The Sea Hawk (1924)

Who's in it: Milton Sills (The Sea Tiger, The Sea Wolf), Enid Bennett (1922 Robin Hood), Lloyd Hughes (1925 The Lost World), and Wallace Beery (1922 Robin Hood, 1925 The Lost World)

What's it about: A former English privateer (Sills) is framed for murder and sold into slavery at sea, but rises to become a captain in the Barbary corsairs.

How it is: I haven't read Rafael Sabatini's novel yet, but I'm familiar with other work of his and this feels like a faithful adaptation of something he would write. The heroic Sir Oliver Tressilian tries to do the right thing by his half-brother (the ridiculously good-looking Hughes) who makes the mistake of killing a man in a duel without witnesses. But Sir Oliver is rewarded for his trouble by being suspected of the murder himself and the cowardly brother not only lets Sir Oliver take the fall; he also sells Sir Oliver to an unscrupulous captain (Beery) and starts making time with Sir Oliver's girl (Bennett).

I don't usually describe women as "somebody's girl," but Lady Rosamund Godolphin doesn't have enough will or personality to be her own person. She's completely wishy-washy, has no faith in Sir Oliver, and is really nothing more than a plot device for various characters to scheme and fight over. It's unbelievable that Sir Oliver goes to such effort to win her back.

But he does, and through a series of events at sea, he finds himself freed by Muslim corsairs and made a captain. True to Sabatini, lots of characters come and go, bringing sub-plots and intrigue with them. That gives The Sea Hawk an epic feel, which also reminds me of Sabatini.

There's much more good about the film than bad. The actors are quite convincing, even Bennett, considering what she's got to work with. I quite liked the complicated relationship between the brothers, too. Young Lionel doesn't start off evil, but he's driven to evil deeds by circumstances and weakness of character. All the antagonists in The Sea Hawk have believable motives. And I especially enjoy Wallace Beery's Captain Jasper Leigh, a scoundrel who quickly finds himself in a plot over his head and clings to Sir Oliver for dear life.

Using corsairs as the pirates is a good move too. I usually enjoy the liberty and style of Western pirates more than the structure and uniformity of the Barbary corsairs as presented here, but so many pirate films focus on the Caribbean that The Sea Hawk is a nice change of pace.

Rating: Four out of five English dogs.

Fantastic Four, et al.

I'm a lazy blogger this week. Mainly I've been spending my free time (what little there's been of it) trying to catch up on news from last week as well as keeping up with my responsibilities to Comic World News and Newsarama.
Couple of things you might be interested in though, as far as those sites are concerned. I did an interview with comics writer/inker Jimmy Palmiotti for CWN. He's one of the creators of the Painkiller Jane comic that's now become a TV series at the Sci Fi Channel, and he also wrote tomorrow night's episode (titled "The League") of the show. So, we talked about that and a ton of other stuff. Fun interview.

If you're into adventure comics at all, I wrote a review of Graphic Classics, Vol. 13: Rafael Sabatini for Newsarama. There's even some art from it for you to look at.

What else? I've deliberately spared you my thoughts on the Fantastic Four movie, but no longer. Like I said, I'm feeling lazy and this'll be easy to write about, if not particularly insightful.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

My hopes for it went from "high" after seeing the trailers to "dashed" after hearing the initial reviews and learning how Galactus was going to be portrayed. Even with dashed hopes though, I still managed to end up disappointed thanks to several factors. Like the movie's heroes not contributing to the resolution of the plot in any meaningful way. Or Doctor Doom's squeaky-voiced reappearance, the incredibly annoying general, and the general's inexplicable desire to let Doom do whatever the hell he wanted even though he didn't help out the least little bit. "You're not producing results, Dr. Richards, so we're bringing in Doom. No, he's not going to actually help or even appear in any scenes with you. He's just going to disappear for a while until he needs access to a deadly weapon that he shouldn't be allowed in the same country with and we're going to let him have it out of gratitude for his -- I dunno -- just hanging around, I guess."

And, oh yeah, Jessica Alba's generally looking creepy.

If you want to make Sue Storm Latina, make her Latina. I don't care. You can even make her a Latina who dyes her hair blonde. That's cool too. But they went way out of their way to hide her ethnicity with those unnaturally blue eyes and it didn't work. It makes Sue look either fake or really ashamed of her heritage. I mean, they didn't try to make up Michael Clarke Duncan to look white in Daredevil, so why is Sue Storm any different? (And don't tell me it was because the actor who plays her brother is white. There's all sorts of ways around that.)

But I could have overlooked all of that for a shot of something that looked like this. Actually, I'd have even settled for this. (Thanks to Jamie Baker for those.)

But, no. We got the freakin' Weather Channel.