Starring: Kenneth MacKenna, Frank Albertson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Warren Hymer, Paul Page, Walter McGrail, Stuart Erwin, George LeGuere, Charles K. Gerrard, Ben Hendricks Jr, Harry Tenbrook, Warner Richmond
Writer: Dudley Nicholas (based on a story by John Ford & James Kevin McGuinness)
Cinematography: Joseph H. August
Editor: Walter Thompson
Music: Carli Elinor
B&W, 1h 17m. 1.37:1 ratio.
Released on: January 31, 1930 by Fox Film Corporation.
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Apparently there was a John Ford Universe 78 years before the term cinematic universe entered the mainstream. Remember Salute, the last Ford film I reviewed? Remember Midshipman Albert Edward Price (played by Frank Albertson), the jokey roommate of Paul Randall? Well, he shows up in this movie, and he's an ensign now. He shows up in Shanghai to accept his first post on US submarine S13. Also on board the sub are Chief Torpedoman Burke (Kenneth MacKenna), Jenkins the radioman (Stuart Erwin), and the usual gang of plebs and roster-fillers, such as the elder statesman of the sub, Costello (J. Farrell MacDonald), Kaufman (Warren Hymer), Handsome (Paul Page), Murphy (Ben Hendricks Jr), Joe Cobb (Walter McGrail), Curly Pollock (George LeGuere), and Dutch Winkler (Harry Tenbrook). Soon after it leaves port, it collides with another ship in a storm (filmed in a rare mis-step for John Ford with obvious miniatures). Soon, it is up to a British ship led by Commander Weymouth (Charles K. Gerrard) and Lieutenant Commander Briddwell (Warner Richmond) to try to save them before their oxygen runs out. Not all make it. Oh -- and one of the crewmen of S13 is not who he claims to be.
This is a fascinating film for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's an amalgamation of different styles of film. While it was filmed and released as a sound film, only portions of the recorded dialogue remain, as the only extant copy is of the international sound version. For those unfamiliar with such a term, let me explain. In the days of silent cinema, films were easy to send to other countries for international presentation; all that was needed was to exchange the English intertitles with those in the language of whichever country happened to buy the print.
The advent of sound technology presented a problem to filmmakers. All of a sudden films with dialogue were limited to audiences familiar with the language in which they were filmed. So in the late 1920s and early 1930s producers and studios usually went one of two routes. One, they filmed simultaneously (usually at night on the same sets as the main production) with different casts and often a different director (well-known examples of these include the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, the 1930 German version of Anna Christie -- which kept Garbo as its star but replaced the rest of the cast -- and the English and French versions of Fritz Lang's 1931 masterpiece, M). The other way to distribute films to other countries was to produce an international sound version, which is what we have here. In such an edit, the dialogue is removed for the most part and replaced with intertitles in the language of choice, while music and sound effects were generally kept. To modern eyes and ears, this appears quite jarring, and if a viewer were unaware of the history behind the international sound version of any given production, said film would seem to be quite the train wreck. Even armed with such knowledge, it does take a while to get comfortable and attune to the rhythm of the piece.
History lesson over!
As mentioned before, this was quite a surprise, especially coming off of Salute, and especially because the first ten or fifteen minutes, with the sailors carousing around bars in Shanghai, are generally unfocused and seem to have no point. Bear with it, because this portion of the movie builds the characters and personalities. In many war movies, the characters are either stock stereotypes or interchangeable; in Men Without Women, they are all a piece of the whole, and the film would be lesser without any of them. The title, by the way, references the fact that the majority of the film is set on a submarine, and the cast (with the exception of some ladies of the night in Shanghai) are all men.
John Ford is known for his epic westerns, his vast landscapes and painterly images. What a shock it was, then, to watch this intense, claustrophobic film set in basically one room for more than half the picture. The tension is palpable, and there are some great insert shots, especially of a wooden boat that a crewman carves which has a callback later in the film. This is not a perfect film, and aside from the military connection and the first fifteen minutes (which scream John Ford), it could easily have been filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, such is the harrowing tension at times. Trivia note: apparently John Wayne appears in the film as an extra, but I couldn't place him.
Seven suffering submariners out of ten.
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