Mare Nostrum
About Mare Nostrum
Ulysses Ferragut, a Spanish merchant captain from a seafaring family, prospers with his freighter Mare Nostrum until the World War I shipping boom. In Italy he meets Freya Talberg, who looks like the sea goddess Amphitrite in his uncle's stories, and learns she is an Austrian spy working with Dr. Fedelmann. He carries the agent Count Kaledine, whose side is served by the U-boat U-35. That boat sinks the Californian, killing Ferragut's son Esteban. Freya turns against the killing, Fedelmann betrays her, and she is shot. Ferragut will not save her. He arms Mare Nostrum, sinks U-35 with a deck gun, and goes down with his own ship as a vision of Amphitrite takes him.
Cast & crew
More about Mare Nostrum
Rex Ingram directed, in voluntary exile from Hollywood after a break with Louis B. Mayer in 1924, using MGM's money. Willis Goldbeck adapted Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1918 novel. Alice Terry, Ingram's wife, plays Freya. Antonio Moreno plays Ulysses. The company bought the old Gaumont studio in Nice, renamed Victorine, and shot for 15 months in France, Italy, and Spain, exposing more than a million feet. The New York premiere was at the Criterion Theatre on 15 February 1926. A rough cut of four hours was brought down to 102 minutes, with anti-German scenes removed after complaints from the German embassy. MGM later sent a mea culpa to European markets.
Themes
Background
MGM released this World War I spy story in February 1926, eight years after the armistice, shot entirely away from Culver City.
Making
Daytime heat and cold nights at Nice, weak French laboratory work, and faulty equipment brought technicians over from Hollywood. Ingram fought to keep the tragic ending and the Latin title.
Reviews
Motion Picture Magazine and Variety called the premiere draggy and a grim story without a laugh, and Variety noted snickers at the portrait of the enemy. Film historian Charles Higham, in The Art of the American Film (1973), later called it Ingram's finest work for its pictorial flair.
Audiences
The New York run started strongly and then slumped. Trade papers described a cool premiere audience.
Look
John F. Seitz shot on the water and at Pompeii, Naples, Paestum, Marseille, and Barcelona, and directed the Barcelona sequences himself.
Technique
The production exposed more than a million feet of film across three countries and cut a four-hour assembly down to 102 minutes.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
Long thought lost. A print was rediscovered in 1994.
Notes
- Mare Nostrum is Latin for Our Sea, the Roman name for the Mediterranean. The opening title uses that line.
- John F. Seitz directed the Barcelona footage as well as photographing the film.
- Freya's execution was staged near a Pathé factory with the 24th Battalion de Chasseurs Alpins and a bugle band that had played at Mata Hari's execution.
- The love scene in front of an aquarium octopus was finished in one take and drew snickers at the premiere.
- Long treated as lost, a print was found in 1994.
- Germany banned it. French notices were warmer than the New York trade reviews.
Scenes
- At Pompeii, Ulysses meets Freya and takes her for the Amphitrite of his uncle's painting.
- U-35 sinks the Californian, and Esteban is among the dead.
- Freya is shot after Fedelmann betrays her, and Ulysses refuses to intervene.
- Mare Nostrum sinks U-35 and is then torpedoed, and Ulysses goes under with a vision of Amphitrite.
Influenced by
- Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's novel Mare Nostrum (1918)
Quotes
Between Europe and Africa stretching from Gibraltar to the Syrian Coast, lies the Mediterranean, land-locked and tideless, known to the ancients as Mare Nostrum — 'Our Sea.'
