Hoist the colors! Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 19, TCM takes us out to sea with a series of cinematic adventures aboard pirate ships. Prepare to be shanghaied at the ungodly hour of 6:00am when the first film, Hell Harbor, kicks off the day-long celebration.
I confess I have already written about Hell Harbor back when TCM was spotlighting the film’s director, Henry King. That was several years ago, and Hell Harbor was not part of the programming on that occasion. I am revisiting the film, because this time around, I get to remind viewers to watch this forgotten film from the early sound era. Indeed, the sound is the most remarkable part of Hell Harbor, because it was shot on location in Tampa, Florida, in 1929—barely two years after the adoption of sync sound.
Anyone familiar with early talkies knows the struggles faced by directors because of the cumbersome, unsophisticated sound equipment. The technology was so difficult to manage that producers and directors sacrificed visual style and good performances in order to ensure clear, audible dialogue. The cost of sound movies plus the frustrations of capturing audible dialogue made shooting sync sound on location seem too difficult, so movie production moved inside the studio, where it remained, more or less, till the 1950s. Viewers eventually adapted to the peculiar “Hollywood realism” that was a hallmark of studio production in which outdoor and indoor scenes had a similar hermetically sealed look.
The earliest sound films tended to look static, with no camera movement, no complicated blocking, and no rapid cutting. All of us have seen those early talkies in which a group of actors awkwardly huddle together as they speak their lines into a vase of flowers, a telephone, or any other nearby object that is doubling as a hiding place for the microphone. But, King hoped to prove that it didn’t have to be that way. With Hell Harbor, he set out to show the industry that sync sound did not mean the loss of dynamic-looking shots or an end to shooting on location. King made the film through Inspiration Pictures, the production company he founded with actor Richard Barthelmess and Charles H. Duell. It was released by United Artists, the studio formed by Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin to better control their own work and to extend creative control to others disillusioned with the major studios.
HENRY KING PREPARES A NEW SCENE ON LOCATION ON ROCKY POINT IN TAMPA.
The storyline of Hell Harbor follows the misadventures of Harry Morgan, a descendent of the notorious Morgan the Pirate. Harry lives with his spirited daughter, Anita, along Hell Harbor, a hidden cove in the Caribbean. Hell Harbor is home to a variety of scalawags, pirates, and misfits, including unscrupulous trader Joseph Horngold. After Horngold witnesses Harry stab a stranger to death in a seedy cantina, he strikes a deal to marry Anita in exchange for his silence. Anita refuses, hoping that Bob Wade, a dashing American sailor, will rescue her. Fiery Lupe Velez stars as the vivacious Anita; Jean Hersholt costars as Horngold; and handsome John Holland plays Wade.
After six months of scouting tropical locations, King decided the shaggy palms of Rocky Point, a tiny peninsula near Tampa, would be the ideal location. At the time, Rocky Point was a secluded area with a white, sandy beach and a small but picturesque harbor. King did not want to shoot a foot of film in a Hollywood studio, so he sent art director Robert Haas to Tampa to construct the ramshackle pirate village. Haas erected soundly constructed buildings, some with complete interiors. King wanted an authentically constructed village so that both exteriors and interiors could be shot on location. The director ordered his associates in Hollywood to ship the sensitive RCA Photophone sound equipment and the editing gear by rail to Tampa, which required seven freight cars. He not only shot Hell Harbor in Tampa, he also edited most of it there.
Despite the hardships of shooting sync sound on location, King used sound creatively in the film. He exploited sound effects to enhance suspense and used music to create atmosphere. In a scene in which Harry Morgan is hiding in the dark from Horngold, a nerve-wracking tension is built by the tell-tale squeak of the trader’s shoes as he comes closer and closer. To add a tropical atmosphere, King imported a band from Cuba to play authentic Caribbean music. The Sextette Habanero played in the cantina and also in the background during a love scene aboard Bob Wade’s ship. Unfortunately, recording live music and spoken dialogue simultaneously was not easy, and the dialogue is occasionally lost amid the sound of a strumming guitar.
KING DIRECTS VELEZ ABOARD THE ELSIE. THREE CINEMATOGRAPHERS WERE USED FOR THE PRODUCTION.
Shooting scenes aboard Wade’s boat proved a logistical nightmare. While the actors performed in front of the camera, a barge full of recording equipment floated nearby. Cables hooked to generators ran from the shoreline over the water to the barge, a distance of 1,000 feet. More cables ran from the barge to the cameras on the boat. The actors, the recording equipment, and the cameras had to be in perfect placement in order to capture the dialogue, and any act of nature — a gust of noisy wind, a flock of cackling birds, or a row of crashing waves — meant the shot had to be redone. A local newspaper, The Evening Independent, requested that visitors to the set be absolutely quiet, while boats with motors were not permitted in the area. Shooting was painstakingly slow. It took about 17 days to shoot aboard the ship for a handful of scenes that amounted to just over 15 minutes of screen time.
PRODUCTION WAS DELAYED WHEN A HURRICANE HIT TAMPA. MOST OF ROBERT HAAS’S STRONGLY CONSTRUCTED SETS SURVIVED.
Though slow and methodical in parts, Hell Harbor is interesting compared to the majority of early sound films. While most directors avoided camera movements, reduced the amount of camera set-ups, shot inside the studios, and refused to work with actors who had accents, King moved the camera extensively in several scenes, used a variety of shots in his film, shot on location thousands of miles from Hollywood, and selected Mexican-born actress Lupe Velez precisely because of her accent.
TAMPA RESIDENTS ALL LOVED LUPE VELEZ.
Velez proved a hit among the local Cuban population of Tampa, and she was a sport about making public appearances during shooting. She and costar Al St. John dutifully attended a dance held at the Davis Island Coliseum by the Tampa Legionnaires. Tickets were sold for a drawing in which the winner was afforded an opportunity to dance with Velez, and she graciously complied.
Hell Harbor was released in March 1930 on the same bill as the first “all-barkie”—a film with an all-dog cast—and a newsreel featuring a mongoose killing a cobra. No kidding. King’s efforts were rewarded with decent reviews that praised both the Florida landscapes and Velez’s performance as a “madcap lass.” Unfortunately, King’s experiences were not enough to persuade producers and directors that shooting on location was reasonable in the sound era, and studio production became the norm.