Une fille dans chaque port

This is what we call today a "guy film" in which two buddies share everything from drinking bouts to bar room brawls to girls. An early effort by director Howard Hawks, the bar and fight sequences are fast, at times comical and always colorful.

Another interesting thing about the film is that we get a chance to see what ordinary people looked like in the 20's. Being about two sailors and their adventures ashore, we a shown a much more exotic world than we might see today. Take for example when one of our heroes picks up a Dutch girl, dressed in full traditional Dutch costume which was common at the time. From our modern view, we expect her to act like some old fashioned Dutch doll, but instead she acts like any other teenaged girl who is out on a date with a hunk. It is a reminder that people haven't changed that much.

Louise Brooks is another treat in the film. A very extraordinary personality, Louise is the center of attention whenever she is on screen. The sexual tension is highly electric in her scenes. It was because of this film that she was chosen for her famous role as Lulu in "Pandora's Box" where she would make cinema history. All in all, although the film is not one of the greats, it certainly has some great moments and is well worth seeing.

The only reason this fllm seems to garner attention is due to Louise Brooks in the final segment. She is attractive enough but displaying little dramatic talent, just a show piece that any woman, actress or not, could have provided the film makers.

I am among those who just 'don't get" Louise Brooks, and I guess I will die unchanged. Nothing special at all in my book. She just had a "look," but no talent.

A buddy movie, that could be termed gay "but without any sex," just camaraderie devoid of the influence of the female.

Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong become best buddies after trying to beat the brains out of one another in this solid but unremarkable comedy from Howard Hawks. The delectable Louise Brooks is the scheming woman who threatens to come between them. Pabst hired Brooks for Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl after seeing her in this movie, and got so much more from her than Hawks does here.

An early directorial effort by Howard Hawks and one of the Hollywood pictures Louise Brooks starred in before becoming a movie legend by acting in two German, G. W. Pabst films, "A Girl in Every Port" also stars in the main roles a young Robert Armstrong (later a regular character actor, perhaps best known for playing the Jack Black role in the original "King Kong" (1933)) and a young Victor McLaglen, who somehow was the only one of the bunch to go onto to win a competitive Oscar ("The Informer" (1935)). Nuanced, McLaglen is not. Don't get me wrong, I love his later supporting roles in John Ford and John Wayne movies, especially "The Quiet Man" (1952), and, for the most part, "A Girl in Every Port" is just his kind of role. It's a "buddy" movie, or "bromance," with lots and lots of guys punching each other, and the way he approaches women like a Looney Tunes cartoon is kind of amusing in an eye-rolling sort of way. But, when the film's final act calls upon him for a couple scenes of dramatic acting, he tried, but it just wasn't in his repertoire.

Unfortunately, McLaglen's character is the protagonist, and much of the film follows him from port to port chasing women, only to discover that another sailor had already had them. Apparently, it's OK for women to share him, but not for other men to share the women he visits only whenever he's in town. Instead of sleeping with any of these women, he, instead, bumps into and gets into physical confrontations with other men. Eventually, McLaglen runs into this other sailor (Armstrong) and, of course, fists are thrown... and thrown some more. Through this male-bonding ritual, they become best pals. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is how homoerotic it is, while simultaneously being misogynistic, as well as jingoistic. In one scene, Armstrong's character repeatedly calls McLaglen away from a girl he's putting the moves on so that McLaglen will help him knock around other guys and to yank on Armstrong's fingers, which become disjoined, you know, from all the pounding. (Odd how Armstrong's character has supposedly had so many women, yet the film never shows him trying to seduce one.) The two also walk around on more than one occasion with their arms locked together.

After sailing together for some time, McLaglen decides he's made enough money to settle down. While his buddy is laid up with a toothache, McLaglen goes on land to discover Louise Brooks in a bathing suit. Naturally, he proposes on their first date that they settle down together. Little does he know, however-although we do from the moment Brooks' manager points the cash-heavy sap out to her-that she's a vamp. Brooks does well to steal a couple scenes, and, reportedly, she had enough presence here to gain the attention of filmmakers overseas. But, it's a rather cliched and thankless role, as she's eventually, literally tossed aside in favor of the film's central bromance.

This is quite the bromance from Howard Hawks. The tale of two men who connect through friendship more completely than they can with any romantic relationship with a woman. This is Hawks' first real movie that feels like a Hawks movie. This is his The Lodger, a solidly good silent film that presages what his future career would become.

Spike is a sailor going from port to port, packing up a ship at one and unloading it at the next. At every stop, he gets off to look for a woman in his little black book. The first stop is in Amsterdam, where he finds that the girl he had known now has several children and a husband, so he waves goodbye and crosses her name out of the book forever. The girl he looks for in Rio, he discovers has not been faithful to him either, and she carries a charm with her of a heart containing an anchor, the mark of another sailor. He grows livid, and when he gets to Panama, he runs into another sailor in a bar. Before they can get into a fight between themselves in the seedy bar, the guards show up and they decide to get into a fight with them instead. In prison the next day, Spike discovers that this other sailor, Bill, is the man who had given the charm away when he sees that the same symbol is in Bill's ring. With every intention of knocking out this man interfering with his lovemaking, Spike pays Bill's bail to get him out, wanders the streets of Panama City away from the police to try and start a fight without getting arrested again. In their search for a place to fight, the two end up bonding by throwing a guard into the water.

Spike and Bill are suddenly friends, and the path the two made to friendship is what really helps sell the film overall. I wrote in my review of Fig Leaves that one of the problems with silent films is the challenge of building specificity in characters. None of that issue is present in A Girl in Every Port. Spike and Bill are wonderfully drawn, complimenting each other as two manly men working the seven seas and backing each other and blocking each other in equal measure when it comes to women at port. They are a wonderful pair, and the movie's decision to spend the time actually building their relationship over the film's initial thirty minutes really helps sell the rest of the film.

After an amusing bit of Bill getting drunk and into fights that Spike must continually save him from while also trying to pick up a lady, Spike meets an exotic young circus performer while Bill remains on the ship with a toothache. Spike instantly falls in love with the beauty, even going so far as to offer her all of his saved money he wants to use to establish himself with a small house, for safe keeping only, of course, but when Bill finally meets the girl, Marie, he knows that she's nothing but trouble. They knew each other years back at Coney Island when she was his girl, and she even has his symbol tattooed on her arm (hidden by a band that Spike never sees). He knows she's going to take Spike for all he's worth, but how does Bill let Spike know? It would be one challenge if the girl was just some girl, but it's something else completely since Bill's mark is on her. How can Bill convince Spike of Marie's underhanded nature without turning Spike against himself?

That conflict, told lightly, balancing on a tone between drama and comedy rather deftly, is more than just a sitcom level issue with the ability to clear everything up with a single sentence. Bill can't just clear it up because to do so would possibly hurt his friend even more. This is where the actual character work and effort made to establish the two men's friendship pays off. It's easy to believe Bill's struggles, Spike's potential (and eventual) reaction to the reality around Marie. That it's done silently is actually fairly impressive as well.

The resolution involves two men finding their friendship to be more important than the affection of a dishonest woman. Two men who grew to love each other through their love of fighting and their job on board a sailing ship find that they can always count on each other. It's quite well done, perhaps leaning a bit more dramatically than it should at times but never far from an easy effort at a smile from the audience. A Girl in Every Port is an entertaining little gem of a find from early in Hawks' career.