Sea Devils (1953)

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General		Extras
Category	Adventure	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1953
Running Time	86:42
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Raoul Walsh
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Yvonne De Carlo Rock Hudson Maxwell Reed Denis O'Dea Michael Goodliffe Bryan Forbes Jacques B. Brunius Ivor Barnard Arthur Wontner Gérard Oury Larry Taylor Keith Pyott
Case	?
RPI	$14.95	Music	Richard Addinsell

    Sea Devils is very much a standard adventure yarn, a genre of film which was quite prevalent during the 1950's. It is the story of a fisherman turned smuggler on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel during the Napoleonic Wars. The smuggler Gilliatt, played by Rock Hudson before he became a big star, takes on the job of transporting a lady (Yvonne De Carlo) from Guernsey to France. She tells him that she needs to try and rescue her brother. She is in fact a spy and the rest of the plot revolves around him trying to work out which side she is actually spying for so that he can either turn her in or fall in love with her. The story is based on a novel by Victor Hugo. The title of the film comes from the name of Gilliatt's boat.

    Unfortunately, the film does not really involve the audience, mostly due to minimal chemistry between the leads and no real development of tension. The complete lack of menace from the baddies does not help. There were three main characters on the side of evil; Rantaine, a rival smuggler (Maxwell Reed); Lethierry, the Guernsey customs officer (Denis O'Dea) and Fouche, the head of Napoleon's secret service (Jacques Brunius). None of these ever seemed particularly dangerous, however, Fouche was certainly the pick of the bunch.

    The romance side of the film is not particularly believable as they seem to spend very little time together before he is chasing after her. As there are no other female characters, maybe it was more a 'beggars can't be choosers' sort of situation. My favourite character was Gilliatt's sidekick, Willie (Bryan Forbes), because he seemed to have more personality than the rest of them put together.

    The production quality is noticeably poor, especially when closing a door means the entire set wobbles (84:00).

    Overall, this is not a terrible film, it is just not particularly engaging. If you like this sort of old film (or your Mother does), it might be worthwhile, especially considering its budget price.

Video

    The video quality is surprisingly good for a film of this age and calibre. The bitrate was consistently high through the film.

    The movie is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and is obviously not 16x9 enhanced. This is the original aspect ratio.

    The picture was generally clear and sharp, however, some grain was present. Shadow detail was quite poor with some scenes being quite had to discern. There was no low level noise.

    The colour was the big surprise. It was really quite vibrant at times, especially Yvonne De Carlo's costumes, including various shades of pink, green and blue. Reds were also quite bright. There was some noticeable colour bleeding especially around faces, necks, candles and fires. Examples can be seen at 25:25, 29:50, 31:29, 54:02 and 64:27.

    Another surprise was the lack of any major artefacts throughout the film. There were some small black and white specks every now and again but very little else. There were some points where the film seemed to miss a couple of frames and accordingly the picture jumped. I noticed this at 65:35, 69:53 and 84:10.

    There are no subtitles.
    

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The audio quality is not great but no worse than you would expect.

    This DVD contains one audio option, an English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack encoded at 224 Kb/s. Despite this encoding, the track is the original mono and all sound comes from the centre speaker.    

    Dialogue was clear and easy to understand throughout. There were no problems with audio sync that I noticed.    

    The score by Richard Addinsell was fine, however it occasionally tried to drown out the dialogue due to its comparatively loud volume. Also, the music was distorted from time to time. This was especially noticeable at 86:36. 

    The surround speakers were not used.

    The subwoofer was not used.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The one page menu allowed for chapter selection via a slightly confusing mechanism. Pressing the left arrow changed the picture from the film shown on the menu and accordingly the chapter selected.

    This disc seems to only be available in Region 4.

    The video quality is surprisingly good for a film of this age and calibre.

    The audio quality is satisfactory.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall