104. Captains Courageous (1937)

Directed By Victor Fleming

Synopsis

Extremely annoying brat falls off cruise liner in the Atlantic. He is taken up by Portuguese Sailor Manuel who teaches him how to be a man, as pansy Americans know nothing about manliness!

Review

Yay! This is probably the only memorable film coming out of the United States that has a Portuguese as the main character in the film. I like that, I am Portuguese myself and you wouldn't know how big it is for us to get any kind of international recognition, even if it was in 1937. I know I have to spend hours explaning to my friends that Portugal is not Spain, that Portuguese is the language they speak in Brazil and is very different from Spanish, that yes we were the first Westerners in Japan, Tibet, most of Africa, India, that we once shared half the world fifty-fifty with the Spanish, they having the western hemisphere from Brazil West until the Pacific and we getting everything else... it's the syndrome of a country which was once comparable to the States today in terms of Power and is now not much more that a country at the bottom at the league tables in EU statistics.

That out of the way, this is a great, great film. Spencer Tracy does a not too bad job playing the Portuguese Manuel Fidello (I don't know where they got that second name, but hey), with a terrible accent of barely understandable Portuguese. Still his character is probably one of the most lovable sailors in the history of cinema and is very well accompanied by child-actor Freddie Bartholomew, who manages to be both annoying at the beginning of the film and have a believable evolution as a child growing into a good man through the film.

It all ends in tragedy of course, and I can tell you my eyes weren't dry by the end of it, still there is a certain sense of hope, when you think of Manuel's slightly simplistic, but wholly appropriate, conceptions of the after-life you really wish he's right...even if you know he is just engaging in wishful thinking. So, do watch the curly-haired, browned up Spencer Tracy playing a Madeiran Portuguese in this very emotional film. Get it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The movie was produced by Louis D. Lighton and directed by Victor Fleming. Spencer Tracy won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in this film.

The movie was also nominated for three other Academy Awards:

* Best Picture - Louis D. Lighton, producer
* Best Film Editing - Elmo Veron
* Best Writing, Screenplay - Marc Connelly, John Lee Mahin and Dale Van Every

Nothing on the film in Youtube so you get a video on the cluster of islands of Madeira where Manuel in the film is from, bumfuck Atlantic Ocean, why someone intercut it with pictures of half dressed children in a pool might have something to do with the fact that it's a popular destination for pedophiles: