I Cover the Waterfront

Rating:
Summary: Joseph M Schenck presents
Review: Director James Cruze's film is set in a fishing waterfront area of California during the Depression, where Ben Lyon, a reporter for The Standard newspaper, is trying to get evidence against the Chinese immigrant smuggler father of Claudette Colbert.
The screenplay is based on the bestseller by Max Miller and describes the Chinese as "chinks", with a brothel being named a "boarding house". Colbert gets a funny line when Lyon shackles her to a torture device in a ship's museum, and kisses her, and she replies "That WAS torture". There is the implausibility of a bandaid being applied to someone after back surgery!, but also a spit putting out someone's lit cigarette, and a shark attack at sea.
As well as proving a joke about a large worker at the "boarding house", Lyon's drunken friend Hobart Cavanaugh is also responsible for 2 subtextual moments which are far more shocking than Colbert's initial apearance supposedly naked. In one, Cavanaugh and Lyon share a bed, and in the second, thinking Cavanaugh has cleaned his house, Lyon says "If you could only cook" and Cavanaugh strikes a fey pose.
The soundtrack has long periods of silence against the dialogue, then intermittent jazz music to play over scenes between Lyon and Colbert, with the love scenes getting serious romantic music.
Cruze also uses a diagonal screen wipe often.
To compensate for Lyon's lack of screen charisma, Colbert is the best thing going here, funny and sassy when she slaps another woman. In one scene she uses a wheazy emotional voice for anger, and her favoured left side to the camera is not so noticable as in her later films.

Rating:
Summary: Smuggling scrutinized from a journalistic point of view
Review: This film, that is no real thriller but has to do with crime, shows how the smuggling of goods or people (in this case Chinese people) into American society is not done for any political or moral reason, but only to make a profit, even if it is paid by the smuggled people with hard cash or who may even die in the adventure. This film shows the responsibility of a journalist to expose such facts but he will encounter the resistance of many people. His boss first who will only question the quest from the viewpoint of the profit he can make out of it. His colleagues who only see him as running after glory and fame, if not money. Many other people in society who will see the journalist as a meddler in other people's business, even if this business is criminal. Finally this film shows how a dying father may decide to save the life of his worst enemy for the sake of his daughter's love. Love could be stronger than hatred and death.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU