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The Sea Wolf:
Fox Film Corporation,
September 21, 1930
New York Times, October 6, 1930
Milton Sills' Last Film
He Gave Incisive Performance in
"The Sea Wolf" at Hippodrome.
The flavor of Jack London's sea-swept tale
permeates "The Sea Wolf," the film at the Hippodrome
in which Milton Sills, as Wolf Larsen, gives an
incisive performance, which proved to be the last of
his career.
At the end of the film, almost in the concluding
hundred feet or so, Wolf Larsen lies on his bunk,
his body crushed, his eyes blinded by a hot iron in
the hands of the cook, the weakling he despised
most, and asks that services be read over his
body—that of an unbeliever. The hero of the tale
reads the passage as Larsen breathes his last.
As for the story, it is familiar enough to the
followers of London. There is a girl in an Oriental
town who follows a weakling on board ship to which
he has been shanghaied. The youth and the girl are
subjected to the brutish whims of Wolf Larsen, the
ship's master, who thinks little of throwing men
overboard and whose life is guided by a philosophy
of "big fish eat little fish" and whose ideas about
survival of the fittest set him thinking in
egocentric lanes until the forces he scorns most
over-run him. They conquer him so completely that he
is left to drift aboard his dismantled schooner,
blind and helpless, the victim of his own hard and
destructive principles.
The young couple pull through and set their course
for home and happiness, of course, but this final
moonlit fade-out is inconsequential along-side the
impression one retains of the study Mr. Sills
created of an individual hardened against life and
impervious to its kindlier aspects.
Jane Keith, a tall, blond girl, seen in only a few
films before, here makes a little niche of her own
as the heroine. Her quiet manner and apparent
understanding of what she says and her easy way of
carrying herself in some trying dramatic moments
with such facile grace, mark her as a performer of
ability. Raymond Hackett is a bit more restrained
than usual. The direction of Alfred Santell is
excellent.
The Sea Wolf:
Fox Film Corporation,
September 21, 1930 |
