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Edward Sedgwick | West Point | Murder in the Fleet
Classic Film and Television Home Page
Edward Sedgwick
Sedgwick made both silent and sound films. He worked with such comedians as Buster Keaton and William Haines. He and Keaton reportedly helped train Lucille Ball in comedy, as she prepared for I Love Lucy.
West Point
West Point (1928) is a silent film about a football player at West Point, the United States Army's military academy in New York. The film was shot on location, and stars William Haines as the cadet, Brice Wayne. The film is unexpectedly entertaining and emotionally involving. It clearly is one of the neglected gems of the silent film.
William Haines was one of the most popular stars of the silent era, and this is one of his best vehicles. He ranges from comedy to drama here. One can see why he was one of the idols of the day. His early scenes show his brash comic intensity, as an cocky young man with an attitude the size of Gibraltar. People clearly loved seeing someone this confident, and fun loving.
Gay Themes
William Haines is one of the heroes of the gay civil rights movement. He was blacklisted in Hollywood, despite his box office popularity, for refusing to hide his homosexuality. West Point is unexpectedly rich in a gay sensibility.The last section of the film deals with Brice's desire to be part of the Corps. On the surface, this is a militaristic theme. But in the film, it evokes other issues. Gay people have been systematically excluded from society. What many gay people want, more than anything else, is to be accepted by society, and to be part of the team. The film shows Brice's overwhelming feelings on the subject, and his struggle to become accepted by the social world around him. These sections awake deep feelings in the viewer. They emotionally invoke a whole world of gay experience. Haines' performance here is strongly felt and expressive. He conveys to the viewer exactly how these situations feel. The screenplay and direction also closely reveal this world, with a step by step emotional logic.
There is not an exact correspondence here between the surface story of the film, and the experiences it evokes. Brice has cut himself off from the Corps here by his own arrogance. By contrast, in the real world, gay people do not have to do anything wrong to be rejected. Society will reject even the finest gay human beings, without any provocation.
Many of the middle sections of the film concentrate on Brice's relationship with his roommate, Tex MacNeil (played by William Bakewell). MacNeil is clearly in love with Brice, and the film comes very close to being about a homosexual love relationship. Bakewell's performance is also emotionally charged. He has not held back; instead his romantic feelings spill out all over the screen.
Location Filming and Landscape
West Point was shot on location. It offers a documentary look at what the school was like in the 1920s. It especially looks at student life there. One does not have to try to imagine what a 1920s West Point football practice session looked like: the film shows it in detail.The film is also strong on showing beautiful West Point landscapes. Silent filmmakers loved "pictorial values", as they were called back then, and were always looking for striking landscape views to put in their films. West Point is in this tradition. Sometimes these landscapes are in the background: for example, during the boat ride up the Hudson River that brings the characters to the school at the start. In others scenes, the characters are in the center: the outdoor staircases down which Brice runs on the way to the train are especially beautiful.
Sports Stories in the 1920's
West Point evokes a whole world of 1920s college prose fiction and films:- F. Scott Fitzgerald became famous when his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was published, offering an inside look at Princeton student life. He also wrote some fine short stories dealing with college football heroes, who both Fitzgerald and the general public idolized.
- Harold Lloyd's screen comedy The Freshman (1925) shows the life of a rather unlikely college football hero. Joe Franklin's essay on Haines in his Classics of the Silent Screen (1959), still one of the best short pieces on Haines, suggests that Haines' typical screen character is based on and extends Lloyd's. Both men played brash young go-getters. Both Lloyd's hero in The Freshman and Haines have tremendous problems being accepted by other male students.
- Long before this, Wallace Reid had had some of his biggest hits playing athletes, such as race car drivers.
Tell It To the Marines
Haines had had one of his biggest commercial successes two years before with George Hill's Tell It To the Marines (1926), in which he plays a raw recruit who is hounded by tough Marine Sergeant Lon Chaney. As Joe Franklin pointed out, this film has been imitated endlessly ever since. Alan Dwan's The Sands of Iwo Jima (1948) featured John Wayne's even tougher Sergeant Stryker. I did not like Tell It To the Marines at all. Haines shows little of the charm here that flows through West Point, King Vidor's Show People (1928), or his other best films. George Hill's mise-en-scène is unpleasant, too. Hill specialized in portraying awful, grim, gritty and downright disgusting looking militarized institutions, both here, and in the pioneer prison drama The Big House (1930). These places are just plain depressing, and Lon Chaney's nasty Sergeant hardly makes them seem any more fun.Sports Numbers
One can see some symbolism in West Point in the choice of numbers worn by the football players. Haines' hero Brice Wayne wears 10 on his football uniform, both during practice as a plebe, and at the big game at the end. This perhaps reflects androgyny: 1 is a male, phallic symbol, and 0 is a female symbol. He is wearing numbers symbolizing both genders. Everyone in West Point wears two digit numbers, so 10 is also the lowest number worn by football players in the film. There are none of the single digit, phallic symbol numbers here such as 1, 7 or 9 that run through Lloyd's screen comedy The Freshman. Please see my article on Sports Numbers and Their Symbolism for a history of such numbers in film and comics.Another comic book connection: the hero's name Brice Wayne might be ancestral to Batman's secret identity, playboy Bruce Wayne.
Murder in the Fleet
Whodunits - and Death on the Diamond
Murder in the Fleet (1935) is clearly an attempt to repeat the "success" of Sedgwick's Death on the Diamond (1934) the year before. Both are mystery stories, in which a mysterious killer is picking off members of the cast. Both take place in an all-male, highly macho institution: the baseball team of Death on the Diamond, a US Navy cruiser here. The members of both institutions wear uniforms. In both cases, we are treated to detailed inside looks at these organizations, which somehow fail to convince. The emotional point of view is that of a small boy who hero worships these characters in a Boy's Own Paper fashion. I put the word "success" in quotes: both are pretty cornball films. They are somewhat unusual as non-series whodunits, with fairly big name performers.Both films have young, pretty boy leads: Robert Young in Diamond, Robert Taylor here. Both have given much better performances for other directors. Sedgwick emphasizes their juvenile quality. Both are neophytes in their respective organizations, with Young a rookie pitcher, and Taylor a Lieutenant just out of Annapolis. Second lead Donald Cook here is much more convincing as a naval officer. He has the dignity, maturity and confidence that Taylor seems to lack. Taylor always looks doubtful, confused and apologetic. Oddly enough, Taylor often is partly out of his Naval uniform here, whereas Cook is always in his. Usually the leading man of a movie gets to wear the sharpest clothes.
Both films also have "comedy" relief in the form of an ongoing battle between Nat Pendelton and Ted Healy. Their relentless comic duels are sometimes annoying and sometimes funny. Pendelton is a convincing tough guy, who adds to the atmosphere of Depression era, low brow, ordinary guy, working stiff machismo.
Both films recall Sedgwick's West Point: Death on the Diamond in its focus on sports teams, Murder in the Fleet in its emphasis on military uniforms, and membership in a Corps.
Staging the Murder Scene
Both films have a dramatically staged murder scene, in which a character's body keels over in a spectacular way. In Diamond, a baseball player's murdered body falls out when a locker door is opened. (My folks remembered this scene from their childhood. It caused a sensation then among all the neighborhood kids.) In Murder in the Fleet, we see the actual murder. A gun shoots, then Sedgwick cuts to a group of naval personnel. One of them collapses while all the others stand stiffly at attention. The scene is both absurd, and visually memorable. It is hard not to imagine it drawing snickers in a collection of Hollywood's Campiest Moments. Still, it shows imagination.Both scenes show some basic anxieties. They suggest a team is vulnerable. In both cases, the body emerges from a team's infrastructure: the locker room in Diamond, a group of Navy men stiffly doing their job on ship here. There is an attack on team through its members. As the murdered members proceed from the vertical to the horizontal, we feel the sense of lost comradeship on the team.
Scriptwriter Spig Wead - and the Navy background
Frank "Spig" Wead contributed to this script, one of many Navy pictures he worked on in Hollywood. Perhaps he helped with the tale's finale, which is a genuinely well done sequence that takes full advantage of the film's Navy cruiser setting. I learned things about ships that I didn't know here. This finale could give pointers to today's Naval thrillers, such as U-571 (2000).Earlier in the picture, Wead develops another one of his persistent themes, a Naval officer whose girl friend is pressuring him to leave the service. We'll see this in more developed form later in Wead's life story in John Ford's The Wings of Eagles (1957). At the end, here, the heroine relents, and encourages the officer to stay in the Navy. She tells him, "You taught me about men and their feelings. I didn't know how all you guys felt about each other." This is a pretty direct look at men's emotions, and it would be unusual in 2000, let alone 1935.