The Sea Lion
About The Sea Lion
Whaling captain John Nelson has stayed angry for twenty years, since his wife left him. In port, Tom Walton, jilted by his own fiancée, signs on as lookout. At sea the green crew mistakes the fresh-water store for a leak and pumps it overboard. Nelson rations what is left from his cabin, and the crew mutinies. Tom sights an island while they sleep. Two shipwreck survivors come aboard, among them a young woman named Blossom, who shares Nelson's surname and says she never knew her father. In a storm he finds her Bible, with a note from her mother saying she had loved him all along. He understands that Blossom is his daughter. They reconcile, and Blossom and Tom fall in love.
Cast & crew
More about The Sea Lion
Rowland V. Lee directed Emilie Johnson's story and Joseph F. Poland's scenario for Hobart Bosworth, who also stars. Associated Producers handled it, and a December 1921 trade ad names Associated First National as the releasing company. The unit, which had just made Lee's Blind Hearts, finished principal photography at the Ince lot in Culver City by May 21, 1921, after work at Santa Cruz Island, in a gale off Catalina, and aboard the ship Fox off Balboa.
Themes
Making
Bosworth, a former sailor on screen for years, plays the captain and produces the film. The water crisis and the mutiny were staged on a working boat off the Orange County coast, not only on a tank.
Look
G. O. Post and J. O. Taylor shot the shipboard scenes off Balboa and Catalina, including the crow's-nest sighting of the island.
Music
Silent, with English intertitles.
Preservation
Prints are at the Library of Congress, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the Pacific Film Archive. The film is in the public domain in the United States.
Notes
- Bessie Love plays Blossom Nelson. Emory Johnson plays Tom Walton. Charles Clary is Nathan Walton.
- Bosworth's new company announced The Sea Lion as its first production in May 1921, with a plan that he would star in six films a year for Ince.
- The running time is five reels, 4,367 feet.
- Richard Morris plays Uncle Billy, Jack Curtis plays Bentley, and J. Gordon Russell plays Simmons.
- Variety reported on May 6, 1921, that the company was fully organized and already shooting.
Scenes
- The crew pumps the drinking water overboard, thinking the hold is leaking.
- Tom, in the crow's nest, spots the island while the mutineers sleep.
- During the storm Nelson reads the note in Blossom's Bible and learns she is his daughter.
Also available
- Internet Archive (TheSeaLion)
