The Sea Wolf (1941)

Directed by Michael Curtiz. Starring Edward G. Robinson, Alexander Knox, John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Barry Fitzgerald, Gene Lockhart, Stanley Ridges, Francis McDonald.

Not to be confused with Michael Curtiz’s swashbuckling adventure The Sea Hawk from the year prior, this seafaring story is based on a Jack London novel and depicts the experiences of a soft, intellectual writer (Knox) and a pair of troubled souls with checkered pasts (Garfield, Lupino) aboard a seal-hunting vessel captained by a sadistic megalomaniac played with relish by Robinson. Gets off to a shaky start, and proceeds to navigate the waters of contrived melodrama, but the ship’s captain and crew are a dynamic, vividly-sketched lot, and the filmmaking has a potent undertow whenever Garfield and Lupino’s lukewarm romance scenes are squirreled away out of sight. One of the better depictions of open-sea special effects and atmosphere from the studio era, thanks in large part to Sol Polito’s moody, chilling camerawork. Screenplay by Robert Rossen; music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Adapted for the screen several times before (mostly as silents), and remade a few more times after this, including once as Wolf Larsen in 1958 and once for cable television in the 1990s.

76/100