Le démon de la mer

I totally forgot this Wesley Ruggles' early masterpiece. Because, yes, for a thirties flick, the early talkies, this is a true tremendous piece of work. It may announce MOBY DICK, but of course at a lesser scale. I enjoyed this movie so much, and it is even more painful to realize that many other films of this kind will forever remain unknown, forgotten for good. This one, fortunately emerged from the darkness, from the depth - not of the sea - but from oblivion. Wesley Ruggles also directed CIMARRON, a gem of the western genre. The rest of his filmography remains mostly unknown, because there are so many silent features.

This movie is SOOOOOO boring!

The Seabat only has around 3-2 minutes of screen time and disappears for a good 40 minutes. I think it's false advertising.

Bad acting from most of the supporting cast, unlikable characters, outdated depictions of native tribes, and probably Boris Karloff's worst movie.

But there is a couple good things about the movie!

The cinematography is dang good for the time, the underwater scenes look good too! At the end of the film when the Seabat gets shot with a harpoon it cuts to this beautiful shot of the Seabat jumping out of the water while the sun rises and the camera is placed on a high shot while on a 60 degree angle! It's one of the best shots in early sound films!

If you wanna watch this one, skip to the last five minutes.

I suppose people turned out to see an early talkie which not only had lots of outdoor footage but also underwater photography. THE SEA BAT is a good film but I think it would have been better had they made it about 5 years earlier as a silent as the characterisations and plot complications come directly from the silent days. The giant manta ray (a Sea Bat) is making life rough for the sponge divers on the island of Portuga (where everyone claims to be of Spanish descent but talks with French accents). This would have been enough for a plot but throw in a minister (Charles Bickford) who won't preach any sermons and stumbles through a funeral service picking passages from the Bible at random. It is not revealing too much to say that this fellow is an eccaped convict who stole a ministers outfit to get off Devil's Island. Now about this being a silent style film? Well the idea that a former pirate who broke jail and is hiding behind a ministers collar reforming just because he reads a few verses from the Old Testament is something you'd expect from D.W. Griffith, circa 1920, yet that is just what happens. Also the scene where the latest victim of the Manta (Nils Asther, best remembered from OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS, 1928) is brought back to port is staged exactly as if this were a silent film. The cast is a joy to see. Watch for Gibson Gowland (GREED) as a Cockney seaman, former Charlie Chaplin comic foil Mack Swain as a bartender, and look fast for a still-unknown Boris Karloff in 3 scenes as a sailor referred to as "The Corsican". The damsel in distress is Raquel Torres, best remembered from F.W. Murnau's docu-drama WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS (1928). The scenes of the giant manta are well done and convincing.

Wesley Ruggles began directing THE SEA BAT but Lionel Barrymore completed it. This would account for the contrast between the outdoor scenes, shot on Mexican locations, and the interiors, particularly a sponge-diving episode, filmed in the studio tank, and some dialog between Charles Bickford and Raquel Torres.

The exteriors bear all the hallmarks of Ruggles - in particular a long tracking shot following Torres through the ramshackle village to the dock, where the sponge fishing boat is about to leave with her brother Asther aboard. The hand of Ruggles is also evident in the scene of Torres fending off potential rape on the rocky seashore, the star pulling a knife and snarling defiance at John Miljan and cronies as spray soaks her flimsy blouse (revealing a pre-code absence of lingerie.)

On the other hand, one is inclined to lay at Barrymore's door an embarrassing voodoo sequence, with Torres performing an unconvincing dance, and also the scene where she tries to vamp Bickford as he stolidly studies the Bible.

The casting, as often in early sound films, mixes talents on the way up with once-eminent silent performers working out the end of their contracts; Charles Bickford and Boris Karloff among the former, Gibson Gowland (GREED), Nils Asther (WILD ORCHIDS)and Mack Swain (Keystone) the latter. George F. Marion parades another of his excruciating accents, a serious rival to his performance in ANNA Christie as Garbo's father.

Considerable effort has gone into creating the manta ray "bat",a towed semi-submersible on the order of "Bruce", the shark in JAWS. More whale than ray, it spouts, and overturns boats. This impressive piece of physical special effects, as usual with early studio productions, is uncredited.

Half-Maugham, half-Melville and all hooey, this tropical potboiler is chock full of sin and salvation, with a giant sting ray tossed in as -- I kid you not -- a romantic deus ex machina.

The setting is a West Indies island where a bunch of grimy sponge divers lust after barefoot temptress Raquel Torres, who only has eyes for the beautiful (and, with his thick Swedish accent, virtually unintelligible) Nils Asther. But when he dies in the clutches of the title monster villain, she turns her back on God and offers herself as reward to the man who destroys the beast. It's a decision she quickly comes to regret, and as the body count increases, the guilt-ridden Raquel flails her arms and pounds her breasts with the frenzy of a silent movie diva.

As if this plot weren't febrile enough, Torres begins falling for newly arrived man of the cloth Charles Bickford, who does his damnedest to resist her overtures since he's actually an escaped convict from Devil's Island.

This awesomely wacky nonsense was concocted by the radical left-wing screenwriter John Howard Lawson without a hint of the political agitprop that infused his later screen work. The film, however, is not without interest: the camera work by Ira Morgan is sensuous and inventive (particularly when underwater) and the cast of scurvy Island rats is populated with such compelling character types as John Miljan (in a departure from his usual urban smoothie), Boris Karloff (as the glowering Corsican), and silent film veterans Gibson Gowland and Mack Swain.