What makes it different from others?

What a waste of my time!!!

Load of rubbish!!

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This movie surprised me again and again with its unexpected plot twists. Movies of this era are usually so predictable. It has a giant hideous shark and a scenes with this shark in the water that are genuinely terrifying. I did not expect effects from this era to stand up.There is a lot of distressing racist dialogue deprecating Chinese people.Claudette Colbert is like a fireplace. She radiates warmth, friendliness and enthusiasm. She has alarmingly thin eyebrows and overly thick face powder, but you get used to it. If she were in movies today, she could hold her own. She has that indefinable something.There is also a pretty racy scene when a women in a bar picks up the sea captain. I was shocked at how direct it was about what was going on. This must have blown the socks off the audience back in 1933.

Reliance Pictures was an off shoot of Edward Small productions and was also responsible for some really interesting films ("Palooka" (1934), an excellent adaptation of the Joe Palooka comic strip with Jimmy Durante and "Let "em Have It" (1935), a dynamic story about a ruthless gangster played by Bruce Cabot) during it's short life. James Cruze was hired by Reliance to direct it's first film in 1933, "I Cover the Waterfront". Based loosely on the best selling expose by reporter Max Miller, the film combined lurid fact with fiction, sprinkled with chilling drama.When reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) is called out to report on a nude bather (pretty risqué even for 1933!!) he meets Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert) and realises her father is Eli Kirk, an old fisherman, who he has suspected for a long time is involved in a smuggling racket. He is - people smuggling!!!and he is cold blooded enough to think nothing of throwing a chinaman overboard when the customs officers get too close. The one person he loves unconditionally is his daughter Julie but she has suspected for a while that something is troubling her father. Miller starts to romance Julie - to see what she knows, but of course the inevitable happens and they fall in love.Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon were the nominal stars but the real reason to watch is Ernest Torrence. He had always been a menacing villain ever since portraying the degenerate Luke Hatfield in "Tol'able David" (1921) but in this movie he really outdoes himself as the fearsome tobacco spitting killer, who will stop at nothing to avoid detection of his smuggling racket. An amazing story, according to "Human Monsters", involves a harpooning expedition, where several twenty foot sharks were caught for the scene in which illegal immigrants were hidden in the shark carcasses. Special breathing masks attached to snorkels enabled the Chinese extras to survive the scenes in which they are bound in chains, inside the sharks. "I Cover the Waterfront" also boasted a popular theme song, which became a jazz standard, covered by many artists, including Billie Holiday.Recommended.

With the title I Cover the Waterfront, I expected a social-conscience picture on the order of Warner Bros.' then contemporary I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. What I got was a part screwball comedy, part romance, part soap opera. Ben Lyon is the "I" in the title, a Joe Miller who hates his reporting job for a San Francisco paper because of non-event stories his boss keeps getting him. One of them is about a skinny-dipping woman named Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert) who is the daughter of Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence), a man Miller is interested in because he believes Eli has smuggled some Chinese immigrants illegally. This being pre-Code, there are some scenes that wouldn't have made it past the censors after 1934 like the one where Lyon and Colbert tour an old torture ship and Ben tricks Claudette into getting chained into one of the ship's devices just so he can kiss her without resistance! And she likes it too! There's also a brief picture of a nude woman in another scene. Witty lines dominate the first half with the two leads while the conflict between Colbert, Torrence, and Lyon takes part in the next in mostly compelling fashion resulting in a pretty satisfying denouement for those who believe in heartfelt conclusions. Well worth seeing for Colbert enthusiasts. P.S. This was Ernest Torrence's final movie.

For those who like "It Happened One Night", read = fans of great quotes, the boozer/ace/snoopy journalist flicks, or Claudette Colbert's big doe eyes, it's a must see film. Add to that the titillating and graphic aspects of the film, which was made only one year before the 1934 amendment of the Hayes motion picture production code* and you have a film or media history lover's paradise. I'm talking same-sex bed sharing, white people being restrained, graphic deaths, explicit techniques for breaking the law; the works. That's pretty much where the plot twists begin and end, but it's enough to keep a viewer, uh, captive. Anyway, the film is based on a book by a reporter who wrote about the shipping and fishing docks on the Pacific Ocean in the 1930s. There's unemployment and there's the black market; there's those who survive by any means necessary, and those who just sink for lack of work. And then there's journalistic integrity somewhere in the hazy mix.With an editor who won't leave him alone because the leads are constantly rolling in, wannabe investigative reporter Joe Miller (Ben Lyon) can't get a decent night's rest from his waterfront beat. Forced to cover everything from bootleggers to herring stench, mob arrests to nude swimmers, he's got no choice- he'd be out a job if he doesn't jump when the boss says so. His pantheon of sources, all characters, comes to include the daughter (Claudette Colbert at her sassy best)of his favorite mark for reporting: Eli Kirk, a kingpin of the docks and bootlegger extraordinaire. Seeing his in with Kirk's daughter, Julie, Miller dogs the seafarer, convinced he can pin him with illegal immigration of Chinese workers (whose lives are quickly extinguished by smugglers if the KGB-like Coast Guard should come their way, sirens blasting).Miller's editor, unlike the fish in whose bellies Kirk so often carries his bottles, doesn't bite, reminding his ace that he needs to prove it with facts, not hunches. So Miller sets out to use Julie, the captain's daughter, to prove it. Alas, as can be expected, love gets in the way. And he soon learns she may not bargain easily when it comes to her father. Will Miller be able to unearth the smugglers and get the girl or will he lose his editor's patience, steamy love affair, and his job in the process?The movie's got more life, wit, and zest in presenting determination and desperation by far than Grapes of Wrath (the movie). *From Wikipedia: 1934 changes to the CodeThe Motion Picture Association of America responded to criticism of the racy and violent films of the early 1930s by strengthening the code. An amendment to the code in June of 1934 prohibited any reference in a motion picture to illicit drugs, homosexuality, premarital sex, profanity, prostitution, and white slavery.