Men Without Women

Men Without Women (1930)

Runtime: 73 minutes

Directed by: John Ford

Starring: Kenneth McKenna, Frank Albertson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Warren Hymer, Paul Page

From: Fox

Another collection recently added to the Criterion Channel that was of interest to me was Young Mr. Ford, as in some of the movies that John Ford made for Fox early in his prolific career. Of course I've seen classics like The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but what little I've seen from the beginning through the late 30's is also intriguing to me. '34's The Lost Patrol is a solid drama where a small patrol is stuck in a desert outpost by an unseen enemy, '35's The Informer is a very good tale involving an Irish man's guilt after he turns in his best friend to the British for a cash prize, and '32's Flesh at least made me laugh because it had Wallace Beery playing a professional wrestler. Point is, I'm happy to see a few of those while the channel has that collection available.

From the premise this was selected; I know there are “better” titles yet the idea of a movie mainly set in a sunk submarine and the small crew attempting to survive with a dwindling supply of oxygen-sign me up. This was only fine but perhaps the form it's in is a small reason why: much of it is silent but sometimes there's dialogue. You see, there was a sound version but the complete version is long gone. Instead there's only snippets; the rest is an International Sound Version. It'd take forever to explain in full but basically, that was done in the early years before subtitles and for movies which did not have a foreign language version made such as the Spanish Dracula from 1931. It has music and other sounds over the dialogue and there's intertitles in English or any other language. What they cobbled together here was any second of “the talkie version” over the surviving full print. This means that not only does it switch between the two during a scene, but more than once it was in the middle of a line of dialogue! A bizarre experience, it was.

While I wish the all-sound version still existed, as is this was still fine. A submarine crew (which is indeed a situation where it's Men Without Women) is first seen in Shanghai, literally acting like drunken sailors on shore leave. That provided laughs the first fifteen minutes. After that, it was sobering as the sub is struck by a ship and they sink to the ocean floor. Tempers flare and this demonstrates that disaster movie cliches existed even back almost a century ago. Not everyone survives to the end and among other things, “Give this message/item to my loved one if I don't make it” was an older trope than I first realized. If not a must-see, this was still solid and for a cast which had a familiar Ford face or two, they were fine. Note that in the final act, John Wayne has about 90 seconds of screentime in a minor part.