Figure 1.-- Here we see Estaban (about 14 years old) with his father Ulysses before the father sails. Esteban wears a dressy grey short pants suit with white shirt and tie, dark knee socks, and polished lowcut leather shoes. Esteban will be killed when a ship he is on is sunk by as U-bnoat his father helped supply. The family is Spanish which you can tell by the mothger's Spanish dress.

"Mare Nostrum" (Our Sea,i.e., the Mediterranean, but also the name of the male lead's boat) is an important American silent film. One source descrfibes it as French. I think the confusion is becazuse it was also released in French. And France plays a major role in the film, executing the German spy and manning the Mare Nostrum. With silent films you only had to replace the text pannels and you could show it whereever you wanted. It was directed by Rex Ingram and released in 1926. It was about the German U-boat war in the Mediterranean. It is an anti-German films. The Germans are depicted as sinsister, deceptive, and evil. Americans had by this time began to rethink their involvement in the War, but there was no rethinking of the view that U-boat warfare had been a war crime. The film was not releaserd in Gerrmany. The film is set in Italy and Spain. Much of it was shot in Spain. Ulysses Ferragut (Antonio Moreno), the owner and captain of the boat, has an uncaring wife and a teenage son, Estaban (Mickey Brantford), whom he loves very much. An aluring German spy Freye (Alice Terry) seduces Ulyssess and inveigles him into helping bring supplies to a German submarine in the Mediterranean. This is all a fiction based on the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Ulysses in the film agrees to do this only to have the submarine tragically blow up the ship that on which beloved son Estaban is travelling. Freya Talberg, the seductive spy (who was married incidentally to the film's director, Ingram) is executed by firing squad. In the end the Upboat sinks Mare Nostrum but Ulysses manages to sink the U-boat. In the shot here we see Estaban (about 14 years old) with his father Ulysses before the the two were parted (figure 1). Estaban wears a grey short pants suit with white shirt and tie, dark knee socks, and polished lowcut leather shoes. In the film his suits look more like black or dark blue. Mickey Brantford was an English born child and adult actor. While traveling he wears a beret and cape. Mickey appeared in a huge number of films. The notorious Kada-Abd-el-Kader also appears in the film as the young Ulysses.

Created: May 19, 2004
Last updated: 2:02 AM 12/6/2010