE WHITE SCANDALS OF 1924. Dolores was indeed a willowy wonder and as she and Helene were under contract to Warners at $75 a week, and had already appeared in several inconsequential movies, if this was whom Barrymore wanted as his leading lady, it was an extremely workable deal.
Dolores Costello’s appearance in the high-profile THE SEA BEAST, coupled with extremely photogenic good looks overwrote any limitations she had in her acting, and Costello would become a top Warner Brothers Star of the late silent and early sound eras, starring or co-starring in such hits as OLD SAN FRANCISCO (1927), GLORIOUS BETSY (1928), and NOAH’S ARK (1929), as well as co-starring once again with her now-husband John Barrymore in WHEN A MAN LOVES (1927). John Barrymore becoming her Husband was not a fact greeted warmly by all of the Costello Clan, Papa Maurice was dead-set against it, perhaps knowing too well the behavior associated with being a matinee idol of the movies, then again, Helene also proceeded to wed Lowell Sherman the following year, perhaps the fatherly role model impairing both daughters spousal judgement.

In any event, suffice to say the union proceeded to be as intense as the courtship and like much that is intense, burned itself out with rapidity. Dolores separated from John in the early 30’s, then divorced him in 1935 on the advice of Helene and Lowell, who then divorced themselves soon after. Dolores retired from films in the early 30’s as well to raise her and John’s Children, but upon her divorce returned to the screen in 1936, now pushing thirty and her beauty matured as well as her acting. She gave a fine comeback performance in LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY with Freddie Bartholomew, and she continued to work steadily through the late 30’s, most likely to keep the coffers full when John was arrears in alimony, and she retired soon after giving the performance that she is probably best remembered for today as Isabel Amberson in Orson Welles’ THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942). Another marriage to John Vruwink in 1939 lasted until 1951, then Dolores Costello spent the rest of her life on her Avocado Farm, Fallbrook Ranch, making no further public appearances save for allowing herself to be interviewed by Kevin Brownlow for his HOLLYWOOD series a few years before her death in 1979.

If any Filmmaker can be termed “neglected” or “forgotten”, Millard Webb, the Director of THE SEA BEAST, would have to fit into that category. Starting off as a actor and assistant director in D. W. Griffith’s Fine Arts Company at Triangle in the mid-teens, Webb graduated to working with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. at Paramount in 1917, and directed his first feature, THE FIGHTING SHEPHERDESS with Anita Stewart for Louis B. Mayer at First National in 1920. After helming several programmers for Fox, Webb found himself writing and directing for Warner Brothers in 1923, where several reasonably successful programmers like HIS MARRIAGE VOW (1924) led to Webb’s getting THE SEA BEAST, the biggest film he had made up to that time. A combination of the coat overruns and production problems that plagued the film, and its success upon release led Webb and Warners to part company, and he proceeded to freelance throughout the rest of the Silent Era, still making competent programmers for Universal and PDC, but never landing anywhere for a lengthy period of time.

In late 1928, Webb found himself in New York, directing Paramount’s first East Coast talkie, GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS at the Astoria Studios. That film’s success and introduction of Walter Huston to Film Audiences landed Webb the directors chair of Paramount’s Flo Ziegfeld-produced GLORIFYING THE AMERICAN GIRL in 1929, but that film’s equally troubled production history, none of it really Millard Webb’s fault, and it’s subsequent box-office failure ended what looked like an early-talkie comeback for Webb, who continued to freelance at Fox and First National making programmers like THE PAINTED ANGEL (1929) with Billie Dove and Edmund Lowe, and HER GOLDEN CALF (1930) with Jack Mulhall and Sue Carol. A stint in England directing for Gaumont led to nothing, and Millard Webb directed his last film for independent producer William Burke in 1933. Millard Webb died in 1935 at the way-too-young age of 41.

Surviving prints of THE SEA BEAST are sadly not spectacular, all existing material derives from a George Eastman House restoration of a print from the Henry A. Strong Collection, which was unfortunately in poor shape, missing subtitles, and in places, out of order sequentially, most likely from a foreign negative. The film was put back together and copied as best as possible at the time, but those whose virgin eyes are offended by scratches, blemishes, less-than-perfect contrasts or anything that does not look digitally restored to the point where it no longer looks like film might want to take a pass. These are eighty-plus year old films folks, old as your grandparents (and they don’t look so pristine either), so it doesn’t hurt to have the occasional reality check and remind oneself that with so much silent and early sound film missing, one is frequently darn lucky to be seeing anything at all, whatever the quality.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Louie Despres
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Re: Cinevent notes: THE SEA BEAST

Postby Louie Despres » Thu May 16, 2013 9:05 am

Thanks for sharing these, Richard. I wonder who wrote the ones on "House of Fear"?

Richard M Roberts
Godfather
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Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 6:30 pm

Re: Cinevent notes: THE SEA BEAST

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu May 16, 2013 3:45 pm

Louie Despres wrote:Thanks for sharing these, Richard. I wonder who wrote the ones on "House of Fear"?



MIke Schlesinger wrote the notes for HOUSE OF FEAR. It's actually a remake of THE LAST WARNING.



RICHARD M ROBERTS

Louie Despres
Associate
Posts: 348
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 3:31 pm
Contact:

Re: Cinevent notes: THE SEA BEAST

Postby Louie Despres » Fri May 17, 2013 12:30 am

Richard M Roberts wrote:
Louie Despres wrote:Thanks for sharing these, Richard. I wonder who wrote the ones on "House of Fear"?


MIke Schlesinger wrote the notes for HOUSE OF FEAR.

RICHARD M ROBERTS


Oh shit, that means El doesn't fare well in those notes.


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