Andy is a bad boss, trying to upset his workers' mood at sea but Bill seems indifferent to him. Bill moves into the sea as he works to save a girl from a failed suicide attempt. This girl is called May, who later loved her and asked her to marry despite the intervention of many people.
It fulfills their requirements, somewhat obscure to this reviewer, of rhythm, plasticity and unity. In simpler and more popular terms, it seems to be exceptionally good motion picture entertainment.
... a turn-of-the-century bowery answer to Sunrise, with a romantic idealism fighting its way out of hard-scrabble lives and resigned characters of the waterfront culture.
In a way lost to contemporary social-work movies, von Sternberg's unsentimental poetic realism ennobles his lower-class protagonists through beauty. Classic.
Von Sternberg is a director of situations, not of suspense -- it is his mastery of the subtle eye-line interplay of silent cinema, his command of mise-en-scene and mood, that makes the love between these characters credible.
visually evocative and narratively intriguing, such that even its generally terrible ending can't quite undermine the overall sense that you have just seen something profoundly of its time and ahead of it
Sternberg suppresses direct emotional appeal to concentrate on something infinitely fine: a series of minute, discrete moral discoveries and philosophical realignments among his characters.
