Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2821 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-03-31
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Customer Reviews

A Great movie, with a Great Star!
One of the best (boys) adventure books ever written was Charles
Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.
I read this book when I was 12, along with R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, and DaFoe's Robinson Caruso.
This movie adaptation of Dana's work is as close to the book
as Hollywood has ever gotten with transfering a book to the
screen.
Especially since this film was made in the 1940s. Alan Ladd
acting was always dynamic. He was truly a good actor.
I wish the movie distrbutors would put more of these great
films on dvd.
Because a lot of these movies that were released on vhs.
in the 80s and 90s. Have or are going out of print.
And will no longer be available to the general public,
(at a resonable price!).
So if you can find a copy of this film, then please buy it.
Perhaps even try to transfer it on to dvd.

The horrors of a sailor's life
An all star cast under the fine direction of John Farrow gave a quality performance in "Two Years Before the Mast" based on a 1840 novel by Richard Henry Dana. Dana's book was an expose of the deplorable conditions that merchant seaman were forced to live under while asea and under the orders of the ship's captain.

In this film Alan Ladd stars as Charles Stewart a spoiled dandy and son of a wealthy Boston shipping magnate in the 1830's. He accidently is pressed into service aboard one of his father's merchant ships the S.S. Pilgrim. The Pilgrim is commanded by the unsympathetic Capt. Thompson played marvelously by Howard DaSilva. DaSilva cares nothing about the well being of his crew allowing them to starve, contract scurvey and get flogged mercilessly. Also aboard is author Dana who is serving as a common seaman played by the tough Brian Donlevy. Although a capable sailor, Dana is secretly penning a novel describing the grievous conditions under which the sailors exist.

Eventually the crew tiring of the poor treatment, mutiny, take over the ship and decide to return to Boston to tell their tale and face their destiny.

This excellent cast was also bolstered by William Bendix playing the hardened but sympathetic first mate Mr. Amazeen and Barry Fitzgerald playing the ship's cook Dooley.

SHIPS & WHIPS
This movie is based only loosely on the Richard Henry Dana book. It basically uses that book's 19th-century-sailing-ship setting for a traditional story about the rich boy who "grows up" when thrown into the rough-and-tumble reality of life.

Alan Ladd plays the "rich boy" who finds himself forced to assume sailor duties on a ship bound from New England around the tip of Cape Horn. At one point he's stripped to the waist, tied to ropes, and given a flogging in a sequence which everyone who's watched the movie seems to remember. It seemed to embody the slightly-masochistic tone which runs through many of Ladd's roles and it's far superior to the flogging scene in his later "Botany Bay."

Black-and-white photography limits the movie's visual appeal and makes it play like an "oldie" to modern audiences.