Captain Calamity

Really bad story of a Captain who is paid with a gold coin for transporting a passenger to an island. When people find out that he has a gold coin they assume he has a treasure and well…

This film is a mess. As bad as it is, its also a watchable film in a so bad its good sort of way but its still a mess. Blame it almost all of the problems on the lead. George Houston as the Captain plays it with a smirk and a wink and completely destroys any credibility the film might have had. Trust me, as mediocre as the rest of the film Houston sinks the film single handedly because he's so jovial and joking and ever smiling that we can take nothing seriously. How did this guy ever have a career as anything other than a laughing idiot?

For bad film lovers only.

In the 1930s and 40s, there were a bunch of ultra-low budget filmmaking outfits which were collectively referred to as 'Poverty Row'...mostly because of the cheapness of the films. Of all of them, perhaps the most consistently poor was the output of Grand National...though like all the Poverty Row studios, they occasionally came out with a winner. Unfortunately, "Captain Calamity" isn't a particularly good film...though for Grand National, it's actually pretty good.

Bill (also known as 'Captain Calamity' because of his propensity to fight) has a boat and he agrees to take an Australian back home. The passenger pays him with his good luck piece...a gold doubloon. When Bill returns home himself, the story about this one lone doubloon soon morphs into stories about Bill returning with cases full of gold! As a result, all the scum of the earth living there want to beat the supposed secret about the treasure from him or his crew...but again, there is no treasure! So what's next? Well, you can assume from his nickname there will be a lot of fighting!

The main problem with this movie is that instead of character development, there's a lot of action and fighting. This means the characters have about as much depth as movie serial characters...which means, not much. The acting is also only okay at best...and having Vince Barnett in the film didn't help. How Barnett got to appear in so many movies is perplexing to me. He was a mostly one-note comic relief sort of guy.

So is the film terrible? No. The location shooting on Catalina Island (on the California coast) isn't bad and although the story isn't great, it's an acceptable time-passer....not that this is a glowing endorsement.

George Houston is a rough and tough skipper of a South Seas schooner, who likes to sing songs like "Riders of the Rolling Seas" and "Drop Your Anchor," backed by a chorus as he stands at the wheel bare-chested. He's a friendly blowhard, and may have a shot at a buried treasure. The trouble is he needs money to outfit an expedition, and he's broke. But he has lots of friends, like Doctor Crane Wilbur, and Marian Nixon (in her last film), one of many people he personally rescued from a sinking ship in return for a certificate. So he's a genuine hero, a man's man, and he has his ship tattooed on his back to prove it. And after he lets it be known about the treasure, there are plenty of people who are willing to buy in for a share. Or even slug him so they can seize the treasure they think is on the ship.

Did I mention this movie is in color? It's in Hirlacolor, a subtractive two-color process. There's also Movita to add that Polynesian aspect, Vince Barnett to make it even more ridiculous, and Lloyd Ingraham as a beach comber. It's a Grand National picture, and it's clear they had great ambitions for this movie, since they were spending money on songs and color. But it's mostly a paint-by-the-number effort under the direction of John Reinhardt.

This film was made by Grand National Films, a company with a brief existence from 1936 to 1939. They were trying to become a major player by signing up James Cagney, but his second film for the firm, Something To Sing About cost a fortune for the company and laid an egg at the box office, effectively bankrupting the fledgling firm. Captain Calamity sounds like it would be a comedy film, but it is not. There are some attractive players here, like George Houston, who goes through much of the film with no shirt on, and Movita, a player whose character suffers a surprising fate. The color is a version of Cinecolor which favors blue and red and really looks quite lovely on the unrestored but very watchable print I viewed. Most prints have the first section of credits missing, and cuts in for the shots of the cast poking their heads through a life preserver, with their names printed on the preserver. A good example of early, good-looking color from a company other than Technicolor.

Technicolor wasn't the only color format in Hollywood in the mid-1930s. Cheaper, less vibrant systems were being used, mostly in lower budgeted 'Poverty Row' movies. April 1936 "Captain Calamity," a Grand National Film production, jumped on the pirate theme filming with the Hirlicolor process. Named after its inventor, George Hirliman, the system was part of the Cinecolor's early subtractive two color movie process developed in 1932. Animated cartoon studios, barred by Technicolor's vibrant three-strip process because of its exclusive contract with Walt Disney, were looking to splash some color in their cartoons besides the older Technicolor technology. Fleischer Studios, Ub Iwerks, and Warner Brothers in its Looney Tunes series all used Cinecolor with some reasonable results despite its limitations to only red and green dyes. As the years progressed, Cinecolor was able to achieve a look some some say nearly equaled Technicolor's red, green and blue separate film strips in the camera.