Victor Fleming | Captains Courageous / 1937

the little fish

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Lee Mahin, Marc Connelly, and Dale Van Every, based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling (screenplay), Victor Fleming (director) Captains Courageous / 1937

 

The 1937 film by Victor Fleming is basically an intergenerational love story between a young 13-year-old boy, Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) and a Portuguese sailor, Manuel Fidello (Spencer Tracy) who saves the boy when he falls overboard while sailing on a streamliner, accompanied by his wealthy, quite removed father (Melvyn Douglas).

     Before going any further, I should emphasize that this is not a pedophilic work; there is no sex and only at a couple of moments is any physical contact express, Manuel’s hand caresses Harvey’s cheek, and at one point he gently pats the boy’s butt. Their relationship is generally perceived by most critics and viewers, who would surely deny all gay suggestions, to be a father-son like relationship or a kind of sea-going mentorship. But I think anyone who sees it with an open mind will comprehend that there is real love between the two, the older man calling his “catch” a “little fish,” and the previously spoiled child, absolutely in love with Manuel, so much so that when, at the end of work, he is returned to his now chastened father, he can only beg to go back to sea, even if he witnessed Manuel’s death near the end of the voyage when, in Captain Disko Troop’s (Lionel Barrymore) desperate race to reach to Glouster with this catch before his competitor, Manuel is caught up in the rigging of the falling mast and drowns in the sea.

     And yes, there is plenty of patriarchal patronizing of the young willful Harvey, as Alba M. insists in her on-line essay “Captains Courageous: A Critical Analysis,” and as she points out, the boy’s behavior “is explicitly coded as ‘feminine,’ like a ‘sissy’ boy. But Harvey is at first a monster of a spoiled child who lies, attempts to bribe his way into a special club for which he will certainly not be elected (even his peers detest him), and finally threatens the chairman of the club, “the Buffaloes,” with his father being fired by his own wealthy father. He even threatens to report made up sexual abuse by his teacher.

     This is like a spoiled young Trump, raised without any true parental involvement, so selfish that he cannot he recognize it as bad behavior. This was a character which the beautiful Bartholomew, at the time the most well-known actor other than Shirley Temple, played well, not only in this film, but in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) where audience members saw the character as being “sissified” and “emasculated.”

     In this film, Harvey is punished for his actions by being expelled from his school for a semester, and his father finally realizes that he has not properly paid attention to his son’s actions. The streamliner voyage to Europe is supposed to resolve that problem, but once again, he ignores his son while doing business, and Harvey, once again taunting other boys on board, hides on the ship’s deck, leading his fall into the water, he near drowning, and his being saved by Manuel.

     Even once aboard the fishing boat, Harvey attempts to demand that the captain and crew take him immediately back to New York, and attempts to convince them, unsuccessfully, that his father is a wealthy man.

     Assigned the work of a cabin boy, just as the captain’s son Dan (Mickey Rooney) is treated, he refuses to obey orders or even eat, until he becomes so hungry that he gives into some of their demands, and learns from Dan how to cut fish. But if Dan played a major role of befriending the boy, the two forming an almost intimate friendship and bond in the original novel, here Rooney’s role is drastically curtailed, as he, along with the elder sailors, mock the newcomer.

     Soon after they even begin to see the boy as a danger to the ship, a kind of Jonah who will bring them bad luck.

     Only does Manuel actually commune with boy, attempting to explain his own relationship to the sea and his role as someone who sings and finds pleasure in fishing. He even talks about his own father and his unexpected death aboard just such a boat.

     As Manuel continues to develop almost a romantic interest in the boy, tucking him in with his coat (often—as when James Dean, in exchange for Sal Mineo’s gun, lovingly offers him his red jacket—represented as a symbol of romantic love) when Harvey insists of sleeping on deck, the other sailors even notice Manuel’s interest in and protection of the boy, particularly when he creates what is almost a love-song to his “little fish.” Accordingly, Manuel must behave roughly with the boy just to convince them that his has no pedophilic interest in the beautiful child.

      But, in the end, it doesn’t work, as the two become increasingly intertwined.  In a rare moment of friendliness and honesty, Harvey even comments: “Thank you for covering me up with your coat and everything. I—I never did thank you for saving my life, I ought to thank you for, all right.”

    As commentator Alba M. makes quite clear—although I strongly disagree with her theory that everything in this film should be view through a lens of a patriarchal control of children (children are not empty vessels who learn values by themselves; they need guidance and sometimes even correction; and I don’t mean corporal punishment)—by now Harvey is truly in love with his so-called mentor and, in a scene in which the two began the conversation about having “bad thoughts,” Manuel tells him that when he returns to land, he will go with girls, the boy immediately reacts in shock, “Girls.” Manuel continues, that yes, back in Gloucester he has many girls. Harvey’s reaction is like spurned lover: “Oh, you don’t go with girls?” “Every man go with girl…, begins Manuel before he realizes that in order to maintain the love relationship he has with the boy, he must revise his statement, lying to him that he was just joking and that he most certainly won’t meet up with the girls.

      This is about as obvious as it gets, but the film has now made it quite clear about how things stand between the two of them. Harvey is now a jealous lover, which makes things even more tragic when Manuel, caught in the mast, dies before his eyes.

       In the final scene he attends a memorial funeral with his father for all the men who have died at sea, tossing a wreath into the waters in his final expression of love for the man who has changed his life.

       In J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a prostitute tells Holden Caulfield that he looks just like the boy co-staring Melvyn Douglas, without naming the movie title. Yet, unlike Harvey, Holden never does learn from others, and remains an outsider to his own life.

       

Los Angeles, August 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).