Young director Howard Hawks hit his stride with this 1928 comedy, which established the themes, plot situations, and even some of the lines he was to use for the next 40 years. Robert Armstrong (King Kong) and Victor McLaglen are roughneck sailors who compete for the prettiest girls in every port they visit, when they aren’t beating each other up. Louise Brooks, already packing her bags for Germany and Pandora’s Box, appears as a circus performer who comes between the two buddies; distant and eerily self-contained, she unbalances the male-bonding themes with intimations of a superior femininity. With Natalie Joyce and Marcia Casajuana.