Movies : Adventure : DVD Rip : English
August 20, 1932
Charles Laughton, the English Actor, Makes His Film Debut as an Insanely Jealous Husband.
By MORDAUNT HALL.
Published: August 20, 1932
Charles Laughton, the English actor, whose portrayal in the play "Payment Deferred" won high praise here and in London, makes his film début in "Devil and the Deep," an adaptation of a story by Harry Hervey, which is now at the Paramount. Notwithstanding the unimaginative direction of several of the sequences, the hesitant and often trite dialogue, this melodrama, owing to the excellent work of Mr. Laughton and Tallulah Bankhead and a most interesting climatic episode, succeeds in being something out of the ordinary and a picture that always holds one's attention.
In this narrative of a husband's jealously of his wife, Mr. Laughton plays the rôole of Charles Sturm, a submarine commander, and Miss Bankhead impersonates his wife, Pauline. Mr. Laughton's enunciation is very English, and although the rôle, perhaps, is not as well suited to his style as that of the bank clerk in "Payment Deferred," he gives a clever characterization. Whatever weaknesses there are in his performance are evidently due to the direction and the lines. Sturm is quite an ingratiating person in public, but in his home the sole topic of discussion concerns his wife's affair with one or another junior officer. Sturm laughs at his own jokes and forgets that his wife has heard them, not once but several times. After seeming to be good natured at a party, he returns to his abode ashore, somewhere off the coast of Northern Africa, and without a word slaps Pauline's face. Then he informs her that the young officer, Lieutenant Jaeckel, with whom she is more or less infatuated, has been transferred from the submarine on the ground of inefficiency.
She pleads with her husband to save the young man's career and Sturm consents to do so if she invites Jaeckel to come to their home that night and let him listen from the veranda to decide whether his suspicions are or are not ill-founded. Pauline calls up Jaeckel and the Lieutenant appears in the drawing room and nothing untoward happens, but Sturm believes that his wife has signaled to Jaeckel that he Sturm, was on the veranda.
By a coincidence, after a quarrel with her husband. Pauline accidentally encounters Lieutenant Sempter, whom she does not know is Jaeckel's successor. It is only a matter of a few hours before Pauline falls in love with him and only when he comes to her home does she realize that he is a naval officer attached to her Husband's submarine.
The closing phase of this tale is aboard the submarine, which the insanely jealous Sturm steers so that it crashes into an oncoming steamship. Sempter, realizing what is about to happen, succeeds in partly dodging the big vessel, but the submersible is badly damaged and slowly descends to the bottom of the bay. Pauline is among those aboard and how she and others are saved is pictured in an absorbing fashion, as is also the mad Sturm's end.
Miss Bankhead is at her best in this film. Gary Cooper gives a sympathetic and vigorous interpretation as Lieutenant Sempter. Paul Porcasi is capital as a loquacious Arab. But Mr. Laughton's forceful and resilient portrait is the outstanding histrionic contribution.
There are some curious conceptions of naval procedure and uniforms, but as the country to which the officers belong is not named, this is not an important point, except that, because of Mr. Laughton's intensely English delivery, one is apt to conclude that he is impersonating an officer of the British Navy, and therefor one wonders at the peculiar uniforms, as well as at the idea of having a four-striper in command of a submarine.
DEVIL AND THE DEEP, based on a story by Harry Hervey; directed by Marion Gering; a Paramount production. At the New York and Brooklyn Paramounts.
Pauline Sturm . . . . . Tallulah Bankhead
Lieutenant Sempter . . . . . Gary Cooper
Commander Charles Sturm, Charles Laughton
Lieutenant Jaeckel . . . . . Cary Grant
Hassan . . . . . Paul Porcasi
Mrs. Planet . . . . . Juliette Compton
Hutton . . . . . Henry Kolker
Mrs. Crimp . . . . . Dorothy Christy
Mr. Planet . . . . . Arthur Hoyt
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