Louise Brooks certainly didn't think so - she thought it was about a pair of 'homos' (as she called them). Well maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. What is is, though, is a pretty average and lightly entertaining buddy story involving that great slab of gammon, Victor McLaglen (as Spike Madden) in the lead role, and a rather nervy Robert Armstrong (as Bill) as his antagonist and, eventually, firm friend.
McLaglen may be consistently outlandish, indeed almost a cartoon character, but he is never less than engaging and enjoyable. He meets his match in a brazen hussy (Louis Brooks, as Mlle. Godiva, or Tessie from Coney Island).
Howard Hawks keeps this film going at a breezy pace, and there are a few wild, Hawksian shots of a real life (four (?) masted) barque struggling through a heavy sea.
Hawks always had a fine eye for an alluring girl and we not only have Brooks but also Maria Casajuana, who electrifies the screen for a few moments (in a scene set in a bar in Rio de Janeiro). Unfortunately, I have never seen her in anything else. It also seems that he put Myrna Loy appeared in a scene set in Singapore, but this was not in the print that I saw in the National Film Theatre in London, as part of the short Louise Brooks season.
For some reason this film was very popular in Europe, and Brooks caught the eye of G. W. Pabst...and the rest is history. It also (much later, in the late 1950s) caught the eye of the great Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise (Hawks was very popular with French critics at the time), which led to the first postwar rediscovery of Brooks.
McLaglen may be consistently outlandish, indeed almost a cartoon character, but he is never less than engaging and enjoyable. He meets his match in a brazen hussy (Louis Brooks, as Mlle. Godiva, or Tessie from Coney Island).
Howard Hawks keeps this film going at a breezy pace, and there are a few wild, Hawksian shots of a real life (four (?) masted) barque struggling through a heavy sea.
Hawks always had a fine eye for an alluring girl and we not only have Brooks but also Maria Casajuana, who electrifies the screen for a few moments (in a scene set in a bar in Rio de Janeiro). Unfortunately, I have never seen her in anything else. It also seems that he put Myrna Loy appeared in a scene set in Singapore, but this was not in the print that I saw in the National Film Theatre in London, as part of the short Louise Brooks season.
For some reason this film was very popular in Europe, and Brooks caught the eye of G. W. Pabst...and the rest is history. It also (much later, in the late 1950s) caught the eye of the great Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise (Hawks was very popular with French critics at the time), which led to the first postwar rediscovery of Brooks.