This week on “Picture Perfect,” take the lash and prepare to be keelhauled. We’ll have music from movies featuring tyrannical sea captains.
Tyranny and sadism are common ingredients in nautical adventure films, where hard-bitten sea captains find it better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.
At least that’s the mantra of Wolf Larsen, who does his best to uphold the philosophy of Milton’s Satan, in Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf.” Larsen is a tough Norwegian sea captain who presides over his ship, the Ghost, through strength and brutality.
Edward G. Robinson plays Larsen in the 1941 film version. John Garfield is the working class seaman who opposes him. And Ida Lupino is the castaway with a past, with whom he falls in love in spite of himself. The score is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who provided the music for some of the memorable seafaring adventures of Errol Flynn.
Captain Ahab is a familiar enough figure that he requires little introduction. Everyone knows about his ivory leg and his obsessive quest for the White Whale. Gregory Peck played Ahab in a 1956 film adaptation (with a screenplay by Ray Bradbury) of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” which was directed by John Huston. The score was by English composer Philip Sainton.
Humphrey Bogart was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Lieutenant Commander Phillip Francis Queeg, in the big screen adaptation of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” in 1954. Queeg, in charge of a U.S. Navy destroyer-minesweeper, is pushed over the edge by his obsession for strawberries pilfered from the officers’ mess. Max Steiner’s upbeat, patriotic theme provides a nice counterpoint to the interpersonal turmoil aboard the Caine.
Finally, the most iconic of tyrannical sea captains, Captain Bligh, will be represented with “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Historical novelists Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall make hay from the 1789 insurrection aboard the HMS Bounty.
The classic film version from 1935 starred Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. The 1962 remake featured Trevor Howard as Bligh, with Marlon Brando envisioning Christian as a kind of high seas dandy.
It’s said that Brando essentially directed all his own scenes himself. The film was colossal failure, earning back only $13 million of its $19 million budget. Nonetheless, it managed to inspire Bronislau Kaper to compose one of his most monumental scores.
Take a bucket of salt water with your stripes, you dog! It’s tyrannical sea captains on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
