There’s a move afoot to recognize Gremillon as a French master, but I don’t see it with this, my first Gremillon film. I side with Sarris, that a great director must be at least a good director, and Remorques is stuffed with incompetence. The action scenes are stilted and badly composed, the “sailors” spend more time shaven in dapper French suits than a gangster film, and the emotional narrative is impossible to make sense of. It falters badly in comparison with John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, another sailor movie filmed at the same time.