The Sea Wolf
1941, directed by Michael Curtiz
About fourteen minutes into The Sea Wolf, Humphrey van Weyden emerges from his berth onto the deck of the Ghost. It’s his first exposure to life on the sailing ship since being pulled out of San Francisco Bay after a ferry accident. He parts the double doors and steps into a scene of unexpected misery. The first mate lies there dying, his body twitching amid indifferent sailors and a cruel captain who’s concerned only with the inconvenience of losing a crew member.
The unfolding scene inverts a similar moment from The Wizard of Oz, released two years earlier. Instead of Dorothy opening her farmhouse door onto the Technicolor splendors of Munchkinland, Humphrey van Weyden crosses with equal incomprehension into a foggy, gray, dismal world. There’s a body lying there like the witch under Dorothy’s house, and a villainous figure stands over the scene like the second witch who comes to harass Dorothy – but the flavor of the scene is almost opposite to Dorothy’s and Toto’s first impression of Oz.
Van Weyden’s journey on the Ghost will parallel The Wizard of Oz in one other way. It’s dominated by three male characters with a shared interest in a young woman who doesn’t belong there. The captain, Wolf Larsen, has brains and nerve but no heart; the new sailor George Leach has heart and courage but isn’t clever; and Humphrey van Weyden is empathetic and intellectual, but Larsen calls him “soft like a woman”. Van Weyden does however show a kind of courage, and he’ll grow more resolute over the voyage… but in any case this likeness to Oz is not exceptional. It’s an almost universal method of characterization, aligning characters with the essential attributes of a complete person. Van Weyden’s entrance onto the ship’s deck is more telling because its parallels to Oz highlight the fantastic quality of the journey ahead.
Instead of a fairy tale fantasy, the voyage on the Ghost will be a descent into the underworld. Van Weyden and Ruth Webster arrive by ferryboat like souls crossing the River Styx into Hades. More than the actual ferryboat, the rowboat that brings Leach resembles paintings of those mythical ferries. We’re introduced to the Ghost with dark foreboding in a San Francisco tavern, and when the ferry sinks, the Ghost emerges from the fog like some phantom schooner arriving at a strangely opportune moment to pick up survivors. All these hints of the unreal culminate in the character of Wolf Larsen.
When the captain arranges a burial at sea for his first mate, his careless attitude and his evident lack of humanity mark him as the kind of man religious people would call godless. He mocks Van Weyden for looking like a preacher; his chosen crew carries no bibles; and he knows none of the prayers for laying a dead man to rest. Instead of respecting his first mate, he drops the body overboard with the one line he knows from the service: “…and the body shall be cast into the sea.” Soon after, when van Weyden finds a verse from Paradise Lost underlined in the captain’s quarters, the identification is complete. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The Ghost is a hell, and Wolf Larsen is a devil.
It’s easy enough to demonize a character, but that’s not the point of framing Larsen this way. As monstrous as he is, the captain is also human. His curiosity is genuine, and like most psychopaths he’s occasionally affable. About halfway through the film, van Weyden locates the man’s weakness: “But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal….” Wolf Larsen has isolated himself on a ship where his superiority is assured, but if he actually had the guts to mix with people in the real world, he’d be sure to find his match. This gets under the captain’s skin: “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” Van Weyden’s insight summarizes the cowardice of all despots who equate power with strength, invariably shirking any contest that would measure their strength fairly.
The Sea Wolf was made as World War II was well underway in Europe and Asia. Pearl Harbor was still a few months away, but there was already good reason to prepare an American audience for an eventual confrontation with tyrants like Wolf Larsen. The movie’s ultimate effect is to make a paper tiger (or a paper wolf?) of the captain, exposing his weakness for all to see. If a pampered aesthete like Humphrey van Weyden could triumph over Larsen, then Americans and their allies should not fear the brutes they would have to fight. The movie deflates Wolf Larsen’s mystique, leaving him blind, helpless, exposed as a coward, a mere figment of the unreality that hangs over the film. With its overabundance of fog, darkness, and sea spray, the swaying of the ship, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s atmospheric score, The Sea Wolf feels like a dream – more nightmarish than Oz, but a dream nonetheless.
Certainly the picture of hell on earth, with its allusion to Paradise Lost, gives the film a religious overtone. The Ghost is a ship of sinners, and its two survivors, Ruth and George, are fugitives from the law. It’s curious that the Hays Code permitted them to go free at the end, but their time on the ship must have been an acceptable substitute for prison, and their story ends like a tale of Christian redemption as they sail to a rugged Pacific island, a figurative Garden of Eden. Van Weyden, the only blameless character, sacrifices himself for the couple’s freedom, making him a Christ figure.
It would be strange though for such a religious tale to come from scriptwriter Robert Rossen, who altered Jack London’s source novel so much that one must credit him with a large share of creative control. Rossen was at the time a member of the American Communist Party, and the religious subtext was likely a Trojan horse to make a fairly subversive story palatable to censors and to a broader public. Wolf Larsen is not only a political tyrant but also a capitalist, shamelessly exploiting his workers, and the film sympathizes with the mutinous sailors. To a leftist in 1941 there was no great distinction between a fascist and a captain of industry.
On close examination, Humphrey van Weyden’s sacrifice is not a grand divine gesture, but rather the expected action of an ordinary person aware of his place in a larger society (certainly akin to the valor expected of a soldier should the country get involved in the growing world conflict). Johnson had already sacrificed himself on the lifeboat, slipping into the waves while the others slept, giving them a better chance to stretch their limited water supply. Leach too had tried to sacrifice himself, ordering Webster and van Weyden to abandon him in the locked storeroom and save themselves.
Jack London’s 1904 novel The Sea Wolf was foremost an argument against the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, an individual (embodied by Wolf Larsen) justified only by strength and will. Rossen’s script, while making simplifications for brevity, is compatible with the novel’s purpose, even alluding to Nietzsche in van Weyden’s description of Larsen seeking “the true death of the superman.” The movie however builds George Leach into a major character, giving both the woman and the chance at life to him instead of to Humphrey. In short, the film adds sacrifice to the story.
The film also creates all kinds of symmetries among the characters. George and Ruth are both fugitives, he escaping from arrest, she from a reformatory. George and Humphrey are both new recruits, each defiant of the captain, one perpetually losing and the other ultimately triumphant. Doctor Prescott and Wolf Larsen represent two versions of pride, one debased by injured pride and the other swollen with satisfied pride. The captain and Cooky are two versions of iniquity, one brave and the other cowardly. The doctor and Cooky are both outcasts, each chased dramatically up the ropes by a mob of sailors, one subjected to mockery and the other to anger, one dying on his own terms and the other mutilated by a shark. Wolf Larsen is paired with his unseen brother Death Larsen, each equally vengeful but one a pirate and the other an honest worker. The chief pairing though is between Wolf Larsen and Humphrey van Weyden, both intellectuals but one outwardly strong and the other outwardly weak. The film’s center lies in the contest between these two men.
The climax in Larsen’s cabin passes so fast that it’s easy to overlook its complications. At first the captain wants van Weyden to go off and immortalize him in a book, but when he finds out what van Weyden would actually write, he shoots the writer. Van Weyden then tricks the captain, pretending the blind devil had missed and bargaining his life for Leach’s, offering to accompany the captain to the bottom of the ocean in exchange for handing the storeroom key to Ruth. In order to persuade the captain, he must convince Larsen of what the tyrant had long resisted believing, that “there’s a price no man will pay for living,” in other words that van Weyden would rather die than live with the disgrace of betraying his comrades. Larsen hands the key to Ruth, momentarily convinced that he holds the upper hand, that van Weyden only came back after being shot because he was in a bind. When Larsen then finds van Weyden slipping into the water, his momentary conversion ends abruptly: “I did hit you. I knew there was a catch to it. I knew it!”
The captain will go to his watery grave convinced he was right, that people do not act for the good of society. It was his pride that led him to believe otherwise, and it’s his pride that swings him back the other way, unaware that van Weyden’s initial reason for coming to him in the sinking ship was to make a sacrifice. Van Weyden must have calculated exactly what would happen, counting on Larsen to be deceived by his own pride. If he knew his enemy’s mind that well, he must also have been correct about what would happen next. After his final burst of pride, Larsen would be overwhelmed with fear, loneliness, and despair.
CONNECTIONS:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Story opens with hints of the supernatural before settling into worldly events
The Wizard of Oz – Woman with three men defined by absence of brains, heart, and nerve; transition in a doorway from recognizable life to a fantastic setting
The Maltese Falcon – Transition between the uplifting communal ethos of 1930s Hollywood and the darker psychology of the 1940s
The Big Sleep – Complicated climax where a character calculates exactly what the villain will think and do