Sperms and Oils

Since her scenes were cut from "Beyond the Rainbow" (1922), although subsequently restored later for re-release after she became a star, "Down to the Sea in Ships" may be considered Clara Bow's film début. I suppose she's better than everyone else here, but that's not saying much. The camera is generally more distant than it would be in the later 1920s. It's still a far cry from the flapper or new woman type she'd personify at the pinnacle of her fame. Albeit, she does play a tomboy in this one who dresses up as a man in an attempt to enter the male domain of being a whaler. Even at this early stage, too, before fan magazines and that Technicolor sequence in "Red Hair" (1928) highlighted it, there's an emphasis on her hair, as a man perversely combs out her ragged curls in one scene.

Beyond that, the picture is akin to if the early process proto-documentary short film "Whaling Afloat and Ashore" (1908) had a D.W. Griffith-esque racist melodrama built around it to expand it to feature length. Bow essentially plays the role Mae Marsh did in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), of the childish supporting female character, with an attempted rape and a fainting spell included. Although, the senior female lead is hardly all that mature, either, what with her playing with dolls throughout the runtime. Derivatively, the central threat revolves around a marriage of miscegenation, except instead of the hatred of African Americans in Griffith's notorious epic, here it's yellow peril tripe. An East Asian villain passing for white, rubbing his Buddha statuette in place of twirling a mustache, "shanghais" the woman's white lover to get him out of the way for his sinister plot.

There's also a Native-American servant in a minor role whose only intertitle line is in broken English, and that's relatively inoffensive by comparison, as well as ironically and surely unintentionally a reminder of the hypocrisy of the picture's white supremacy, blaming all violence on racialized others. "The Birth of a Nation" from black slavery to native genocide. The setting amid Quakers and whalers also supports its xenophobic, inbreeding ideology, as the picture's stars-and-stripes flag-hugging patriarch, in lieu of incestuously marrying his own daughter, insists she marry a man exactly like him, i.e. a white Quaker and whaler. Reel sperm oily stuff.

At least the specifically Quaker depictions hold somewhat more interest than the broadly Christian evangelizing of others, such as Griffith. And, they go all out on the ships in this one--there's the shanghaiing, the stowaway, a mutiny, and a storm, to go along with the hunting sperm whale processes in the style of docu-fiction and the climactic, again Griffith-esque, last-minute rescue. Not bad cutting at sea in this one, either, to enhance or create tension and to mix documentary footage with staged drama. Too bad the surf-and-turf crosscutting keeps getting shipwrecked upon the utterly dull happenings ashore back home. The whaling, despite the general distaste for the practice nowadays, is still a more palatable nation-founding business than slavery. Whale oil from an East-coast production at a time when business was moving west, including to Hollywood, where oil instead of at sea was found in the ground, the new porpoise of petroleum.