I COVER THE WATERFRONT


US, 1933, 75 minutes, Black-and-white.
Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, Ernest Torrance, Hobart Cavenaugh.
Directed by James Cruze.


While there is a focus on crime in this 1933 film, it is more a film about newspaper reporting and the consequences.

Ben Lyon portrays Miller, who covers the waterfront, who is dissatisfied with his job, pursues a fishermen who is a smuggler, clashes with his editor, has made mistakes with false leads, but perseveres.

He comes across a man sleeping in his bed, happy-go-lucky type of character whom he befriends – who has the opportunity of making ironic wisecracks throughout the film. His played by Hobart Cavenaugh.

The fisherman is a rogue, involved in fishing but also in capturing sharks, smuggling Chinese immigrants, contained in the sharks. His played by Ernest Torrance, Scottish actor who was also a musician – and does have an opportunity to play the piano in this film. He has a daughter played by Claudette Colbert – the same time that she was working for Cecil B De Mille in Cleopatra and The Sign of the Cross. This is a bright and breezy and forthright role – which led right into her playing a central role in It Happened One Night and her winning the Oscar for best actress of 1934.

The reporter encounters her swimming nude, a cheerful discussion, but then decides to use her and her friendship to get closer to her father and expose him. They do fall in love, the reporter sets up the Coast Guard to detain the boat, the reporter realising that the shark was a decoy and getting someone to slit the shark open with a refugee falling out. The old man is shot and wounded, his daughter tending him, the reporter coming to confront him, the old man shooting the reporter – and then realising that this was the man that his daughter was in love with. He dies, the couple clash – and then reconcile.

Familiar enough material but interesting to see in terms of the role of reporters and the period, but, especially, to see Claudette Colbert.