Flicker Alley, a
leading curator, restorer and distributor of lost and forgotten cinema
gems, digs up a particularly niche bunch for its latest collection.
Under Full Sail: Silent Cinema on the High Seas details early celluloid
depictions of the grand vessels that sailed the world’s waterways at
the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The five films
(one full-length and four shorts, all excellent transfers) are
snapshots of a forgotten time when mammoth ships with masts to the
heavens took seafarers to adventure, danger and romance — both
idealized and real.
The flagship feature, The Yankee Clipper (1927),
has a deep pedigree. Produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by
Rupert Julian (fresh off of The Phantom of the Opera), it’s a
big-budget mix of history and romantic melodrama about the political
race between Britain and the U.S. to dominate Chinese tea trade routes
and their respective clippers’ literal race from Foo Chow to Boston.
The nautical sequences are thrilling, but otherwise Yankee sails
tepidly around a young American captain (a pre-Hopalong Cassidy William
Boyd) and a British society lass’ romance and a sprite stowaway’s comic
relief. The bonus shorts are valuable primary documents and often
surprisingly amusing — the toned, sun-drenched singing sailors
rhythmically working away in The Square Rigger (1932) look straight
from a Kenneth Anger flick. The 10-minute extract from Down to the Sea
in Ships (1922) proves the most exciting, though, following with
intimacy an authentic, brutal whale hunt conducted old-school Moby Dick
style. Grade: B
