An Oldie but a Goodie

Recently I read an article that included a list of great films for families, and Captains Courageous was one of the titles that I hadn't seen. I've been on the lookout for films that Paul and I could watch together and was intrigued by the story line of this one. Bratty rich kid falls off of big ocean liner and is rescued by a fishing boat. He lives and works on the fishing boat for the next few months, and the hard work and camaraderie of his new life changes him and he becomes a good kid after all.

Without learning more, I ordered it from Netflix and we popped it in the dvd player the other day. Paul and his friend, Bryan, noticed right off that the film "doesn't have any color" in it and declared that it must be "old," i.e, not very interesting. I thought they are going to wander away from the screen and we'd just send the movie back to Netflix. But no, the brattiness of the boy was immediately shown in several scenes which we all watched with rapt fascination. As the the story continue to unfold, it held everyone's attention. Spencer Tracy's Oscar award-winning performance as a fisherman was part of the magic, but the scenes of life at sea...fishing, chopping bait, racing boats....were also key elements. Some of the nuances of the plot were lost on the boys, but that was okay, especially as it made it easier for them to deal with the death of Spencer Tracy's character. (They thought he choose to die at sea so he could "go fish with his dead father," when the reality was that there was no choice at all.) We couldn't watch the whole film at once, and they eagerly put it back on as soon as we had time to finish it.

We talked a bit about black & white movies and Spencer Tracy and got on the Internet to find out more about the film It was made back in 1937, which seems like a gazillion years ago. And it was from Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel of the same title, and that really was a gazillion years ago. I guess that's what defines a "classic" work of art.....it may be old but we still "get it" in a big way. I loved the fact that Paul and Bryan had such a positive response to something that initially turned them off.... just a bit of mind-opening activity going on there.