Simply A Masterpiece

Crappy film

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This movie surprised me again and again with its unexpected plot twists. Movies of this era are usually so predictable. It has a giant hideous shark and a scenes with this shark in the water that are genuinely terrifying. I did not expect effects from this era to stand up.There is a lot of distressing racist dialogue deprecating Chinese people.Claudette Colbert is like a fireplace. She radiates warmth, friendliness and enthusiasm. She has alarmingly thin eyebrows and overly thick face powder, but you get used to it. If she were in movies today, she could hold her own. She has that indefinable something.There is also a pretty racy scene when a women in a bar picks up the sea captain. I was shocked at how direct it was about what was going on. This must have blown the socks off the audience back in 1933.

Reliance Pictures was an off shoot of Edward Small productions and was also responsible for some really interesting films ("Palooka" (1934), an excellent adaptation of the Joe Palooka comic strip with Jimmy Durante and "Let "em Have It" (1935), a dynamic story about a ruthless gangster played by Bruce Cabot) during it's short life. James Cruze was hired by Reliance to direct it's first film in 1933, "I Cover the Waterfront". Based loosely on the best selling expose by reporter Max Miller, the film combined lurid fact with fiction, sprinkled with chilling drama.When reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is called out to report on a nude bather (pretty risqué even for 1933!!) he meets Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert) and realises her father is Eli Kirk, an old fisherman, who he has suspected for a long time is involved in a smuggling racket. He is - people smuggling!!!and he is cold blooded enough to think nothing of throwing a chinaman overboard when the customs officers get too close. The one person he loves unconditionally is his daughter Julie but she has suspected for a while that something is troubling her father. Miller starts to romance Julie - to see what she knows, but of course the inevitable happens and they fall in love.Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon were the nominal stars but the real reason to watch is Ernest Torrence. He had always been a menacing villain ever since portraying the degenerate Luke Hatfield in "Tol'able David" (1921) but in this movie he really outdoes himself as the fearsome tobacco spitting killer, who will stop at nothing to avoid detection of his smuggling racket. An amazing story, according to "Human Monsters", involves a harpooning expedition, where several twenty foot sharks were caught for the scene in which illegal immigrants were hidden in the shark carcasses. Special breathing masks attached to snorkels enabled the Chinese extras to survive the scenes in which they are bound in chains, inside the sharks. "I Cover the Waterfront" also boasted a popular theme song, which became a jazz standard, covered by many artists, including Billie Holiday.Recommended.

This film was excellently directed by James Cruze, best known for 'The Great Gabbo' (1929) with Erich von Stroheim, and the Will Rogers vehicle, 'Mr. Skitch' (1933). Cruze died rather young, and has never been properly appreciated. Here he has made a gritty and realistic drama of the California waterfront with lots of harrowing location footage shot at sea showing the dangers of shark fishing. Apparently, great white sharks were hunted by harpoon from small rowboats, and here we see just how wrong this can go. The story is all about Claudette Colbert, here as radiant as ever she was, despite the fact that all the characters in the film including herself are morally ambivalent at best. Her father is a ruthless people smuggler who does not hesitate to throw a Chinese illegal immigrant overboard to save himself from discovery by the Coast Guard, but despite being this sort of character, he is powerfully played by character actor Ernest Torrence as someone entitled to our sympathy, and Claudette goes on loving him despite his crimes, which surely must have left some touches of mildew on her supposedly stainless character? As for her love interest, the dogged newspaper reporter played by Ben Lyon, who is sick of the waterfront and wants to go back to the sanity of Vermont, his own character flaws are wide enough to drive a rather large fishing boat through. All of these iniquities are glossed over, as we are encouraged to root for the romance of this couple, and we very quickly drown in the deep pools of Claudette's soulful eyes (which, by the way, has anybody ever noticed, are too far apart). This is absolutely not a sugary Hollywood drama. Its moral ambiguity possibly makes it all the more interesting.

This is the one where Lyons takes Colbert on a visit to a "torture" ship, puts her in stocks, spread eagle, kisses here and then asks if she wants more "torture" to which she says "Yes, I can take it!" Approximately 35 minutes into the movie. This was pretty racy in it's day--not too shabby now either. For atmosphere for this sort of movie, I suggest "The Docks of New York"--another coast, of course, but I think it's a better movie--although it doesn't have the come-hither looks of Claudette Colbert. Waterfront movies need lots of atmosphere and this one has it. The ending is a bit trite, though--all of the fireplace and cats, but it is a good diversion picture and good example of it's period. I'd also recommend, if you like this, to try out "Anna Christie"--both the silent version and the sound version--"Garbo talks"--gimme a visky, ginger ale on the side and don't be stingy, baby"