Below the Surface (Silent)

A tale of lust and betrayal beneath the sea. Aging diver Martin Flint turns down crooked entrepreneur James Arnold's offer to recover treasure from an old shipwreck. Still needing an expert diver, Arnold has his wife Edna seduce Flint's callow young son, Paul. Falling for the sexy vamp without realizing she is Arnold's wife, he agrees to the dangerous mission his father turned down. Upon his return, Paul discovers that Edna has left him and succumbs to delirium. Martin then pursues Arnold and Edna, but the boat they try to escape on with the treasure sinks, killing them both. Martin returns to his son with the sad news. Refusing to believe the truth, the delirious Paul dives to the wreck to prove his father wrong. Now Martin must save his son before he joins the woman he loved... dead, at the bottom of the ocean...

Below the Surface is a pulpy silent melodrama with some outstanding underwater camerawork from director Irvin Willat, who specialized in films with a nautical theme like Behind the Door (1919), On the High Seas (1922), and The Isle of Lost Ships (1929). Produced by pioneering media proprietor Thomas H. Ince, it stars craggy Hobart Bosworth, an ubiquitous presence during the silent era. He played everything from Jack London's Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf (1913) to the crusty old lighthouse keeper that took in Baby Peggy in Captain January (1924). Young Lloyd Hughes would eventually wind up in a few prestigious silents like The Sea Hawk (1924) and The Lost World (1925), but by the talkie era he was a fixture in numerous Poverty Row "B" pictures such as The Drums of Jeopardy (1931) Midnight Phantom (1935) and A Face in the Fog (1936), to name just a few. Gladys George, who plays an innocent, virginal young woman vying for Hughes' affections, ironically is best known for later playing the oversexed widow of murdered detective Miles Archer in the classic The Maltese Falcon (1941).