Captains Courageous (1937)

Directed by Victor Fleming. Starring Freddie Bartholomew, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Melvyn Douglas, Mickey Rooney, Charley Grapewin, Oscar O’Shea, John Carradine, Walter Kingsford.

Perfectly dreadful populist entertainment from a Rudyard Kipling story only has some periodically invigorating seafaring sequences to recommend. Elsewhere, there’s a lot of Freddie Bartholomew infecting the screen with his nails-on-the-chalkboard portrayal of a spoiled, stuck-up brat who gets reformed by Kipling’s notions of how to build a man out of a boy…and he’s just as insufferable at the end as he is at the beginning. Oscar-winner(!) Tracy doesn’t rate much better as a Portuguese fisherman with a bad accent and hokey line readings; in fact, with Barrymore doing his stylized sea-dog patois and O’Shea’s trash-talk making a schooner rivalry out to be the WWE of its day, the most measured acting job from the key players at sea probably comes from Mickey Rooney! Not exactly prime Kipling, and hardly prime storytelling regardless of the source—it’s a movie defined by its sermon-like life lessons and broadly-defined characters (and the actors inhabiting them), and on those measures, it’s—forgive the pun—out to sea.

37/100