What makes it different from others?

the audience applauded

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

While it is an occasionally spirited film dealing with fishermen and their vessels on the seas, I am struck by the film's emotional core, which are those scenes of remarkable intimacy between Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew. The two actors have a sublime rapport, assisted by the direction of Victor Fleming. Tracy won an Oscar, of course, for his touching, humane portrayal which mixes wisdom with humor and courage, as Manuel, a simple Portuguese fisherman who teaches a young boy about life and helps that formerly spoiled young man mature. Bartholomew, in the role of the rich man's son, gives what has to be the performance of his career.I'm always particularly touched by the scene towards the film's end in which Bartholomew tries, in his own way, to tell the fisherman of his love for him. And it really is a moment of love between these two. Tracy is talking to the boy about the fact that the boy's father will be anxiously looking for him and they will need to be reunited. Bartholmew acknowledges that statement, but starts to ramble. He keeps his head down, looking at the floor as he tries to tell Tracy how he feels. It's one of the most heart wrenching moments ever captured on film. A little boy, formerly self absorbed and proud, dropping all pretense of pride as he emotionally opens up to a man he loves and respects, and can't bear to leave. Tracy, stunned, deeply moved, can only say, "My leetle feesh," as he places his hand on the boy's face. His look and that gentle simple gesture beautifully expresses his feelings at the moment, too. It's a scene that never fails to move me.Later in the film, after the fisherman, the boy's friend and hero, has drowned, Bartholomew, in that scene in which he cries in Manuel's boat, as his father tries to comfort him, captures the anguish and despair that we all feel when we have lost someone very special in our lives, and know we will never see that person again. Victor Fleming touchingly directs a moment which, to me, captures the agony of a young boy dealing with the terrible permanence of death.

This film starts a little slowly as it tries to show how much of a little twit Harvey (Freddie Bartholemew) really is.It gets a lot better once the boy is out at sea, having fallen overboard from a fancy liner and been rescued by Manuel, played well by a Portuguese-accented Spencer Tracy.An unlikely friendship builds between the spoiled brat and the old salt, backed up by Manuel's lovely hurdy-gurdy shanties and rousing scenes of wind-whipped,tumultuous seas.This film's cast is all-male until the poignant, penultimate scene in Gloucester, Mass., at which men, women, boys, and girls cast flowers and wreaths into the brine that has claimed their seafaring loved ones.I watched this film with my 11-year-old son, who at first was resistant but got drawn in. I agree with an earlier reviewer who said they just don't make movies like this anymore! A modern version would have to dazzle us with all sorts of computer-generated special effects. But this one wisely finds all the drama it needs in the relationship between two souls. The heir-less Manuel had lost his father at sea and gains a son before descending to his own fate.Perhaps there is a lesson here for oversolicitous, overprotective parents: Give your son some space! Let him find his own way. Give him a chance to become the man you hope will develop. Anchors away!

This is one of those films I recall very fondly from my childhood (on TV in the '70s, I hasten to add, my having been born three decades too late to catch its original release) and now, after having watched it again for the first time in probably 30 or 35 or so years, I recall it just as fondly. It's a classic tale from Kipling, a potent mix of morality play and coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a hazardous and hard-earned way to make a living. The fishing and sailing scenes are, as others have noted, very realistically presented and I see I am not alone in noticing that the actors were capable enough with their marine duties to make it look like they really WERE old hands at that sort of thing (something I noticed first with Mickey Rooney, who carried on his tasks with great efficiency, as if they were second nature, even while delivering dialog...his presence in the film is small but it's still a real standout).This film is loaded to the gunwales with talented actors, including some of the all-time greats. The incomparable Spencer Tracy, for example, is magnificent (and, yes, the scene where he faces down Carradine's character, with real menace suddenly supplanting his otherwise easy-going demeanor is a very powerful moment), and he here again proves why he is considered one of the very best actors to ever have worked in Hollywood. Lionel Barrymore is absolute perfection as the skipper, totally convincing in every detail. John Carradine, too, is 100% believable and a magnetic screen presence even by now. Melvyn Douglas, too, has captured a very nuanced and understated take on a character who is not in most of the picture but who is vital to its working. Every other actor in the ensemble delivers, too, just right.Young Freddie Bartholomew, of course, has the significant burden of basically carrying the film -- somewhat daunting even if your co-stars didn't include such as Tracy and Barrymore -- and he succeeds magnificently. He's utterly on target and convincing as the spoiled little brat who finally gets shaped into some sort of a better person, on the road to being a better man than he would have been had he not fallen off that ship. He's really a wonder in this film, perhaps one of the very best child actors ever. The depth of his hero-worship and love for Manuel, who he obviously contrasts to his more distant and workaholic father, is tangible and touching. He may be young still but, by the end, he's a man, or well on his way to being a real man, and not the kind of 'real man' who's some overbearing macho blowhard; he's had better examples than that aboard the schooner and his father's own journey, off-camera, suggests he'll do his best to be such an example. Manuel would have been very proud.

In its classic heyday, Hollywood made its own heroes. The source material for most classic pictures tended to be from theatre and literature, but the studios were savvy enough to tailor material not only to suit the medium but the resources available to them, without anyone crying "sacrilege!" It's not uncommon for a screen adaptation to cut out one character for the sake of length or beef up the role of another for commercial viability, but sometimes rearrangements need to be made for the sake of Hollywood form. The screenplay for Captains Courageous, whose writing team includes John Lee Mahin, a name on a ridiculous number of excellent MGM features, makes a number of massive changes to Rudyard Kipling's novel, surely the most significant of which is the foregrounding of Manuel to a major character. In the book, Manuel is simply another crew member and a relatively minor character, whereas in the film he becomes the very spirit of the story, and a surrogate father figure for young Harvey. It puts a powerful new emotional slant on the tale, but also puts the burden on the writers to build the character into someone who can carry the picture.This was the way Hollywood worked at the time. Its stars were characters, and its stories were built around powerful personas. Captains Courageous needed a Manuel. And Manuel needed a star who could breathe lungfuls of life into him. Spencer Tracy was perhaps an odd choice for a Portuguese fisherman – he was not one of those generic ethnic types like Mischa Auer or Akim Tamaroff who were cast as anything from Mediterraneans to Manchurians. But even this early in his career he had carved out a reputation for earthy, honest good guys, and this was indeed the very reputation Fritz Lang was trying to pervert as early as 1936 in Fury. And while Tracy can quite easily put on the "funny foreigner" act he never once loses sight of his character's emotional truth. He presents Manuel as a daffy caricature, and yet allows genuine tenderness, pride, grief or anger to shine through the stereotype – and that is the beauty of his performance.But the character of Manuel and his effective interpretation by Tracy cannot carry the picture alone. It's time to look at the contribution of director Victor Fleming. Fleming was himself a rugged outdoorsman who took a no-nonsense approach to film-making, which translated into excitement on the screen. Fleming pictures move, and they move quickly. Take the opening scenes on dry land. There is quite a lot to take on here – Freddie Bartholemew's character, his relationship with his father, and the sequence of events which lead him to be stranded in the Atlantic. Fleming packs it all into twenty minutes, and an engaging twenty minutes at that. How? First, the actors are coached to spit out their dialogue as quickly as is feasible. There is no room given to wordless contemplation, and there doesn't need to be at this point in the story either. Second, Fleming makes these scenes seem even faster than they really are. Characters walk as they talk, and shots often begin and end with movement, buffeting us from one point to the next.Even once we are underway on board the We're Here, motion is a continual presence. Crew members bustle about, sometimes getting between the camera and the protagonists, and everyone tends to keep working as they talk. This not only gives a realistic atmosphere to life aboard a busy fishing vessel, it gives a rough and relentless pace to the images. Just like young Harvey, we are being dragged along for the ride. Even in the more sedate scenes, such as Tracy playing his hurdy-gurdy on watch, Fleming keeps the sea sweeping up and down as a backdrop. After the furore that came before it's now quite a soothing presence, but we are never allowed a moment of total stillness, and when the story eventually gets back on dry land the difference is quite jarring.The crew of this fictional fishing boat are appropriately motley, with such distinguished hams as Lionel Barrymore, Charley Grapewin and John Carradine. Rather than harm the sincerity of the picture with their grandiosity, they actually fit in nicely as a bunch of salty dogs, and they stop Tracy's performance from looking farcical. At the very opposite end of the scale we have that fine naturalistic performer Melvyn Douglas, seeming appropriately muted for his role as the landlubber of the piece. Freddie Bartholemew was always a little too childish for his career to last into adulthood, but he does well here by simply reacting believably to those around him. By contrast, Mickey Rooney was always destined to be a star for life, because he never dwelled on being the child star, and was always an actor first and foremost. A final honourable mention goes to Sam McDaniel as Doc. He is the lesser-known brother of Hattie McDaniel, and although his career was very prolific this is one of his few credited appearances.I do not know whether there were significant numbers of Kipling purists around at the time, lamenting the swathe of differences between this version and the novel, but certainly now there are a lot of people who will criticise a film for not being the book. But what good would it do the book if they got their way? Surely it would make the novel truly redundant if motion pictures were just slavish copies of the printed word. This Captains Courageous has its own identity and is a classic of the screen. This does not mean it has ruined the legacy of what is an equally classic book.