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.
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).
