A Girl in Every Port represents the best of silent comedy, full of vitality, movement, and perfectly timed playfulness, not the least of it supplied by Louise Brooks as a circus high diver. One of Howard Hawks' eight silent films, A Girl in Every Port was unearthed by French critics in the process of delineating Hawks' importance, and contains the seminal Hawks theme: "a love story between two men," here two sailors, played by Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong. In this context, Robin Wood indicates a source of dissatisfaction with the film in "Hawk's failure to realize the potentialities of Louise Brooks. She might well have established the tradition of the Hawks woman, but, after a promising beginning, her part degenerates into a commonplace figure of female duplicity, simplifying the issues unfairly and making it impossible to use the actress's full resources." --in "Howard Hawks"