The hero of the picture again sitting in the righted boat. A microscope will show the pains taken to secure realism in its film; the actor actually became a sailor for months, with hair grown in the fashion of sailing days. (See page 62.)] They decided the first thing to do would be to get the whale. If that part worked all right, they’d go ahead and make the rest of the picture, if it didn’t—well, they could start over again and make some other picture, of a cat or a dog or a trick horse that wouldn’t be so hard to play with. They held a convention of old sea-captains, who decided that Sand Bay or some such place, in the West Indies, would be a likely spot for whales. They fitted up an old vessel, the last of the real old whalers, and sailed away. Luck was with them. They struck a whole school of whales almost as soon as they had dropped anchor at the point that had been selected. Green hands at whaling, they started off with every whale-boat they had, and cameras cranking. They tried to harpoon the first whale they came to, I’m told,—and missed it. But luck was with them again, decidedly. Missing the big whale, which happened to be a female, the harpoon passed on and struck a calf on the far side of her, that the amateur whalemen hadn’t even seen. Ordinarily, they say, a school of whales will “sound” or dive and scatter for themselves when one of their number is harpooned, but in this case it was a calf that was struck, and its mother stuck by it, and the rest of the school stuck by her, while the movie-whalers herded them about almost like cattle. They got some wonderful pictures. Later, they captured a big bull whale, and had an exciting time of it. More pictures, and a smashed rowboat. Then they returned to New Bedford and completed the photoplay. As a “Feature Film” the final picture, “Down to the Sea in Ships” is nothing to boast about, _except_ for the whales. Without the whaling incidents, it is a more or less ordinary melodrama, beautifully photographed, of the whaling days in old New Bedford. But the real whales make the picture worth going a long way to see. A Scandinavian film, released in this country by the Fox organization under the name of “The Blizzard,” does the same thing as “Down to the Sea in Ships.” Only, it has a reel that shows reindeer incidents, instead of whales. But it is just as remarkable. You see a whole gigantic herd of reindeer—hundreds and hundreds of them, the real thing—follow their leader across frozen hillsides and rivers and lakes, through sunshine and storm. Finally, in a blizzard, the men holding the leader that guides the herd get into trouble. One of them falls through the ice, while the other is dragged by the leader of the herd over hill and dale, snowbank and precipice until at last the rope breaks. The herd bolts and is lost.