Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day Thirty-Six: A Lot More Ship

Various computer issues have stopped me from having a fruitful week of watching and now I'm desperately trying to get up to at least forty films before I go to Portugal on Thursday. Last time I watched my first film starring the iconic Bette Davis and this time was no different as I watched the first film in the list starring another icon - Spencer Tracy. Of the early screen men (Bogart, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda) I was less familiar with Tracy's work than I was any others. I'm not sure how good it was to start off with Captain Courageous while, although this won Tracy his first of two consecutive Best Actor Oscars, he is also given second billing as child-star Freddie Bartholemew's name is top on the poster. In fact Tracy doesn't appear for at least the first twenty minutes of the film as first we follow Barthelomew's Harvey a very spoilt and obnoxious child whose father is incredibly rich and Harvey uses this to try and bribe his way through life. When his father finally wises up to this fact he takes Harvey away with him to Europe, to try and introduce him to the world of work however Harvey starts messing around and ends up falling out of the ship but is soon rescued by Tracy's Portugese fisherman Manuel. Manuel is part of the crew on a fishing ship and Harvey has to quickly learn how to be productive and how he has to work for his money. He becomes less spoilt and looks to Manuel as a father figure as he spends more time with him than his father normally does (Harvey's mother never features in the film and we assume she died in his childhood). The film is mainly about fathers and sons and growing up and its those two films that are seen throughout the film. There is quite an emotional scene towards the end of the film where things change up but at the end Harvey's father learns to appreciate his son and vice versa.

While I thought Tracy did a good job as Manuel, I'm not sure whether it was an Oscar winning performance. I think mainly its due to the kind of family-adventure nature of the film because while it is a naval adventure movie it never kind of explores any adult themes in the way something like Mutiny on The Bounty did although as you can see from the poster it is just as good. But I think Tracy is only that good because he is backed up by a very good almost all-male cast, at the beginning of the film I did want to dropkick Bartholemew but at the end of the film I'd warmed to him, it must've been so hard as a child actor in the early days of cinema to know how to pitch yourself between cutsie and annoying. Another child star on board is Mickey Rooney who has a supporting role as the Captain's son while Lionel Barrymore again steals every scene as the ship's Captain. Very well made and well paced I wish a lot more non-animated family films were as good as this these days, but I don't think we'll ever seen Brendan Fraser or Steve Martin nominated for their roles in their PG friendly films.