A group of wealthy socialites take a cruise on their yacht but a storm cripples the ship, making it possible for the disgruntled crew to mutiny. Flat-nosed Louis Wolheim does his best in the role of an insane crewman with dreams of power but his exaggerated performance makes this dull film laughable and only mildly entertaining. The acting is stagy, the story melodramatic, and the early sound technology makes for long stretches of awkward silence. Unless you're interested in someone from the cast, or want to see how bad some early talkies could be, skip this one.

Written by Hollywood Ten screenwriter John Howard Lawson, this crackles with class resentment. The blasé privileges of wealth: i.e. Going to the office at eleven and working furiously until noon, are thrown into a maelstrom of class war. It starts with the usual, per the period, bunch of night club swells dressed to the nines, blithely decide to take a yachting journey to San Francisco. While they talk about the crew in disparaging terms, the steward seethes at being ordered about, being blamed for their faults, etc. While the rich lounge on deck drinking highball, the crew is restricted to the heat of below decks. A storm, which the rich welcome for a bit of excitement, seriously damages the ship, giving the steward the opportunity to mutiny and take over the ship reversing the situation. Its clear that Lawson was writing a parable of Class War. Its always been my hypothesis that early talkies became unpopular not because of their crudeness because of the early recording equipment, but because the subject matter, mostly 1920s theater, was made instantly passé by the depression. Men in white tie at the country club dance, fluttering flappers trying to decide between one vapid stockbroker or another. These became chokingly irrelevant in the depression. Here this begins in the same way but gets down to the ugly truth quite quickly. That this wasn't popular at the time is obvious. The O'Neill type ending doesn't help. Lawson was to take a lesson from this and spread Communist propaganda in more subtle ways later in his career. He was, however, just as doctrinaire, becoming the head of the Communist Party cell in Hollywood.

Thuggish steward (Louis Wolheim) leads a mutiny aboard a yacht. The first half of the film makes us kind of hate the rich passengers on the yacht, particularly the insipid romance of Conrad Nagel and Kay Johnson. But after the mutiny the film seems to shift sympathies back to them and away from the highly entertaining power-hungry steward. The whole movie centers on Louis Wolheim's intense performance. Wolheim died the year after this was released. I was surprised to find out he was actually a math teacher at Cornell before his acting career. This is an OK movie considering the age. It creaks a little but not as badly as some claim. Amusingly, despite living under harsh conditions adrift at sea for days or weeks with very little water or food, neither Nagel nor Johnson ever have their hair mussed up.

Early talkie could have been good but the hideous performance of Louis Wolheim and bad direction kill this effort despite some good work by Kay Johnson, Zeffie Tilbury, and Carmel Myers. Even Conrad Nagel is not all that bad, but the endless monologues of Wolheim kill any tempo this film might have had plus he's just plain bad. This is one of several talkie flops that ruined Nagel's starring career; this is also Myers' first major talkie. Too bad. She was interesting. Johnson has a couple of dynamite scene, and Tilbury (famous as the grandmother in The Grapes of Wrath a decade later) is awfully good as Lady Daley. Holmes Herbert, Jack MacDonald, and Ivan Linow co-star.