What connection could there possibly have been between Rafael Sabatini and Buster Keaton? Sabatini was hailed as a brilliant writer of popular fare and, for the adaptation of his 1915 novel about a 16th century English nobleman who takes on a new identity as a fearsome corsair, Buster Keaton loaned out his much-valued man-of-all-skills, Fred Gabourie, to design and build the ships. The regular art director was the great Stephen Goosson, who later designed Shangri-La for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon in 1937.
Although the British trade magazine, The Bioscope, described the film as a “swift-sailing pageant-play of piratical adventure,” they also called it “lengthy and elaborate.” Indeed, it lasts more than two hours—too long for most children and too complicated, what with Sabatini’s revenge plot and much romantic intrigue. So, the rest of us can sit back, happy to enjoy the perfectly chosen English locations recognizable from many a summer holiday, although they never actually left California.
When I first saw The Sea Hawk, I heard muttering about the impossibility of Moorish galleons sailing from North Africa to Britain fueled only by sails and the muscle-power of slaves. But not so long ago, I visited Baltimore, a town in Ireland’s County Cork, which displays a memorial to the ancestral villagers “who were forcibly removed from their homes by Algerian pirates on the 21st June 1631 and sold into the slave markets of Algiers.”
As one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, director Frank Lloyd had a high reputation, having made epics such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and Les Miserables (1918). Lloyd was born in 1886 in Scotland but had left as a child with his family. He became a stage actor before immigrating to Canada and quickly realized his lack of ability: “I was so bad at acting that they had to put me on directing in self-defense.”
He made many pictures set in Britain, such as Oliver Twist (1922), with Jackie Coogan, and the much-loved talkies Cavalcade and Berkeley Square (both 1933). He followed Sea Hawk with another epic, this one set in the Alaskan Gold Rush, Winds of Chance (1925), which his loyal descendants, Antonia Guerrero and Christopher Gray, spent months restoring and presented in Los Angeles this winter to a standing ovation.
While I was interviewing movie veterans in California and elsewhere, I came across enormous warmth and admiration for Lloyd. Percy Marmont called him “Christ-like.” Gary Cooper: “He was a prince.” Clive Brook: “A great director with people.”
Bessie Love recalled that despite all this, his directing could sometimes be unorthodox. For 1924’s The Silent Watcher with Glenn Hunter, both actors were feeling skittish before a scene in which, as newlyweds, they were gradually to make up after a row. “Frank Lloyd did a most extraordinary thing,” Love says, “and had the bed wired up and [gave] Hunter a shock … We had all our excitement and laughs for the day. We could now settle down to doing some weeping.”
Anthony Slide’s 2009 biography of Lloyd points out that he was the first British-born director to be nominated for an Academy Award and the only Scotsman to have won the coveted prize for directing, with 1929’s The Divine Lady, about Admiral Horatio Nelson’s affair with Lady Hamilton during the Napoleonic Wars. Slide writes: “Frank Lloyd had loved anything to do with the sea since childhood, but it was not until The Sea Hawk that he was given the opportunity to transfer that affection, in truly awe-inspiring style, to the screen.”
Slide describes the film as the first American production to deal with Moorish history, going on to say that “it was claimed that months of research were necessary to ensure the accuracy of historical details for the scenes in Algiers.” Lloyd was also determined his production “would contain no shots of miniatures floating in a tank,” according to Slide’s account, so “four 16th century ships were built to scale under the supervision of Fred Gabourie and transported to Catalina from a dry dock in San Pedro. For the Spanish galleon, a 172 feet long sailing ship was refurbished, with room for a crew of one hundred. An old ferryboat was used as the foundation for the Moorish galleon, with a length of 175 feet.” To show they’d done their research, Gabourie and his team distinguished between galleons and a three-masted vessel with heavier fire-power called a galleass, introduced in the 16th century to answer the increasing threat from Barbary pirates.
The casting began in January 1924 and was unusually skillful. Milton Sills, whom Slide correctly describes as “much under-rated,” had been a fellow in philosophy at the University of Chicago before becoming an actor. He worked on the stage until he met the great French émigré director Maurice Tourneur, who gave him a leading role in 1914’s The Pit.
Sills declared The Sea Hawk to be his favorite film, yet the fan magazines made repeated remarks about his alleged miscasting as a tough “he-man.” The campaign was led by the editor of Photoplay who eventually relented and claimed Sills “a great friend with a great mind.” Sills went on to hold his brawny own in films like 1926’s Men of Steel. Sills’s character in The Sea Hawk was inspired by actual historical figures like Dutchman Jan Jansen, who escaped the galleys, “turned Turk,” and joined the Barbary pirates in the early 17th century as Morat Rais (often anglicized to Matthew Rice), and the one responsible for that 1631 sacking of Baltimore.
Enid Bennett, who was born in Australia in 1895, appeared on the U.S. stage and later played the heroine in a number of Thomas Ince pictures. She was Maid Marion to Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922). She married Fred Niblo in 1919 and accompanied him to Italy for the shooting of Ben-Hur (1925). In 1963, she married another outstanding director, Sidney Franklin, whose great 1922 film, Smilin’ Through, was a silent-era hit.
Sea Hawk’s master of the sword was a former instructor in the Belgian army, Fred Cavens, who taught the art of fencing to nearly all the screen’s major swashbucklers: Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, and Errol Flynn. The role of captain of the guard was taken by a genuine western outlaw turned film actor, Al Jennings.
First cameraman was Frank Lloyd’s favorite, Norbert F. Brodin. Lloyd’s publicity man, J.L. Johnston, contributed a piece to American Cinematographer detailing Brodin’s work on The Sea Hawk, whose photography had already been garnering high praise among critics. The article discusses the day-for-night shooting of a battle off Catalina Island, calling the resulting lighting effects “truly uncanny,” and describes perilous camera positions atop a thirty-five-foot mast as well as on the edge of a cliff. The article ends on a roundup of laudatory quotes culled from Los Angeles-area reviews, including Guy Price’s in the Herald, which quipped: “I could sit and look at the sea scenes by Norbert Brodin until the Democrats get together on their candidate.”
Perhaps the most interesting comments were made by Variety critic Fred Schader. His review, signed as “Fred,” contained the phrase that every filmmaker quietly prays for, then and now: “There isn’t a thing lacking in this picture that any picture fan could want. That is a lot to say about a costume picture, but nevertheless, this one is 100 per cent.”
Schader goes on to tell the story of the film’s production in unusual detail for a trade paper review and his summation must have brought profound satisfaction to Frank Lloyd and his company: “That is the story, but its handling is a work of art that will go down in screen history as a really great picture.”
Frank Lloyd continued a colorful and productive career, which included yet another successful seafaring film, Mutiny on the Bounty, with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, winner of the Best Picture Oscar for 1935 and so popular MGM reissued it in 1939. (There have been multiple versions throughout cinema’s history, from 1916’s made in Australia through 1984’s, called The Bounty and shot in New Zealand and French Polynesia.)
Although The Sea Hawk was extremely successful, the subject of Barbary pirates was not tackled again until James Cruze, with his epic masterpiece Old Ironsides (1926). Let us hope that rarely shown and outstanding film will also appear again on our screens before long.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra