Rod La Rocque plays the son of a famously cowardly captain who fears that he has inherited his father’s cravenness. Only his girlfriend, Jacqueline Logan, believes in him. Will he finally prove that he has what it takes to conquer the sea?
Home Media Availability: Released on DVD.
Yellow Fellow
Audiences of the silent era loved two things: seafaring pictures and “I’ll make a man out of you” stories. It made sense, then, to combine both of these elements into one briny, brawny tale of oceangoing heroics.
The Code of the Sea tells the story of Bruce McDow (Rod La Rocque), a would-be sailor haunted by the ghost of his father’s cowardice. When the elder McDow was the captain of a lightship—a floating lighthouse—he lost his nerve and broke for shore during a storm, leaving a passenger liner to smash on a reef. Yikes.
Bruce is obsessed with his father’s failure and terrified that he will end up the same way, which becomes self-fulfilling as his fear of failure and disgrace causes him to be apprehensive and timid, unable to even climb the ship’s rigging and freezing in a crisis. He has all the book knowledge to be an officer but none of the instincts or nerve.
He is fired from his job as a sailor for his incompetence and the only person who believes in him is Jenny Hayden (Jacqueline Logan). Jenny loves Bruce but her father (George Fawcett) won’t hear of it and it’s easy to see why. He was the owner of the ship that the elder McDow allowed to sink. To make matters worse, the wealthy Ewart Radcliff (Lefty Flynn) is pursuing Jenny and he never misses an opportunity to mock Bruce.
Jenny persuades a family friend to give Bruce a job as the first officer of a lightboat. She presents the offer to Bruce at a party and he agrees to accept. But then, a careless partygoer throws a match out the window and ignites Jenny’s dress. Bruce freezes and Ewart rushes to the rescue.
(The rising star Martha Mansfield died less than six months before The Code of the Sea was shot when her antebellum gown caught fire due to an irresponsible smoker’s match, despite gallant efforts by her costar and chauffeur to save her. This macabre and tasteless torn-from-the-headlines storytelling can also be seen in Souls for Sale, which reenacts Viola Dana witnessing the death of Ormer Locklear, her stunt pilot lover.)
Bruce returns the job offer and leaves humiliated. Jenny is uninjured and goes to seek him out, persuading him once again to take the job on the lightboat. Look, I am all for standing up for the person you love but it strikes me that maybe Bruce could learn to be a man in a situation that does not involve looking out for the safety of hundreds. But, well, this is a movie.
Bruce does fine on the lightboat while the weather is good but then a nasty storm hits and the lightboat must remain in position to warn ships of a dangerous reef. Jenny’s father is at sea aboard another one of his passenger liners while Jenny herself is on a pleasure cruise on Radcliff’s yacht and Bruce knows it. To save the yacht, the lightboat will have to leave its position and the passenger liner will hit the reef. The Trolley Problem on the high seas.
Will Bruce rise to the occasion? See The Code of the Sea to find out.
The version of the film I saw was rather choppy but it is also the version released on 16mm for home viewing and one reel seems to have been excised. I don’t know what was in that missing footage, so I won’t go too deeply into this but the picture basically has no scenes of Bruce building up his courage or struggling during his lightboat stint. As a result, his heroics at the end come off as abrupt but this may be a flaw of the editing and not the original picture.
I quite like Rod La Rocque as a performer but acting is very much like singing: the song has to fit the voice. A singer with a very limited range will sound like a million bucks if they stay with music that is within their reach. By the same token, some actors have a five octave range and the ability to span comedy, drama, action and more. And La Rocque… doesn’t.
He’s lovely to look at, charming too, but he is at his best in feather-light fare that allows others to do the heavy lifting. I loved him in The Fighting Eagle (with Phyllis Haver and Sam De Grasse doing the hard work) and The Cruise of the Jasper B (carried by Mildren Harris and Snitz Edwards), both delicious trifles.
The Code of the Sea asked a lot of its leading man. He had to portray a genuine coward, show his struggle and his final effort to show courage at the eleventh hour. La Rocque just looks like he has a sore tummy for most of the picture. This film called for Lloyd Hughes, who was wonderfully week in Below the Surface and The Sea Hawk. Or Richard Barthelmess, who portrayed shellshock beautifully in The Enchanted Cottage.
Jacqueline Logan does all right but with La Rocque in over his head, it is difficult to understand why Jenny believes in Bruce so fervently. Lefty Flynn is suitably arrogant as Radcliff and is probably the actor who emerges with the best performance in the picture.
So, with the leading man unable to handle the heavy lifting in the emoting department, we are left with the action and special effects sequences. Director Victor Fleming, of course, famously excelled at this sort of thing with When the Clouds Roll By (a Douglas Fairbanks comedy crammed with whimsical and charming effecrs) to The Wizard of Oz in his filmography.
Here again, the film falls down. It’s not Fleming’s fault, really. Like Logan, he is a victim of circumstance. You see, The Code of the Sea simply didn’t have the budget needed to wow viewers. Even cheaper productions like the Edison version of Kidnapped (1917) had ways of obtaining realistic vessels (they refitted an old brig). The same year The Code of the Sea was released, First National brought epic battles between Elizabethan, Spanish and Barbary galleys in The Sea Hawk. Ben-Hur was shooting with full-size Roman warships in Italy.
And The Code of the Sea? Well, it’s better than the toy boats that Siegmud Lubin allegedly sunk in his bathtub to reenact the fate of the U.S.S. Maine but that’s not saying much. Unconvincing miniatures during the storm scenes, especially in an apples-to-apples comparison of other seafaring pictures like, say, Down to the Sea in Ships, Behind the Door or The Sea Lion, do not do our subject any favors. The calmer sea sequences use real vessels, so it’s particularly noticeable when the switch up happens during the finale.
It’s a shame because there is nothing wrong with Fleming’s direction. In fact, he deserves kudos for making it as exciting as he does. The scene is paced to perfection and he builds genuine suspense as to whether or not Bruce’s late turn to heroics will kill him. So, I would say that this film requires a sympathetic viewer who will understand that Paramount was simply stingy and there was nothing Fleming could do about it.
The Film Year Book sheds some light on the budget matter in its listing for The Code of the Sea: “no star.” While their names figured into studio advertising, neither La Rocque nor Logan were viewed as big enough box office draws at the time for the trade magazine to note them by name in its year-end box offices roundup. As for that box office, The Code of the Sea hovered around the middle to low end of the weekly takings at major theaters. Paramount wasn’t about to risk cash on big ships for little stars.
The picture had decent reviews, described as a fun old-school “meller” (melodrama) and the finale was particularly singled out for praise. The Exhibiters Trade Review recommended that theater owners make the most of the July release and push the film’s cold ocean setting as a hot weather cooldown. Another suggestion was to join forces with a confectioner and put up a sign stating: “Are You in Bad with Her? A Box of Our Chocolates and Tickets to Code of the Sea Could Prove a Life-Saver.” (Other “tie-up” advertising ideas were far tackier and included pushing a connection with the Titanic and other sea disasters, and offering free tickets to mothers who lost sons in WWI naval service.)
The Code of the Sea isn’t bad but it’s too much picture for its budget and star. If Fleming, Logan and Flynn had been given ten or twenty thousand more to work with and if the leading man had been able to perform the emoting called for, this could be a classic. Instead, we are left with strong direction and some good performances but that’s not a complete picture.
Where can I see it?
Available on DVD from Grapevine.
☙❦❧
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