Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

The Sea Chase Blu-ray Movie Review

Sea-Faring Rebel Without a Cause

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 31, 2017

Humphrey Bogart wasn't convincing as a French freedom fighter in Passage to Marseilles, but John Wayne is even less believable as a wartime German ship's captain in The Sea Chase, one of two nautical films starring the Duke released in 1955. The other is Blood Alley, and it's the better of the pair. Both have been issued on Blu-ray in new transfers by the Warner Archive Collection, and both involve special technical challenges, which WAC appears to have handled as well as anyone can expect.

Wayne plays Capt. Karl Ehrlich, an experienced German naval officer who's been demoted to the command of an aging freighter, the Ergenstrasse, because he refuses to support Hitler and the Nazi regime. With the declaration of war between Britain and Germany, Ehrlich must glide his ship out of Sydney's harbor under cover of night to avoid the prospect of spending the war in an Australian internment camp. He is pursued by a British commander, Jeff Napier (David Farrar), who also happens to be an old friend. The Englishman's appetite for apprehending Ehrlich is sharpened by the fact that Napier's fiancée, Elsa Keller (Lana Turner), has sailed with Ehrlich aboard the Ergenstrasse in a plot contrivance that is obvious long before it's revealed. (When one of cinema's best known femme fatales saunters onto the screen, swathed in mink and dressed to kill, it's immediately obvious that her engagement isn't what it appears.) The Ergenstrasse's passage is complicated by the presence in Ehrlich's crew of a scheming Nazi sympathizer named Kirchner (Lyle Bettger), as well as a complete lack of armament, a shortage of fuel and the absence of any destination where Ehrlich will be wanted.

The Duke provides another in his long résumé of stalwart commanders, and he does as well as can be expected in a role for which he's hopelessly miscast. On the sole occasion when he attempts to deliver a line in German ("Auf wiedersehen!"), he mangles the words so badly that even he looks embarrassed, and one wonders why director John Farrow (Hondo) didn't reshoot the exchange entirely in English. A tremulous Turner, who is reported to have clashed repeatedly with Farrow during filming, looks equally out of place, and her chemistry with Wayne is negligible at best. The crew is full of interesting faces that would soon become much more familiar, including James Arness (Gunsmoke), Tab Hunter (Damn Yankees!) and Alan Hale Jr. (Gilligan's Island). The best parts of The Sea Chase involve the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of Ehrlich's stratagems to evade pursuit, while his crew grows ever more restive and unsure. In those moments, you can forget the implausible nationalities and just enjoy the action.

The Sea Chase Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Sea Chase was shot in Cinemascope by William H. Clothier, John Wayne's favorite cinematographer and the DP he chose to photograph The Alamo. Clothier also shot Wayne's other 1955 release, Blood Alley, and both films present significant challenges in transferring and mastering. Both were made during a period of major transition in filmmaking technology, when studios were experimenting with widescreen formats to compete with TV, of which the anamorphic process dubbed Cinemascope was one example. Studios were also attempting to develop in-house processing expertise to compete with Technicolor, which is why the credits and trailer proudly announce that The Sea Chase is presented in "Warnercolor"—an inferior process that lasted only a few years before being abandoned. Warnercolor is an obstacle to contemporary restoration efforts, because its color reproduction was inferior and the process was uniquely subject to fading. Add to that the softening and spatial distortions typical of Cinemascope lenses, plus the early stages of "yellow layer collapse" that plagued Eastmancolor stock in the Fifties (see my discussion in connection with Silk Stockings), and you have a daunting array of source limitations.

For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a new scan, which was performed by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility at 2K using a recently struck interpositive. MPI then applied the latest in digital tools to restore the film's palette, followed by WAC's customary meticulous cleaning and removal of dirt, scratches and similar flaws. The resulting Blu-ray image is impressively sharp and detailed for an early Cinemascope production, with solid blacks, good contrast and a grain pattern that is unexpectedly fine, given the source. As is customary with WAC's titles, no filtering or grain reduction has been applied. The film's palette offers what is no doubt an intentionally ironic commentary on the conflicted loyalties of Wayne's German officer, with a recurring dominance of Yankee (and Union Jack) red, white and blue, accentuated by the earth tones of the wooden ship and the third-world ports that it visits during its eventful voyage. The high average bitrate of 34.99 Mbps, with a capable encode, helps ensure accurate and artifact-free reproduction.

Cinemascope lenses were notorious for their instability, which is one of many reasons why the format was ultimately supplanted by Panavision's superior optics. Depending on one's playback equipment, you may notice odd distortions at the extreme right and left of the frame, especially during camera moves where the focal length changes. (The larger your display, the more noticeable these visual quirks are likely to be.) Modern eyes are unaccustomed to such flaws in widescreen films, and while it's tempting to blame the transfer and mastering, the Blu-ray accurately represents the source.

As with the video scoring of other films from this era, my score of 4.0 is meant to balance the accuracy of the restoration efforts against the source's limitations.

The Sea Chase Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Sea Chase arrives with a stereo track encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0—and thereby hangs a tale. The film was originally released in both mono and four-track stereo, but Warner Brothers in this era did not make a practice of retaining the original magnetic recordings of multi-track mixes. In the early Nineties, with a new appreciation for the value of preserving its library, the studio embarked on a project to reclaim these stereo soundtracks from release prints, capturing and preserving two-channel mixes from the optical print tracks wherever possible. The Sea Chase is a beneficiary of this effort, and the Blu-ray soundtrack reveals surprisingly robust stereo separation, of which the effect is most audible in the score by Roy Webb (Bringing Up Baby and Out of the Past, among others). The dialogue is clearly rendered, and the excitement of the action sequences is amplified by the track's enhanced fidelity and expanded dynamic range. The Sea Chase may not sound like a recent release, but the audio is surprisingly effective for a film that's over sixty years old.

The Sea Chase Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 2.55:1; 3:29), which has been remastered in 1080p, although the quality is limited by the roughness of the source. Warner's 2005 DVD of The Sea Chase (reissued in 2007 as part of the John Wayne Collection) contained a gallery of trailers for Wayne's films.

The Sea Chase Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Sea Chase is lesser Wayne, but it's still the Duke, and his fans should enjoy watching him stretch himself in a role that is so obviously out of his comfort zone, even if the results are less than satisfying. WAC's presentation is faithful, superior and recommended.