The character:	Wolf Larsen
The actor:	Edward G. Robinson
The movie:	The Sea Wolf (1941)

Magnificent fog is one of those things we don’t have anymore for our nautical films. Think of Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander, both of which rely on some pleasingly misty moments to hide ships. The fog is much too real. It’s too believable, and it does too much work to camouflage ships entirely, as if fog was a curtain rather than a scrim. This is not the fog of Sunrise, or of John Ford emulating F.W. Murnau in Pilgrimage, The Informer, and, of course, the very boaty and porty The Long Voyage Home. Nor is it the fog of The Sea Wolf, which hangs on the mostly proletarian characters of the title vessel the way fox fur drapes, paws down, off the necks of contemporary elegant women. The lines between the tyrannical captain, Wolf Larsen, and the unfortunates who live on the same baby seal clubbing ship as him, aren’t foggy or misty at all. He is wicked. They are his victims. The stratus on deck elevates the story from sadism to allegory. The only difference between the two is that allegory allows us to distance ourselves from sadism, and thus makes us more sympathetic to the sadist.

Or maybe it’s just Edward G. Robinson who can do it. The Sea Wolf is a fortunate little movie. No one ever comes out and says that Michael Curtiz is American cinema’s greatest director, although there’s a good case for him there. Robinson is probably a little closer to being at the top of the list of America’s greatest actors, but still, there are too many people who would rather name Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson than Robinson for that part. Robinson is one of our cinema’s great short kings, and it’s one of the two directions that make sense for Larsen. Either Larsen needs to be a giant, someone as massive as Sterling Hayden, or he needs to have that rodent aspect, the physical smallness that makes his complete command over the crew ironic. Robinson is perfect for the part because he is both of those men, physically small yet rotund, and also a giant who can tower over any man despite his diminutive stature.

The model for Wolf Larsen is, ironically, a bulldog. In White Fang, the title dog is forced into a series of dogfights in which he is invariably the winner; he is stronger, faster, and more savage than every other. However, he suffers a single defeat at the hands of Cherokee, a bulldog who locks in on White Fang’s throat and will not be shaken off. That’s Wolf Larsen. What is Nietzschean about Larsen is not really the stuff he highlights with Van Weyden, the jawn that relaxes the captain during a late-night discussion. It is the will to power, the bulldog’s stubbornness, the powerful jaws that will not be removed from the throat. Robinson is the right man for this job. Other actors, great actors, play gangsters as expressions of the id: Paul Muni in Scarface, James Cagney in White Heat or The Public Enemy, James Caan in The Godfather. Robinson, even at his most savage in Little Caesar or, amusingly, Barbary Coast, is never the id. He is the ego, balancing his basest instincts against what will keep him in power tomorrow. He calculates. Wolf Larsen is the calculator, and in that calculation his nastiness comes through. He is not a renaissance man so much as a renaissance autodidact, but even the finest autodidacts have gaps which a teacher might have filled better. I am a tyrant because each man on a boat is after his own personal gain, he tells Van Weyden, hinting that there might be some better world in which he is a better man. Yet he seems not to understand, just as Jacob Marley did not understand until after his own death, that he forged the chains he wore in life. The Ghost is a prison ship for all, including Larsen, for he is trapped in the hell of his own making just as much as any other person aboard is.