On June 1, the TCM website featured an article in Movie News titled “TCM Selects 15 Most Overlooked Classic Hollywood Directors” as part of their month-long celebration of filmmakers. The list ranged from the expressionist-influenced Frank Borzage to 1950s sci-fi favorite Jack Arnold, but I was particularly pleased to see that Henry King made the cut.  

            Like others on the list, including Borzage, Allan Dwan, and Clarence Brown, King started his career in the silent era. At first an actor, King began to make films in the mid-teens, eventually directing over 60 silent movies by the time the sound era arrived. In 1930, Fox placed the experienced director under contract, and he worked for that studio (later 20th Century Fox) until the end of his career in 1962, when he finished almost 50 years as a Hollywood moviemaker with Tender Is the Night. King became one of Darryl F. Zanuck’s most trusted directors, and through the years, he gave Fox a number of Golden Age classics in a variety of genres, including In Old Chicago (1938), Song of Bernadette (1943), Twelve O’Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter (1950), and Carousel (1956). Toward the end of his career, his status as a notable veteran was indicated by the assignments he was entrusted with, particularly films based on American literary works such as Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Sun Also Rises (1957).

            King and his peers not only survived the silent era to work in sound but also moved from black & white cinematography to color when the latter became more of an industry standard during the 1950s. In my opinion, these veterans really understood the impact of major technological shifts on the movies they were making. Those who worked in the extreme tonal ranges of black and white understood the impact of color in ways that modern directors do not. And, some who had made silent movies learned the advantages and disadvantages of sync sound the hard way — on the job – something later directors never had to contend with.

            Much has been written about the struggles that directors had during the sound era because of the cumbersome, unsophisticated sound equipment. The technology was so difficult that many producers and directors cast aside concern for style and craftsmanship in order to capture clear, audible dialogue at any cost. Fear of rising costs, frustrations in capturing audible sync sound dialogue, and difficulties in shooting on location drove filmmaking inside the studios. The result was static-looking movies with no camera movement, no complicated blocking, no rapid cutting, no location shooting —  and no life. One need only watch The Lights of New York, The Cocoanuts, Bulldog Drummond, or countless other movies from 1927 through around 1932 to see the negative impact of sync sound on the movies. The sight of a group of actors huddled together  in a hermetically sealed studio and shouting their lines into a vase of flowers, a telephone, or any other nearby object that doubled as a hiding place for the microphone pales in comparison to the fast-paced, well-edited silent movies shot on authentic locations in the mid-1920s.     

            In the late 1920s, when the major studios were converting to sound amidst an atmosphere of apprehension and trepidation, Henry King understood perfectly well what was going to be sacrificed because of sync sound, and he was determined to prove that it didn’t have to be that way. With his film Hell Harbor, King set out to show the studios that sync sound did not have to mean an end to shooting on location.        

LUPE VELEZ PLAYED ANITA MORGAN, DAUGHTER OF A PIRATE.

            A raucous pirate adventure starring Lupe Velez, Hell Harbor (sometimes erroneously referred to as “Hell’s Harbor”) was shot entirely in Tampa, Florida. It tells the story of Harry Morgan, a descendent of the notorious Morgan the Pirate, who lives with his spirited daughter, Anita, along Hell Harbor, a hidden cove located in the Caribbean. Hell Harbor is home to a variety of scalawags 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. Velez stars as the charismatic and vivacious Anita while Jean Hersholt plays Joseph Horngold and handsome John Holland costars as Wade. The good people of Tampa filled in as the residents of Hell Harbor, including the city’s Cuban population, who were enamored with Lupe Velez. Among the Tampa residents who showed up on the set was an odd-looking newspaperman named Rondo Hatton, whose striking appearance was due to acromegaly, a progressive disease of the pituitary gland that caused his hands, feet, and face to become enlarged. Hatton’s distorted features prompted King to place him front and center in the cantina scenes. In 1934, Hatton moved to Hollywood to embark on an acting career, ending up in a string of horror films. (For more on Hatton, read fellow Morlock RHSmith’s posts about this unique character actor.)

SOME SOURCES CLAIM THIS PHOTO IS OF DIRECTOR HENRY KING SCOUTING LOCATIONS IN CUBA, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE THE SET OF HELL HARBOR TO ME.

            Henry King had spent the first half of 1929 traveling across the country looking for a suitable location for what became his first talkie. Because the film was set in the Caribbean, he was searching for an authentic tropical atmosphere, which he hoped to capture on film. As soon as he saw the shaggy palms of Rocky Point, a tiny peninsula near Tampa, he knew he had found the ideal location.  King sent art director Robert Haas to Tampa to plan the primary set for the film, which would be an entire pirates’ village built from scratch. Haas oversaw the construction of the fictional Hell Harbor on Rocky Point, a secluded area with a white, sandy beach and a small but picturesque harbor. Unlike most Hollywood sets, the village was not a collection of false fronts. It was soundly constructed, with complete interiors built inside some of the key buildings. King requested a solid, authentically constructed village so that both exteriors and interiors could be shot on location. He did not want to shoot a single foot of film in Hollywood, least of all on a recreated set on some studio sound stage.

            Ultimately, the well-built sets proved useful for more than their authenticity, because Florida gave King and his crew a slice of tropical life that was not part of the script. During the last week of September, 1929, King got word of an approaching hurricane. The crew packed up the sound equipment and the lights and raced back to Tampa. Haas and a few men lashed down what they could and then filled and stacked sandbags along the front of the sets. The next day, King and Haas returned to Rocky Point as the tides continued to rise. By midnight, the waves were beating against the tropical-style shanty that served as Anita’s home. Haas and some of the crew stayed throughout the night, rushing sandbags to the shanty to keep the water from claiming it. A shift in the wind during the middle of the night signaled a change in direction for the hurricane, and the waters subsided. By 8:00am on Monday morning, King was on set arranging his first shot of the day. The stout sets, designed by Haas and built by the carpenters of Tampa, had been strong enough to survive a hurricane.

            The film’s sets and location shots from Florida’s Gulf Coast help make the sultry atmosphere and romantic adventures come alive, from the opening shots of swaying palms silhouetted against the skyline to the climactic fight scene in the seedy El Marino Cafe. The exotic pirate village teems with activity as a diversity of character types and ethnic groups can be seen going about their business in the shops and cantinas. To King, location shooting was essential to the look and feel of the film, and he was determined to prove that shooting sound films on location was not only possible but vital. He 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. King not only shot Hell Harbor in Tampa, he would also edit most of it there.

THE SEXTETTE HABANERO

            Despite the hardships, King used sound intelligently in the film, taking delight in such details as the squeaky shoes of his villain, Joseph Horngold. In a scene in which Harry Morgan is hiding in the dark from Horngold, suspense is created when the tell-tale squeak of the trader’s shoes is heard coming closer and closer, and viewers realize Harry is in grave danger. To add to the 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. Recording live music and spoken dialogue simultaneously was not easy, and the dialogue is occasionally lost amid the sound of a strumming guitar, but the live music added a unique richness to the film.

            Of all the scenes in Hell Harbor, those shot aboard Wade’s boat were the most difficult. While the actors performed in front of the camera, a barge full of recording equipment floated nearby just off-camera. 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. 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. 

SHOOTING SYNC SOUND ON THE BOAT PROVED DIFFICULT.

            The hard work and long hours were worth it, because Hell Harbor is far superior 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 Lupe Velez precisely because of her accent. 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. Location shooting was reserved for certain genres and special occasions and often limited to key scenes or sequences. By 1932, the technology improved immensely, and most directors truly mastered sync sound rather than merely exploiting it. But, shooting inside the studio dominated Hollywood filmmaking until the 1950s, and the era of inventive, authentic-looking location shooting was over.

            The failure of Hell Harbor to prevent studio heads and producers from panicking over the difficulties of sync sound did not hurt Henry King’s career, because he signed with Fox the same year the film was released. After a rocky start, in which King had difficulties adjusting to the lack of creative control, he became one of the directors that Darryl F. Zanuck counted on. I first became aware of Hell Harbor when I was cowriting a book about filmmaking in Florida titled Florida on Film. Prior to that I had never heard of it, let alone seen it. As far as I know it is not available for home viewing, though I found a copy available on the Internet (no questions asked). Not only is it an outstanding film with marvelous performances by stars who over time have faded into the film history books, it may be Henry King’s greatest contribution to cinema because it is a mind-blowing exception to a Hollywood era fraught with panic, frustrations, and bad movies.

[King's movies are not part of TCM's month-long foray into the work of Hollywood directors, but the movies of a few of  his peers are, including Clarence Brown (June 15) and W. S. Van Dyke (June 24).]