Fishing and Captains Courageous
Last Christmas, my sister told my parents that she didn’t think she’d ever seen a black-and-white film. This was somewhat shocking for me to hear. I’m a decade older than her and my childhood was different. We watched movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age all the time.
For most of my youth, my mother was the authorized biographer of Spencer Tracy, a silver-screen legend. I recall hanging out in a lot of libraries, while she scrolled through microfilms. I imagine I was one of very few 10-year-olds in 1997 who had a dead-on James Cagney impression.
In the end, life got in the way and she had to give up the project. Her research was incorporated into James Curtis’ 2011 biography of the actor, which critic Leonard Martin called “a high-water mark in this field.” I’ve yet to read it, but I want to.
All of this is a long-winded way of explaining why I recently rewatched Captains Courageous, a 1937 film directed by Victor Fleming, for which Tracy won an Academy Award for Best Actor. It’s certainly not the Tracy picture I’ve seen the most — that would probably be Boy’s Town — but I remember watching it a number of times as a child.
Based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling, the movie centers on a spoiled boy, Harvey Cheyne, played by Freddie Bartholomew. The son of a tycoon, Cheyne falls off a steamship bound for Europe and is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman named Manuel Fidello. Spencer Tracy employs a dubious accent in the latter role.
It’s a coming-of-age story. Cheyne learns the importance of hard work, honesty and other virtues while under the care of Fidello. Ultimately, the surrogate-father figure is cut in half by boat rigging. This is presented in such a circumspect manner, that, as a child, my mother needed to explain what was happening.
Looking at the film through an animal-liberationist lens, there is at once too much material to discuss and not enough. There’s too much in the sense that the whole movie is about nonhuman exploitation, specifically fishing. Yet, there’s simultaneously too little, because the movie doesn’t question or complicate the ethics of killing animals.
Beyond Tracy’s accent, Fidello is a somewhat cartoonish character. Everything is related to fishing for him. He sings about fish. He uses the phrase “little fish” as a term of endearment. His vision of the afterlife is joining his father on a fishing boat in heaven. The passages from Christian scripture he references are — you guessed it — about fishing.
We learn Fidello insists on handline fishing and hasn’t used a trawl since his father died. As far as I can tell, the reason for this isn’t made clear. But it doesn’t seem related to any ethical objection to trawling. In fact, he bets fishermen in another boat that he and Cheyne can catch more animals using his method.
Later, with a fish flopping on the the floor of their vessel, Cheyne asks Fidello if he can unhook the animal. Fidello seems to interpret this as welfarist concern, though Bartholomew’s line delivery makes it sound more like his character just wants to be involved. Regardless, Fidello tells Cheyne not to bother, because they “don’t know these fish personal.”
Fidello releases a different fish he catches into the water, but this isn’t done out of mercy. He does it out of a sense of fair play. Cheyne confesses he tangled the rival fishermen’s trawl so Fidello would win the wager. This violates Fidello’s concept of honor, which he seeks to teach the boy.
I hesitate to learn too much about the film’s production. I assume it was shot in some type of tank, but the fish were real. More than 60 years later, director Ridley Scott would use only rubber and animatronic fish during production of 2000’s The Perfect Storm.