Way for a Sailor, truth be told, has more noise than the-then primitive sound system could comfortably handle and many scenes simply drown in the general din. The comedy-drama was obviously created to resurrect John Gilbert's standing at the box office after the silent screen star had suffered nothing but ridicule in the wake of his first talkie, the leaden His Glorious Night (1929). Although Way for a Sailor proves once and for all that there was nothing inherently wrong with Gilbert's voice he still seems too flamboyantly hammy for the new and more prosaic talkie era -- unlike co-star Wallace Beery, whose stardom skyrocketed in the early 1930s. The writer Jim Tully, meanwhile, is out to sea as Gilbert's sidekick, no pun intended, and director Sam Wood fails to add excitement to an overly familiar tale.