Men Without Women

....don't do it! Although, I do get it was done in ignorance on this occasion. Kenneth MacKenna (Burke) did it whilst captaining a submarine and this led to his submarine's destruction with all life on board lost at sea. Apart from his. He stood trial and was sentenced to death for his misdemeanor. His friend and prosecuting judge Charles Gerrard (Weymouth) put the blame on MacKenna as opposed to the woman (?) and this film begins with both MacKenna and Gerrard turning up in Shanghai. MacKenna is supposed to be dead and Gerrard thinks he has seen a ghost. However, before Gerrard can confirm his sighting, MacKenna sets sail on the China Sea on his next mission. However, things don't go well and the submarine sinks. Gerrard turns up in charge of the rescue mission...

Don't be fooled by the title as there are plenty of women in this film, especially in the beginning sections of shore leave in Shanghai. They sing, dance and entertain the sailors for a price. The majority of the film takes place on the submarine after it sinks and the cast have to battle with mental strength, poisonous fumes, a slight case of water ingress given they are at the bottom of the sea and they only have one oxygen tank which can support them for a few hours. They need divers to find them but they also have a torpedo chute which gets used rather ingeniously. They don't all make it.

The film has the added interest of being in that crossover period to sound and so we get speech title cards, occasional dialogue, silent patches and soundtracked scenes. It's a crazy mix, especially those scenes where a character starts speaking, then we get a title card only to return to the character to finish his dialogue with different words to what we have just been reading. It is always the same gist and it doesn't really matter but it is entertaining to watch. The only point which I couldn't get over was the non-sensical devotion that MacKenna has to this duplicitous woman with whom he had a dalliance. His notion of being a gentleman is rather annoying nonsense.

This film is of interest since it is in a period of transition between silent and sound pictures. The version shown on AMC has limited sound dialogue as well as title cards, and a few scenes have both! You hear John Wayne's voice before you see him in a small part.

John Ford was taking some hesitant steps in his feature films from 1928 to 1931 with the advent of the talking motion picture. In Men Without Women there are bits of dialog, a lot of sound effects, some singing, but it is still mostly a silent picture. It's also a pretty good one, despite the suggestive title. Men Without Women refers to the crew on a US submarine between the World Wars and in this case the sub is on duty in the China Seas.

An accident at sea sends the submarine to the bottom with the only survivors the slightly more than a dozen men who are in the forward area of the ship. Command is now in the hands of the only surviving officer, Ensign Frank Albertson who just reported for duty in Shanghai on his first assignment. He's green and not really experienced for the job.

The one who holds the crew together is Kenneth McKenna the chief torpedoman who has a past. During the first World War McKenna was a British submarine commander who in some pillow talk with his enemy agent girl friend divulged he was taking a British Field Marshal on a secret mission. The submarine sank, but he survived and he never reported back. In fact the commander of the rescue ship which is British thought he recognized McKenna. All that could be rescued are rescued, but some don't make it, a lot like the Poseidon Adventure.

This has to be the most claustrophobic film John Ford ever did. Most of the last 60% of the movie is in that submarine forward room and Ford does a great job with his ensemble cast. I find it ironic though because Ford is identified with photographing those wide open spaces in Monument Valley for his westerns. This shows he could handle a closed in environment. Those submarines back then didn't even have the capacity to submerge as long World War II vessels did let alone modern subs.

There are some fine scenes of the sea rescue and you can even catch a glimpse of John Wayne as the radio operator on the rescue vessel. The Duke had one fine head of hair in those salad days, but he's unmistakable.

All in all one of the best early sound films from John Ford.

Apparently, the full sound English language version of this movie no longer exists...but a hybrid version was just posted on The Criterion Channel..and this is the one I just saw. When I say hybrid, this is a film where music, some singing and sound effects were added...but the rest is essentially a silent film. This was the case with the supposed first full-length sound movie, "The Jazz Singer"...though it only had bits and pieces of sound within anotherwise silent film. It is odd to see a hybrid from 1930, as hybrid films mostly came out in 1927-29. By 1930 nearly all American productions had full sound. Perhaps Fox Studio held this one from release...and that would explain why Ford's first all-sound film actually came out a year before "Men Without Women".

There is a plot about a guy assuming a new identity following an accident in the navy. Well, this really isn't very important to the film. What is important is that the submarine he is on ends up colliding with another ship and sinking...and NOT in a normal or good way! What follows is a tense, harrowing and claustophobia-inducing portion of the film....exceptionally realistic and well made. In fact, I think this hybrid film is MUCH better than his earlier all sound movie, "The Black Watch". The best parts of the film are the direction and sets...they really are top notch.

By the way, if you do watch, keep a sharp eye out for John Wayne in a tiny role as a radio operator on the surface. Blink and you just might miss it!

John Ford was really good with endings, I'm beginning to realize. It's been obvious that his greatest strength up to this point in his career was bringing in a bunch of different narrative pieces into a singular set piece. The overall strength of the film really depended on the quality of what came before. Oftentimes the films are simply too short for the amount that goes in, but there's a very nice balance to be found in Men Without Women. The opening is very loose, but we get a surprisingly focused situation through the final half of the film that ends really well.

The only existing copy of Men Without Women left is an international edition. Filmed for sound in English, the copy left uses English intertitles (I believe they were recreated decades later) while the original sound is either gone completely or heavily muffled and out of synch with the picture. I was thinking of how the British film system had decided to film two copies of Alfred Hitchcock's Murder!, the German version being titled Mary (similar to the American and Spanish versions of the classic Dracula). It really seems like studios in the early talkie era really had no idea how to release films in markets with different languages. Subtitles would eventually come along, but until then, studios were going in all kinds of directions.

Anyway, the weird way this copy still exists doesn't really negatively affect the film overall too much. It's obvious that it was filmed for sound, and the worst part is when intertitles come up in conversations on film obviously directed for sound, breaking the flow of scenes in more pronounced ways than in naturally silent films.

Anyway, it's the story of a naval crew on a submarine leaving port from China. The first fifteen minutes or so is the crew ending their shore leave. This is the sort of side-character loving stuff that Ford had become well-known for. There are sailors buying vases for their mothers back home, some looking for good times with prostitutes (this was pre-Code), and generally just getting really drunk (again, pre-Code). It's lightly amusing stuff, but it obfuscates who this story is actually about. Our first clue to who the center of this story comes as the sub leaves dock and the captain of a battleship seems to recognize one of the sailors, the chief torpedoman Burke (Kenneth MacKenna). In addition, the character of Albert Price (Frank Albertson) from Salute appears, graduated as an ensign, as the newest member of the crew, coming aboard for his first voyage with the ship.

Something goes wrong very soon after they leave port. The engine room floods, killing everyone there and stalling the ship, keeping it from moving. There's also damage to both torpedo tubes, and the men cannot get off the ship. The bulk of the film is the crew on the submarine's bridge, left with Ensign Price as the senior officer, trying to buy time with their limited oxygen supply while the radio operator sends out S. O. S. Messages. The crew grows increasingly frantic with Burke keeping hold of the oxygen tank, trying to slowly dose out the gas to elongate the crew's ability to survive (I'm not entirely sure how doling it out in small bits would be great for survival, but sure). People go crazy, and one even needs to get shot.

The truth of Burke's past begins to come out at the same time. It turns out that he was a British officer, a captain of a ship that got sunk on a secret mission that, the court marshal determined, was either his fault or the fault of Burke's girl back home in England. He knows that he didn't give up the information, it was probably her. However, because the crown sees him as killed in action, they laid the blame on him. He then took on a new identity of join the American navy. Concurrently, we hear about Ensign Price's girl back home, and how he wants to go back to her.

Time goes on, and a destroyer receives their message and comes to rescue them. However, it is of course the ship captained by the man who could identify Burke's past and take him back to England. The torpedo tube gets cleared, allowing the surviving men to be released from the sub one at a time, but one man will have to stay behind to shoot the second to last man out, doomed to stay and die with the ship. Ensign Price, as the commanding officer, decides that it must be him who stays behind, however, Burke can't go up and not only face his own previous failings of not having gone down with his previous ship but also make it known that his girl back in England is a traitor. It's the kind of perfect little encapsulation of events that the movie rather adeptly builds up to. This conflict of duties in two men bound by duty is really well executed.

The first half is loose and sometimes hard to follow. The second half is clear-eyed and comes to a great conclusion. The health of the existing print means that we'll never see it as originally released in America, but I think it's good enough on its own. It's a solid story of men in the military, a favorite subject of Ford's, and I think it ends up working quite well.