Item: His Briny Romance
Rating: 7
Author: Archivist John

Thomas A. “Tad” Dorgan’s only celluloid excursion, His Briny Romance, washes ashore like a message in a bottle nobody asked to open—then proceeds to slice your palms on its salt-rimmed glass. Shot on fog-breached stock that seems pickled in herring brine, the film refuses to behave like any 1923 programmer you’ve half-digested in a MOOD midnight marathon. Instead it writhes, barnacled and barn-burning, between proletarian lament and erotic maritime hallucination.

We begin in a nameless port that reeks of diesel, wet rope, and the metallic twang of dying starfish. The camera—operated, legend says, by a retired deep-sea diver who never fully adjusted to pressurized air—glides inches above the wharf, as though too heavy to ascend. Our stevedore (played by an anonymous extra whose cheekbones could slice cod) hauls crates stamped with foreign alphabets, each thud syncing with the heartbeat of an unseen gramophone inside his head. Dorgan intercuts these Sisyphean labors with handwritten diary pages, the ink bleeding into the emulsion itself: “Today the ocean spat up a woman. Or maybe I dreamed her. Either way, the tide owes me.”

Enter the woman (credited only as She-Who-Sang-to-Anchors). She emerges from a coil of kelp like Venus rendered by a drunken sailor—hair matted with bladderwrack, pupils reflecting moonlit troughs. Her first gesture is to press a conch to the stevedore’s ear; the soundtrack—yes, this silent film has a Vitaphone track of sighs and distant sonar—swells with the wet throb of bivalve lust. Within minutes they negotiate a mythology: she claims banishment from an underwater court where Neptune trades wives like playing cards. He believes her because his own mother vanished into a rip current while humming “Sweet Adeline.”

What follows is not a love story but a slow corrosion of certainties. The couple drift through gin joints that smell of boiled octopus and failed revolutions. They dance on tables while fishermen pound tankards in 7/8 time, a polyrhythmic defiance against the cannery owner, Mr. Griswald (a bloated magnate whose mustache appears stapled on). Griswald plans to harvest the reef’s glowing squids, those living lanterns that keep the town from sliding into moral darkness. His scheme is filmed like a pagan rite: conveyor belts shrouded in incense smoke, child workers wearing squid-ink blindfolds, an accountant who tallies souls on an abacus of bones.

“Every reel feels dipped in tide-pool phosphorescence; every cut smells of ruptured ink sacs.”

Dorgan, a cartoonist by trade, storyboards the uprising as grotesque comic strips: the stevedore chains himself to the factory gate using a discarded anchor chain, the woman rallies dock cats by yowling in feline contralto, the one-eyed preacher baptizes scab workers with fermented seawater. The film’s tonal whiplash—slapstick one moment, chiaroscuro tragedy the next—should capsize the narrative, yet the dissonance mirrors the ocean’s own temperament: playful wave, devouring maw.

Visually, Dorgan weaponizes tinting like a berserk watercolorist. Interiors drip in sickly sea-green; exteriors blaze with amber gels until the screen itself seems sunburned. A pivotal love scene—shot inside a beached hull—alternates cyanotype blues with arterial reds, producing a bruised violet that stains the viewer’s retina. The effect is more than ornamentation; it is the film’s emotional cartilage, flexing where spoken titles fear to tread.

And those titles—oh, they swagger. Rather than functional exposition, Dorgan supplies haiku of dockside existentialism: “Her skin—charted by barnacles. Her lies—sung in C-major.” Or: “Griswald counts gold coins; the tide counts corpses. Guess who’s richer?” The letters quiver, as if typed on a barge during a nor’easter.

Performance-wise, anonymity elevates myth. Because no star ego polishes the lens, we read archetypes straight from the salt: the stevedore’s shoulders carry not just cargo but the proletariat’s ache; the woman’s hips sway like moon-ketamine hallucination. When she finally boards the luxury liner—trading coral crown for feathered hat—the betrayal lands harder than any star vehicle could allow. We do not weep for celebrities; we weep for tides.

The final ten minutes unspool like a death rattle. Authorities saw through the anchor chain; the stevedore staggers across rocks slick with squid ink, clutching diary pages that dissolve faster than promises. He reaches the jetty’s terminus just as the liner’s foghorn bellows—a low, bowel-loosening note that drowns out human noise. Dorgan cuts to an extreme close-up: the man’s eyes reflecting the departing ship, pupils eclipsing iris until both eyes become twin portholes onto nothing. Fade. Not to black, but to a sodium-white that sears the afterimage of a horizon that will never again hold her silhouette.

Comparative Undertow

Critics quick to pigeonhole His Briny Romance as a proletarian Redemption of White Hawk miss the film’s brackish surrealism. Where White Hawk mythologizes individual guilt, Briny dissolves identity into collective brine. Likewise, The Pines of Lorey may share maritime fatalism, yet Lorey’s forested shores imply rootedness; Dorgan’s port is root rot incarnate—boards warped, identities barnacled.

On the spectrum of oceanic ennui, Briny sits closer to Victory than to swashbuckling adventures like Lions and Ladies. Both Briny and Victory understand that the sea is not backdrop but prosecutor. Yet where Victory tempers nihilism with stoic camaraderie, Dorgan opts for full-tide nihil: the ocean doesn’t reform; it simply forgets.

Restoration & Viewing Strategy

Until 2019, only a vinegar-syndicated print survived in a Latvian nunnery. Enter the Sea-Lost Cinema Collective, who scanned the 35mm at 8K, then soaked the digital file in algorithmic brine to reconstruct tinting. The resulting DCP flickers like a lighthouse on fentanyl—stunning but unstable. If you snag a festival slot, demand a venue with carbon arc projection; the heat exaggerates the film’s sweaty dread.

Soundtrack? Vital. Although originally silent, Dorgan left cue sheets calling for accordion, conch, and “the moan of a walrus in heat.” Most screenings employ a trio who improvise a tidal score: bowed fishing line, sloshed buckets, whispered sea shanties. Bring a slicker; the front row gets splashed.

Final Undulation

Why does His Briny Romance—obscure, fragmentary, morally brackish—matter now? Because every contemporary sea epic, from CGI kraken orgies to Oscar-bait tsunamis, still fears the elemental humility Dorgan bottled. His lovers don’t conquer the ocean; they are digested, slowly, like chum. The film reminds us that climate grief isn’t new; it’s just better lit.

So seek it out, cine-splunkers. Let its salt crust your eyelids. Let its final whiteout obliterate your shore. And when the liner’s horn echoes in your chest weeks later, remember: the tide keeps books, and we’re merely marginalia—smudged by ink, erased by foam.

Verdict: 9.2/10—A barnacled masterpiece that smells of sex, squid, and insurrection. Mandatory viewing for anyone who’s ever loved something that could drown them.