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Movie Reviews in Alphabetical Order
A B C D E F G H
I J K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y Z
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ANNE OF THE
INDIES (1951) [Not available on VHS
or DVD] With Jean Peters, Louis Jourdan, and Thomas Gomez.
Written by Phillip Dunne and Arthur Caesar. Directed by Jacques
Tourneur. A 20th century Fox release. ( Jacques Tourneur's lavish Technicolor swashbuckler Anne Of The Indies is based on the idea of a woman pirate named Anne who sailed in Blackbeard's time. The names Bonny and Rackham are dropped in connection with the men in her past, but otherwise, there are no similarities to historical pirate Anne Bonny. There's no sign of Mary Read, no Calico Jack, no pleading of bellies to escape the hangman's noose. On the other hand, as nothing is known of the real Anne after her famous trial in 1720, it would be nice to think the filmmakers were bold and savvy enough to invent a new adventure for her after the historical record ends. It's actually a pretty irresistible idea, if only the movie weren't so mired in the Hollywood morality of its day. As played by Jean Peters, this Anne struts around in modish culottes, and short, fluffy '50s hair (on which her scarlet headscarf perches at a rakish angle, like a beret, serving no practical function whatsoever). Anne captains her own crew of cutthroats aboard the Sheba Queen, calls herself Captain Providence after the English father she never knew, and claims to sail for revenge against the English who unjustly executed her brother as a pirate in Jamaica. (Heaven forbid a woman in a '50s movie should be so undomesticated as to choose piracy for gold and adventure, like the real Anne.) She's so hardcore, she gives no quarter to English crews, even if they surrender; they're all made to—yes—walk the plank. In this version, Anne's surrogate father, the one who taught her the trade, is Teach himself, played by Thomas Gomez with the rascally gusto of a favorite uncle. ("You old fraud!" is her affectionate nickname for Blackbeard when they meet and playfully cross swords in a Nassau tavern.) And unlike the real Anne, who apparently slept her way out of the Carolinas and into pirate history, this Anne is unschooled in feminine wiles. Strapping on a satin gown is torture to her (although her make-up is always perfect), and her notions of romance are a bit primitive. "Sea dogs," she scoffs, "they take their women as they take their rum—by the barrel!" Despite her tough exterior, her naiveté makes her an easy mark for the bilgewater spewed by Louis Jourdan as Pierre (she calls him "Frenchy"), a French "privateersman" she finds in irons aboard a captured English ship. He doesn't actually feed her a line; he doesn't have to. All he has to do is look soulful and disapproving, and Anne gladly tosses her wit to the winds. She makes him her "sailing master," and drops everything to sail for Port Royal in pursuit of that wheezy plot device, the other half of a treasure map. Despite the misgivings of her first mate, Dougal (James Robertson Justice, whose Scots burr comes and goes with the trades) and her tippling doctor, (Herbert Marshall), who think Pierre is a spy, Anne keeps trying to impress him with her authority, the only way she knows how to woo. She even has a falling-out with Blackbeard over Pierre, and the pirate captains become sworn enemies. Jourdan is the male equivalent of Olivia De Havilland in Captain Blood, the snooty conscience nagging away at the pirate protagonist. The difference is, De Havilland eventually falls in love with Errol Flynn, and re-evaluates her principles. Pierre's romancing of Anne is completely dishonest; he even has a Wife in Jeopardy (prissy Debra Paget) squirreled away somewhere, to whom he remains nobly true. When Pierre calls Anne "the vilest-hearted she-monster that ever came out of the sea," he seems to mean it—pretty harsh words considering how well he's been treated. When the wife chimes in that Anne is "a disgrace to our sex," you can't blame Anne for wanting to maroon the pair of 'em on an unchartered isle. ("Be a man…give us a clean death," Pierre sneers at her.) This is evidently an act of unprecedented meanness on her part. (She used to be "clean," mutters the doc into his tankard, but now she's "foul.") Of course, she has a crisis of conscience and returns to the isle in time to defend the couple from Blackbeard's murderous crew. This is a lively enterprise in many respects. The Technicolor is vibrant, the production looks expensive (there's bear-wrestling— with a live bear—in one tavern scene), and pirates are depicted with entertaining bravura, from Gomez's flamboyant Blackbeard to a shot of cutthroats weeping to a sentimental tavern song. Purists may point out that the heydays of Port Royal and Nassau as pirate havens were actually about 40 years apart, or that by the time the real Anne survived her notorious trial, Blackbeard was already dead. None of which would matter if the fictional alternative was grand enough in its own right. But the invented storyline disappoints. There's not enough of Anne in her element on the high seas, or sharing camaraderie with her men. As usual, a crew of male scriptwriters assume that a woman who wears trousers and wields a sword must be impaired, mentally (this Anne can't read), or sexually. And, of course, she has to pay for her nonconformity with her life. Hollywood movies would have to wait another 45 years to depict a female pirate captain who was not only tough, but smart, ribald, in charge of her own sex life, and gloriously unrepentant—that would be Geena Davis in Cutthroat Island. BLACKBEARD
THE PIRATE (1952) [Available in VHS]
With Robert Newton, Keith Andes and Linda Darnell. Written by
Alan LeMay. Directed by Raoul Walsh. A RKO release. Not rated. 98
minutes. ( Two years after Robert Newton made such a splash as the over-the-top, yet endearing pirate captain Long John Silver in Treasure Island, Hollywood wanted more. Every tic, eye-rolling pose, and tongue-rolling "Aarrrr!!!" of his Silver performance is re-hashed in Blackbeard The Pirate, a plugged doubloon of crackpot history and marginal entertainment value in which Newton snarls again, this time as the infamous real-life pirate captain Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard. In the earlier film, Newton had a story, character, and dialogue rooted in the enduring Robert Louis Stevenson classic to ground his flamboyant performance. But as Blackbeard, he's all at sea in a script flung together from spare parts that makes little dramatic, much less historical sense. Pirate fans know they're in trouble right away when the hero of the film is Robert Maynard, in real life the naval lieutenant who captured Teach's ship Adventure and battled the notorious pirate to a gruesome death in hand-to-hand combat. In the film, Maynard (played by Keith Andes, a lukewarm slice of early '50s beefcake) is an English spy on a mission to prove that Sir Henry Morgan is still in cahoots with his former pirate comrades. Passing himself off as a surgeon, Maynard goes aboard the ship of a Captain Charles Bellamy in Port Royal, Jamaica, along with passengers Edwina Mansfield (Linda Darnell) and her jittery maid (Irene Ryan, later Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies). But they find the ship in the possession of Blackbeard, who has strung up the unfortunate Bellamy from the yards, takes the women hostage, and sets sail. Wait a minute. Blackbeard? Morgan? Bellamy? It's as if screenwriter Alan LeMay decided to use these reknowned pirate names to confer an ersatz "authenticity" on the story, then threw any other notion of historical accuracy out the window. Of course, the real Morgan died in Jamaica 30 years before Blackbeard was active in the Carolinas; they weren't even contemporaries, much less partners in crime. But nobody connected with this movie cares, and indeed it wouldn't matter if director Raoul Walsh had concocted a rip-roaring yarn in place of strict historical facts. But Blackbeard The Pirate is silly without being much fun, and way more trouble than it's convoluted plot is worth. Maynard is after Morgan, not Blackbeard, but is apparently trying to use Blackbeard to get to Morgan, while Blackbeard uses hostage Edwina to lure Morgan into an ambush. It also turns out that Edwina is Morgan's niece and was planning to elope with Bellamy with a fortune in treasure stolen from her uncle. Needless to say, Edwina and Maynard fall in love ("What on earth is a man like that doing in this slaughterhouse?" she drools to her maid). Swords clash over the bosomy female on board, insults fly ("You'd make the flesh crawl on a squid!" Edwina exclaims to Blackbeard), and there's rum to be drunk and treasure to be buried before the final confrontation—in which not Maynard but Blackbeard's own crew does him to grisly death on a deserted beach, burying him up to his neck below the tideline where he rolls his dying eyes at the fishes as the tide comes in. Newton looks okay, if a trifle portly for history's most menacing pirate, with his beard twisted into braids and pistols stuck in his belt. But his mugging histrionics wear thin, and there's not much else to hold our interest. William Bendix plays the sqinting, blustering pirate sidekick/first mate like he's just wandered in from a 3 Stooges short. Morgan's flamboyant costumes make more of an impression than Torin Thatcher in the role. But when all else fails, there's some amusement to be had in the final battle at sea, watching pirate-clad extras try and fail to swing from one ship's deck to the other.
According to the strict moral code of the silent movie era, a pirate couldn't be a hero. When Douglas Fairbanks, the most popular actor in Hollywood, wanted to make a pirate picture, he had to play a disguised nobleman who joins the pirate crew for a "noble" reason—to avenge himself on the scurvy dogs who caused his father's death. This device waters down the impact of The Black Pirate, in which Fairbanks gets to have all the fun of playacting the pirate life without tarnishing his heroic image. Make no mistake, the pirates in this movie are a thoroughly bad lot. Once they've plundered a prize ship, they tie up the crew and blow the ship up with the crew still aboard. After one such encounter, survivors Fairbanks and his aged father wash up on the beach of an uncharted island (somewhere off the Spanish Main, the titles tell us), where the old man promptly expires and his son vows revenge. When the pirates return to that very island to bury their treasure (instead of spending it, like sensible brigands), Fairbanks begs to join their company. First he challenges their leader (the word captain is never used) to a swordfight and wins. Then he promises to capture their next prize single-handedly. He accomplishes this after sneaking aboard a merchantman by climbing up the rudder, and employing all the acrobatic stunts and energetic swashbuckling for which Fairbanks was so famous. (It also helps that, aside from a single watchman, the entire merchant crew is below and oblivious.) In the most memorable stunt (perhaps the best-remembered of Fairbanks' entire career), he climbs out on the yard, plunges his knife into the top of the sail and slides all the way down to the deck by the handle as the knife slices the sail in two. Yowza! Don't try this at home, kids. The newly designated Black Pirate (named for his fetching outfit of musketeer boots, bloomers, and ripped-open shirt showing plenty of cleavage) is proclaimed the new pirate leader. But he's conflicted, brooding on the sidelines when his colleagues set to plundering the merchant ship. He saves the lives of the merchant crew by exhorting his fellows to keep their ship intact for ransom. When a beautiful Princess (Billie Dove) is discovered hiding on board, the rest of the movie is devoted to the Black Pirate's efforts to protect her from his slavering crewmates. This is an all-Fairbanks production; he wrote the script (under his alias Elton Thomas) and sketched out every shot before a director even came on board. He revels in plundering every pirate cliché in the canon, from that buried treasure to walking the plank. (Curiously, he uses the title card "Marooned" to describe the hero washed ashore on that desert island, not an exile from the pirate crew. Still, the image of Fairbanks sitting alone and dejected on the beach looks exactly like the famous Howard Pyle illustration.) There are no shipboard battles until the very end—and then the troops that come to fight the pirates actually swim out under the ship and climb the chains to board. The elaborate exteriors of the ships and the decks are very impressive, especially when the pirate boats are scuttling away from a prize, or when Fairbanks is swinging from the lines. But the ship interiors (obviously shot on a soundstage) are a little overdone, with enough vaulted archways, carved niches, filligreed balconies and curving staircases to pass for a castle interior from one of Fairbanks' previous swashbucklers—maybe Robin Hood or The Three Musketeers. The Black Pirate is one of the first films ever shot in three-strip Technicolor, but most video versions present it in black-and-white. Also, while most sources list it as an 88-minute film, the Reel Images video I saw runs for two hours—a wee bit too long for such a slight storyline.
This is a real curio, an adventure yarn about a famous real-life pirate with virtually no action at sea. In fact there's precious little yo-ho-hoing of any variety in this landlocked saga of French "privateer" Jean Lafitte. Yul Brynner plays the role in a fringe of dark bangs and a thin moustache that make him look a little Dickie Smothers, but his intense, exotic courtliness is just right. Partly out of respect for the letter of the fledgling American Constitution, but mostly to impress dimpled governor's daughter Inger Stevens, Lafitte teams up with crusty Captain Andrew Jackson (Charleton Heston) to turn back the British at New Orleans during the War of 1812. The principal battle sequence takes place on land with rockets and rifles, giving Lafitte's crew little chance to show off their skill at hand-to-hand combat. The movie's one sea skirmish takes place off-camera when a renegade pirate captain sacks an American merchantman carrying a cargo of gold—a raid Lafitte actually tries to prevent. We get only a few moments of victorious pirates swigging rum and crowing over their plunder before that killjoy Lafitte comes aboard to end the party. He gives them all a stern talking-to, strings up their disobedient captain, and herds the whole crew back to dry land. Produced under the supervision of Cecil B. DeMille (a remake of his own 1938 film of the same material) and directed by DeMille's then son-in-law Anthony Quinn (himself no stranger to onscreen derring-do), The Buccaneer has some of the look if not quite the spirit of a lavish Hollywood epic. It was obviously shot entirely on closed sound stages, but the misty, pre-battle sets have the pearly, surrealistic quality of air-brushed paintings, impressive even on a small video screen. There are also some tantalizing glimpses of Lafitte's well-appointed pirate lair in the bayou, crammed with handsome purloined booty and furnished with a gun deck balcony with a row of cannon trained out over the open sea. A very young Claire Bloom is all but unrecognizable as a scrappy pirate maid. And even when the movie occasionally falters, we still get Charles Boyer as Lafoitte's effusive French mate Dominique You, bringing Gallic gusto to lines like, "The code of our brotherhood is better than all the nations lies!" and "When a man loses everything, he still has ze sea!"
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CAPTAIN BLOOD
(1935) [Available in VHS]
With Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone.
Written by Casey Robinson. Directed by Michael Curtiz. (Not rated)
119 minutes. ( When they talk about the golden age of Hollywood pirate movies, this is the movie they're talking about. Captain Blood has everything you could want in a pirate movie. It's a lavish Warner Bros. production—shot in glorious black-and-white—based on a rip-roaring Rafael Sabitini novel, and it features a rousing musical score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and sure and spirited direction by Michael Curtiz. It's also the movie that made little-known, 26-year-old Errol Flynn a star. Best of all for pirate fans, Captain Blood dares to be bold, almost subversive, in its sympathetic portrait of pirates themselves. The buccaneers in this movie are not all black-hearted, cutthroat evildoers; many of them are ordinary men who have fallen out of favor with fortune or, worse, been victimized by gross social injustice. Such is the case of Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn), a principled young Irish-born physician in 17th Century England during the embattled reign of James II. One night Dr. Blood treats a man wounded in an aborted rebellion against the king. The next day, Blood is arrested by king's men, shipped to Barbados and sold into slavery for the crime of treason. In Barbados, Blood is purchased by corrupt Colonel Bishop and sent to work in the mines, where his compassion and doctoring skills earn him a loyal following among the other abused slaves. He also attracts the notice of Bishop's niece, Arabella (a dewy 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland). When a Spanish galleon sails into port and makes free with the defenseless town, Blood and his companions escape their chains, sneak aboard and capture the Spanish ship, then head for the open sea—where the legend of Captain Blood is born. Taking up the only means of livelihood and liberty open to them, Blood and his outlaw crew cut a swath across the Spanish Main, plundering the ships of the wealthy and corrupt. In one of the most exhilarating montages ever devised onscreen, we see Blood and his crew battling one enemy ship after another as the screen fills with the cannon smoke and the headlines: blood. Blood. BLOOD! Still, Peter Blood is not a bad guy. Despite his hard feelings for James II, he's loyal enough not to attack British shipping, confining himself to the Spanish and the French in the role of self-made privateer. For a time he falls in league with roguish French pirate Levasseur (the inimitable Basil Rathbone)—until the Frenchman captures Arabella Bishop sailing home from a visit to England. Levasseur plots to hold Arabella for ransome and he and Blood become deadly enemies. The youthful Flynn (so early in his career he has not yet grown his trademark pencil-thin moustache) commands the screen in the role that made his name synonymous with romantic swashbuckling. He's less jaunty here than in his other classic pirate movie, The Sea Hawk, given the more dramatic arc of the story, but he's as stirring in the shipboard action (and there's plenty of it) as he is soulful in the dramatic scenes. He and the ever-elegant Rathbone are well-matched opponents, particularly when they are duelling nose-to-nose. Unfortunately, the lovely De Havilland is stuck playing the standard female character in all pirate yarns: the disapproving noble lady flouncing around in her petticoats while the men go off and have all the fun. She's spirited enough in her compassion for Blood the slave and her rebuke of Blood the pirate. But women with red blood in their veins will long to see a gutsier, less conventional heroine winning the outlaw captain's heart. Still, for its complex characters, thoughtful plotting and cinematic dash, Captain Blood should be number one in everyone's pirate movie archive.
CAPTAIN RON
(1992) [Available in VHS
/ DVD]
With Kurt Russell and Martin Short. Written by Joh Dwyer and
Thom Eberhardt. Directed by Thom Eberhardt. Rated PG-13. 100
minutes. ( It's smooth sailing for this predictably plotted but entirely good-natured adventure comedy about a nice, well-behaved yuppie family who unwittingly hire the Skipper from Hell to sail them around the West Indies on a yacht they've just inherited. Although not a pirate movie in the usual sense, it does offer Kurt Russell in a terrific turn as a crusty, one-eyed, brewski-swilling seadog who's seen too many reruns of Treasure Island. Russell has always been more fun spoofing macho beefcake than playing it straight, and he has a high old time here. Martin Short gives a relatively reigned-in and likeable performance as the uptight urban dad dreaming of la dolce vita in the islands. Mary Kay Place is smart and sassy as the unflappable mom, and even the kids are entertaining—especially little Benjamin Salisbury, who must be the last innocent, non-wiseguy child actor in Hollywood. Puerto Rico looks fabulous (standing in for several other islands, as well), and the sail-away escapist fantasy is played to the hilt. Even some of the slapstick gags are pretty inventive. And while this isn't a conventional pirate movie, look out for a running gag about "the pirates of the Caribbean" that pays off when the vacationing urbanites find themselves pursued by modern-day marauders. The whole movie is more fun than you might expect—especially if you can't afford to take a real vacation to the islands.
THE CRIMSON PIRATE
(1952) [Available in VHS]
With Burt Lancaster, Eva Bartok and Nick Cravat. Written by
Roland Kibbee. Directed by Robert Siodmak. (Not rated) 104 minutes.
( Ex-acrobat Burt Lancaster's dazzling knockabout stunt work and hearty exuberance highlight this terrific tongue-in-cheek Technicolor costume adventure from 1952. The story is set in the Caribbean of the late 18th century (although it was shot in the Mediterranean), and involves an island in revolt against colonial Spain, a corrupt diplomat, a popular liberator, his beautiful daughter, and a shipment of illicit guns for the rebels. Into this charged atmosphere sails the pirate Vallo (Lancaster) and his freewheeling crew of brigands, who get themselves involved with the warring factions while trying to find some decent loot to plunder. Of course, Vallo falls in love with the liberator's daughter (Eva Bartok), setting the stage for mutiny among his disgruntled crew. There's even a drop of sci-fi in the mix in the person of a scientist in league with the rebels who keeps inventing new and crazy weapons to use against the Spanish. But all this plotting is just a flimsy excuse to get big, brawny Lancaster into action with his longtime circus partner, small, wiry Nick Cravat, who plays Vallo's mute sidekick Ojo. The two of them have a high old time swinging from the ship's rigging, spinning around flagpoles and caroming off window ledges. Lancaster himself claims credit for staging the final sequence, an 18-minute shipboard battle between the pirates and the Spanish, full of jokes, delightful sight gags and rip-roaring action. While the tone of the movie is lighthearted and spoofy, Lancaster obviously loves the pirate genre and treats it with respect. His athleticism drives the movie forward and The Crimson Pirate is an absolute treat from the first frame to the last.
CUTTHROAT ISLAND
(1995) [Available in VHS
/ DVD]
With Geena Davis, Matthew Modine and Frank Langella. Written by
Robert King and Marc Norman. Directed by Renny Harlin. (PG-13) 123
minutes. ( It's a question of icons. Sure, Renny Harlin's female pirate adventure Cutthroat Island may be no more than a big, mindless, soulless, expensive stunt movie. But as these things go, I'd much rather watch Geena Davis swinging through the rigging of a pirate ship brandishing a cutlass than the endless gunplay and speeding subway trains, buses, tanks and/or fighter jets of most other action movies. Cutthroat Island will never win any dramatic awards. The dialogue is too often strained and trite, there are far too many things blowing up and it never occurred to any of the six (male) writers credited with the script and story to provide any shading of character for the actors to play in the lead roles. But with its genuinely thrilling stunts, a rousing musical score by John Denby and its lavish, lovingly crafted period look, it can be a heck of a lot of fun. Davis plays Morgan Adams, the daughter and niece of pirate captains racketing around the West Indies in the 1660s, who has apparently grown up in the trade. When her father, Black Harry (Harris Yulin), is dying, he turns over his ship, The Morning Star, and her crew to Morgan, along with his third of a map to a fortune in buried treasure on uncharted Cutthroat Island. The other two thirds are in the possession of his brothers, the cowardly Mordachai Fingers (George Murcell) and the ruthless Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), captain of the Reaper, who means to have all of the map and all of the treasure for himself and will tolerate no interference from his upstart niece. That's about it for plot, once Morgan stops off at a slave auction in Port Royal to buy an educated slave to translate the Latin on her third of the map. Her purchase is smooth-talking con artist William Shaw (Matthew Modine), and their reluctant alliance, sparking eventually into romance, is a neat twist on the old ploy of the roguish pirate making off with the genteel, well-bred lady. ("It's hard to imagine what part of your life would require me to speak Latin," William observes, in one of the movie's few good lines, as they race through the streets in a stolen carriage pursued by Redcoats.) But while Modine works hard in he role, his personality is too lightweight and insubstantial. And he gets no help from a generally weak script that strains for arch witticisms at the most inappropriate moments which mostly fall flat. Langella is terrific as Dawg, however, effortlessly evil, carelessly physical and able to put a droll, cagey spin on his lines. ("That boy doesn't understand us, Morgan," he sighs, preparing to duel his niece to the death, "but, then, he's not family.") Stan Shaw, too, has a commanding presence as Morgan's right-hand mate, Glasspoole. He also has an appropriately West Indian accent (unlike Davis and Modine, whose American dialect did not exist in the 1660s). What a movie this might have been with the charismatic Shaw in Modine's role. Still, the movie it is offers outrageously entertaining stunt work (on land, underwater and in the air) and glorious period detailing, from weapons to ships' figureheads to the ghoulish gibbeting of miscreants in the port towns. And we get all six feet of Geena Davis, rambunctious and vulnerable, brawling, jesting, sword-fighting and shooting her way across the Spanish Main. Escapism shouldn't just be for guys. Girls, too, just want to have fun.
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FINDING
NEVERLAND (2004) [Available in
DVD] With Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet,
Dustin Hoffman, and Freddie Highmore. Written by David Magee.
Directed by Marc Forster. A Miramax release. Rated PG. 101 minutes. ( It’s good to be a pirate. Just ask Johnny Depp. After swaggering and goofing his way to an Oscar nomination in Pirates of the Caribbean, he’s likely to earn a second nomination for Finding Neverland. As author James. M. Barrie, Depp gets to dress up in eyepatch and hook as an early prototype of his Captain Hook to play pirates with a tribe of fatherless boys. It’s a charming fantasia on the real-life events that inspired Barrie to write his masterpiece Peter Pan, and a gentle meditation on the value of play in coping with the harsh realties of life. Working from a script by David Magee (adapted from the Allan Knee play The Man Who Was Peter Pan), director Marc Forster zeroes in on the central relationship of Barrie’s life: his friendship with the five Llewellyn-Davies brothers he met one day in Kensington Park, to whom he eventually became legal guardian. Facts are fudged for the sake of economy—onscreen, the boys’ father is already dead when Barrie meets them (in life, he befriended the entire family), and the number of brothers is reduced to four. But the movie makes a valid attempt to explore the sense of conspiratorial innocence with which the troubled writer bonded with the tragedy-haunted brothers. In 1903, expatriate Scot Barrie (Depp), a popular playwright with a string of hits, is sweating out the opening night of his tepid new comedy on the London stage. His conviction that the play is “bull’s pizzle” is confirmed at the lukewarm politeness that greets him at the cast party and the grumbling of his producer, American impresario Charled Frohman (a wryly funny Dustin Hoffman). Like a well-behaved but distracted child, he confounds the attempts of his pretty wife Mary (Radha Mitchell), a former actress, to steer him into useful social contacts; correct and polite, the childless couple are emotionally adrift, retiring to separate bedrooms at night. Strolling in the park with his big shaggy dog, Barrie encounters four exuberant brothers: George, the eldest, Peter (Freddie Highmore), the most mistrustful of adults, cocky Jack, and little Michael, imprisoned under a bench for the crime of being the youngest. Their newly-widowed young mother, Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies (Kate Winslet, frazzled, windblown and exquisite) apologizes for her sons, but Barrie is enchanted and a fast friendship is born. The movie is delightful in conveying the imaginative fancy with which Barrie views the world, rendered by Forster with either glistening awe (like the Neverland brewing in Barrie’s head), or charmingly gimmicky stagecraft. When the boys jump up and down on their beds, Barrie imagines them all flying out the nursery window. Dancing his huge dog around the park, he exhorts the boys to see the creature as a dancing bear, a vision Forster creates in a circus ring full of frolicking clowns surrounded by a painted audience. When they play pirates, the ship’s deck is realistic, and Barrie, the boys, and Sylvia are piratically garbed, but the undulating painted ocean and leaping shark are cardboard. (When doubting Peter refuses to take a suitable alias, Barrie’s pirate captain sentences him to walk the plank “for lack of an interesting pirate name.” But even as Barrie completes Peter Pan, and Frohman mounts and rehearses it (“Dogs, fairies, pirates; it’s a play for puppets!” the producer carps), the real world intrudes. Scandalous talk about Barrie and Sylvia—and Barrie and the boys—threaten their reputations, to the outrage of Sylvia’s grimly proper mother (the regal Julie Christie). The Barries’ marriage deteriorates further. And Sylvia develops one of those persistent movie coughs that can only mean one thing, forcing her boys closer to the brink of painful adulthood. The film doesn’t delve too deeply into the peculiarities of Barrie’s real life. Literally stunted by the traumatic death of a brother when he was 12, Barrie stood barely five feet tall, could not grow facial hair, and is believed to have been incapable of a mature sex life. (Certainly not with his wife, although their estrangement in the film is never explained). And for all his longing for the imagined innocence of childhood, Barrie’s vision of Neverland and the “heartless” children who rule there (especially in his novelization Peter And Wendy, written seven years after the play) is much more dark and ambivalent than portrayed here. But this isn’t a biography of Barrie; it’s about the alchemy of art and imagination trumping reality to liberate the human spirit. To their credit, the filmmakers don’t attempt to romanticize Barrie’s friendship with Sylvia into a love affair. Winslet’s radiant Sylvia clearly adores the attention the writer lavishes on her boys, and she’s spirited enough to enter into their games. (“May I take your hat?” she deadpans when Barrie arrives for tea in a feathered Indian headdress.) She’s the heart of the story, and when it’s time for her to leave it, she’s given one of the loveliest exits ever filmed. Depp combines weary intelligence and a wistfully innocent demeanor with an impish sense of fun. The wrong actor could have scuttled the whole precarious enterprise, but Depp’s winsome gravity is absolutely right.
FRENCHMAN'S CREEK
(1944) [Available in VHS]
With Joan Fontaine, Arturo de Cordova and Basil Rathbone.
Written by Talbot Jennings, Directed by Mitchell Leisen. (Not rated)
112 minutes. ( More than any of the other pirate movies I devoured in my formative years, this is the one that made me want to sit down and write my own pirate story. Based on the Daphne du Maurier novel, the story proceeds from an unapologetically female viewpoint and dares to propose that a woman of any spirit might find it much more rewarding to ally herself to an audacious pirate outlaw than submit to the boring conventional morality of mainstream society. Joan Fontaine stars as Lady Dona St. Columb, a bored young 17th Century noblewoman stuck in London with her fatuous husband and his sleek, insinuating companion, Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone). To dodge Rockingham's advances, she packs up her two young children and goes home to the family estate on the Cornish coast. There she learns that a notorious French pirate has been using a secluded creek on her property as a home base from which to launch raids on shipping in the channel. Soon enough, Lady Dona and the Frenchman (Arturo de Cordova) come face to face. She tries to stick up for the moral principles of her class, but nevertheless she finds herself attracted to the well-spoken, philosophical Frenchman and the freedom of his outlaw lifestyle—a freedom denied to her. Instead of betraying his whereabouts, she becomes his ally, protecting him from her neighbors. As the bond between them grows stronger, she eagerly dons a boy's disguise and joins him in one of his escapades. When her husband and the sinister Rockingham arrive to put a stop to these local piracies, the emotional stakes rise for the conflicted Lady Dona. Seeing the movie again more recently, I'm much more aware of its flaws. Fontaine is too cool and patrician as the heroine; she seems to be playing a game of piracy, without the heat and guts of a woman prepared to abandon everything for love. And she's quite unbelievable in her boy's disguise, complete with '40s jet-propelled bosom and glamour make-up. De Cordova, a New Yorker of Mexican heritage, plays the Frenchman with a nebulous, romantic-sounding accent that's not specific to any particular country. He looks great in his long dark curly wig and has oodles of superficial charm but he lacks the complexity a more seasoned, serious actor might have brought to the part. And of course the movie suffers from its moralistic Hollywood ending—quite unlike the book—where Lady Dona returns to her loathsome husband for the sake of her children instead of running off with the pirate like any sensible woman. (Hell, she could take the kids with; they'd probably love it!) Nevertheless, the idea of a woman participating in skullduggery as a kind of foreplay by which she and a courageous outlaw earn each others' love is a powerful one, however watered-down it is by the film's finale. From bored society matron neglected by her foolish husband, she grows into a formidable woman with the chutzpah to risk her life in a dangerous ruse, fend off and kill a would-be rapist and flee to the forbidden sanctuary of the ship with the lover of her choice. This is strong stuff and it stays with you after the movie's shortcomings fade away.
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HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA (1965) [Available in DVD]
With Anthony Quinn, James
Coburn, and Deborah Baxter. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Not
rated. 104 minutes. ( This is an extremely interesting artifact in the pirate movie genre. Not a swashbuckler, nor by any means romantic, it's more of a psychological drama about the supposed natural innocence of children vs. the supposed natural cruelty of pirates. Based on the 1929 literary novel by Richard Hughes, the movie is slightly softer and less chilling than the book, and includes a few odd, Hollywood flourishes, but it's still an intriguingly different take on pirate movies. The story is set somewhere in the Victorian era, long after the "Golden Age" of piracy. After a hurricane devastates much of their family's Jamaica sugar plantation, the five young Thornton children are shipped homeward for the safety of England—along with two Hispanic Creole siblings from a neighboring family. But their ship is waylaid by pirates near the Windward Passage (off Cuba). While their ship is being looted, the children have the run of both vessels, and when the pirate schooner departs, the children are all on board. Anthony Quinn plays the pirate captain, Chavez, who's distressed to find his ship overrun with "the kids," as he insists on calling them. (Would anyone in the Victorian era use this expression? Especially someone who doesn't know that much English?) But they bring out something paternal in Chavez, who tries to look after them and shield them from the worst excesses of his crew—who come to fear that having children aboard is "mala suerte" (bad luck). The children, however, while prim about minor things (like speaking the word "drawers" aloud), adapt to the pirate life aboard ship with easy amorality. In particular, the girl Emily (Deborah Baxter), who's about ten, and from whose viewpoint most of the story proceeds, absorbs and accepts everything and forges a bond with Chavez. As crusty old rogue Chavez softens, even risking mutiny, to play nursemaid to "the kids," pragmatic little Emily proves steely enough to kill—and willing enough to let Chavez take the rap when authorities from the real world intervene, protected by her youth and "innocence." Of course the story is more textured in the book, but the sheer audacity of it still fascinates onscreen. (Especially with the cast of utterly composed, Village Of The Damned-type English child actors.) The details of shipboard life and piracy of that era feel correct: when Chavez and his crew attack the merchant ship, they lock the kids in the deckhouse, motion them to get down, then shoot harmlessly through the upper part of the deckhouse to terrorize the captain into telling them where his money is hidden. And it's refreshing that a crew of largely Hispanic pirates actually speak Spanish throughout the film. Which doesn't mean the movie is exactly accurate. James Coburn, god love him, is on board as Chavez's American first mate, a handy device for getting a lot of the Spanish dialogue repeated in English for his benefit. (There are no subtitles, to intensify the strangeness of the pirates' life for the children.) But no attempt is made to fit Coburn into the period, with his long Beatle bangs, his killer grin of perfect teeth, and a striped jersey apparently left over from Kirk Douglas' wardrobe in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. And one of the Creoles, a pretty teenage girl, wears a long, straight hair-do teased up into a little bun on the crown that would not have been out of place on Carnaby Street in 1965, but is laughably anachronistic here. (And the book's subplot about her effect on the crew and her estrangement from the younger children is entirely absent.) Russian-born Lila Kedrova (who costarred with Quinn the year before in Zorba the Greek) is briefly on hand as a lusty island madam. Gert Frobe (better known as Goldfinger) has a tiny but crucial cameo as the captain of a Dutch merchant ship. This is the kind of window-dressing Hollywood compels filmmakers to add to beef up the box office. But despite all this monkeying around, with the story's essential edges softened and its complexities glossed over, A High Wind In Jamaica can be eerily effective.
I was prepared to get a big kick out of Steven Spielberg's mega-budget update of the Peter Pan story, in which flamboyant pirate Captain Hook plays such a pivotal role. And I was not exactly disappointed. Dustin Hoffman brings hilarious brio and vitality to the role of Hook, complete with long curly Charles II wig and gap-toothed Terry-Thomas sneer. No less effective is the charming performance as a grown-up Peter Pan delivered by co-star Robin Williams (who has always had a touch of Pan about him). But instead of standing back and letting these two pros do their stuff, Spielberg does his best to scuttle the project with the kind of ham-fisted sentimentality that mars so many of his films of the '80s and '90s. What's amazing is that despite this gooey "Spielberg touch," the good ship Hook manages to stay afloat. There are enough wonderful moments to make Hook well worth seeing—although not quite enough to justify its two-hour and twenty-minute length. The intriguing plot supposes that the perennially 13-year-old Peter came back to London sometime in the 1960s to visit his old playmate Wendy and decided to stay. After entering an orphanage supervised by the now elderly Wendy, Peter was adopted by American parents and has now become a stressed-out 40-year-old yuppie married to Wendy's granddaughter Moira (Caroline Goodall), and too busy for his own kids, Jack and Maggie. While the Neverland of Peter's protracted childhood induced runaway kids to forget their parents, living in the grown-up world has made Peter forget the boy he was; Peter Pan is just a kids' fairy tale to him. When the family goes to London to visit "Granny Wendy" (the regal Maggie Smith), and she greets him on the stairs with her signature salutation, "Hello, Boy," Peter doesn't get it—and it's heartbreaking. He's lost his memory and his sense of magic. But not for long. Hook and his scurvy crew abduct Peter's kids in hopes of luring him back to Neverland for a final showdown. The fairy Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts, in a breathless performance employing her entire arsenal of toothy grins) sprinkles pixie dust on the bewildered Peter and hauls him back to Neverland—where Hook despairs over what's become of his once-worthy adversary. But Tink promises to get Peter in shape in three days for a duel that will decide the fate of the children. This is where the script starts getting flaccid. There are some lively scenes of Hook trying to steal the kids' affection away from their absentee father, aided by his devoted but frazzled first mate, Mr. Smee (the delightful but underused Bob Hoskins). For one thing, young Jack teaches the crew baseball, and when the pirates play ball and a runner is "dead on second," he's really dead. But concurrent scenes of Peter trying to regain the magic of his youth, the heart of the movie, are shapeless and out of control. Essentially, the cynical Peter (he calls Tink "a firefly from Hell" and the Lost Boys "some kind of Lord Of The Flies preschool") must learn four lessons: to believe in magic and his own identity, to learn how to play, to use his imagination, and to think one happy thought that will enable him to fly. But the process takes forever, with each lesson taking up its own overlong sequence. (The "play" lesson, for instance, involves a duel of gross-out insults and a food fight.) And every single one of Peter's many epiphanies is punctuated by long lingering close-ups of the faces of the dewy-eyed Lost Boys (who have become a sort of Equal Opportunity street gang with black and Hispanic members who ride skateboards and call Peter "Pan the Man.") This works once, when the littlest Lost Boy manipulates the distressed Peter's face into a smile and chirps, "Oh there you are, Peter!" But after Spielberg uses the same shot of beaming Lost Boy faces for about the 147th time, you resent having your emotions squeezed through a garlic press and start to root for the pirates to wipe the kids out. By the time Peter is ready to say goodbye to everyone he has ever known in Neverland (think of the end of E. T. with thirty kids instead of three), you're ready to have Spielberg keel-hauled. Neverland looks terrific, with its three romantic moons. And the bustling wharf where Hook's ship docks, crowded with colorful lowlife, makes you wish you were there. If there's a disappointing lack of natural light and sea air aboard Hook's obviously stagebound ship, chalk it up to the fact that all the action takes place in port. The spirited cast gives its all, including entertaining cameos by David Crosby and a bearded Glenn Close as pirates and Phil Collins as a deadpan police inspector. And despite some odd moments (there's a weird scene in which Tink suddenly grows to human size, which raises more questions about the nature of fairies than it can answer), Hook is in many ways a work of sustained enchantment. If only Spielberg didn't feel he had to keep blasting home his point with a cannonade.
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THE ISLAND
(1980) [Available in VHS]
With Michael Caine, David Warner and Angela Punch McGregor.
Written by Peter Benchley. Directed by Michael Ritchie. Rated R. 114
minutes. ( At first glance, The Island seems to have an even chance of being good. Stars Michael Caine and David Warner are both marvelous actors who are always worth watching, even though each has appeared in his share of turkeys. And while director Michael Ritchie has had his ups and downs, he's also made such offbeat and amusing films as The Candidate and Smile. Peter Benchley's script, adapted from his own novel, is an unknown factor; Benchley seems to have run out of stories to tell very quickly after (or perhaps during) Jaws. But the kernel of the plot is enough to delight the heart of any latter-day pirate fancier or re-enactor, turning as it does on a race of authentic pirate descendants whose lifestyle has remained unchanged and untouched by civilization for 300 years surviving into the present day on an unchartered Caribbean island. But The Island has nothing to do with the classic swashbuckling genre. Instead, it's a grueling, mean-spirited exploitation chiller in the vein of the bloody, shock-mongering Friday the 13th series and all its unholy spawn. That so many talented people and intriguing ideas go down with the ship ought to be a hanging offense. Caine plays a reporter about whom we know very little, including where he lives, what kind of publication he writes for, and whether he's respectable or a hack. All we know is that he's divorced, has a 12-year-old son, and is obsessed over the fact that many small pleasure craft have disappeared in a certain vicinity of the Caribbean. With very little plan of attack, he jets to Florida with his petulant son (Jeffrey Frank), charters a plane that crash-lands on remote Navidad Island, and is soon in the grubby hands of a pack of 17th Century cutthroats whose ancestors were contemporaries of Blackbeard. Warner plays the leader of the pirate gang, which survives by boarding and plundering stray pleasure boats and killing or kidnapping the crews. Warner takes a liking to the boy, whose resistance he tortures and brainwashes away in preparation for raising him as his own son and heir. Meanwhile, Angela Punch McGregor as a tough young woman of the tribe who has lost her mate spares Caine, whom she keeps chained in her hut for stud service. After 300 years, the bloodline has become "…inbred, scrofulous and diseased." Strong young children and healthy adult males with active sperm counts are as prized as plundered rum and cigarettes. It should be possible to make a compelling or entertaining adventure yarn out of all of this. (Or at least have some riotously campy fun with the material.) But this movie opts for none of the above. We get no sense of what must be the fascinating rituals of the pirates' existence. Instead the unimaginative plot is a grim series of escape attempts punctuated by pirate attacks of the most grisly violence. Besides detailed Technicolor close-ups of knives, axe-blades, arrows and bullets plunging into human flesh, we're treated to clever torture sequences like the one in which the gang holds down McGregor and sticks a live jellyfish up under her shift. (Benchley is big on torturing nubile young women; you'll recall the fresh chicken blood dripped over Jacqueline Bisset's naked torso in The Deep.) Worse, the inept plot makes no sense, even by its own cheesy standards, and unanswered questions abound. The miracle of 300 years of regeneration within so small and "diseased" a community is never really explained. Why do they all speak in a coy, Angloid dialect that sounds like something out of One Million Years BC? 17th Century England was not exactly the Dark Ages. Why is McGregor the only healthy woman, and as such, why isn't she accorded some respect or mated with the son-hungry chief? And why do her motivations toward Caine keep zig-zagging around? She seems to attack or defend him indiscriminately, whenever the feeble storyline needs juicing up. To top it all off, the film has no moral viewpoint of its own. It seems to want to drive home the point that real-life pirates were a slimy, cretinous, bloodthirsty lot, not the romantic swashbucklers of legend. Yet the savagery of Warner and his crew is no more vicious than the hail of machine gun fire with which Caine slaughters them all in the grand finale —and both are treated with equal lip-smacking indulgence by Ritchie. The charming Caine is given nothing more to enact beyond a tedious tight-lipped stoicism. And Warner, potentially the most fascinating character, is reduced to the single dimension of a stock villain. In short, The Island is an unalloyed disaster, traitorous to the talents involved and insulting to its own audience.
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MASTER
AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD [Available in DVD
and VHS]
With Russell Crowe
and Paul Bettany. Written by Peter Weir and John Collee. From the
novels by Patrick O'Brian. Directed by Peter Weir. A 20th
Century Fox release. Rated PG-13. 128 minutes. ( Fans of historical novelist Patrick O'Brian have been waiting forever for someone to make a movie from his Napoleonic War-era seafaring tales. Peter Weir's sweeping adventure Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World may not be everything an O'Brian fan could possibly want. But Weir's film is utterly masterful in depicting the rigors of working a ship at sea, above and below decks, in every hour of the day and night, and the orchestrated chaos of battle at sea. No other film comes to mind that so realistically captures the details of shipboard life, what O'Brian once referred to as the drama of 200 men shut up together in a wooden box out in the middle of the ocean. Weir and co-scriptwriter John Collee have cobbled together a storyline from different books in O'Brian's popular Aubrey-Maturin series. The books feature bluff Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy, whose skillful seamanship has earned him the nickname "Lucky Jack," and his friend and ship's surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin, a brilliant Irish-Catalan physician, naturalist, and spy (but a hopeless lubber when it comes to nautical terminology and maneuvers). Their evolving friendship kept the series afloat for 20 books. Weir's film can only hint at the depth of that friendship, but the performances of Russell Crowe (in many ways an ideal Jack) and Paul Bettany (a perfectly serviceable Stephen) give Weir's episodic narrative its backbone. In 1805, Jack and his crew aboard the 28-gun warship Surprise are off the north coast of Brazil with orders to capture or destroy the French privateer Acheron, en route to wreak havoc with the English whaling fleet in the Pacific. Just after dawn, the French ship appears like a phantom out of the fog and nearly decimates the Surprise before Jack concocts a brilliant defensive maneuver that keeps her afloat until the Acheron disappears again into the fog. Instead of limping home, the outraged Jack decides to refit the ship at sea and continue in pursuit of his orders. The Surprise endures a horrific typhoon while rounding Cape Horn, and then a sweltering calm in the Pacific. The crew fears their adversary is supernatural, and designate Hollom (Lee Ingleby), a hapless 30-year-old midshipman, as a "Jonah" souring their luck. Stephen suggests Jack's dogged pursuit of the Frenchman is a matter of "pride." When Jack wonders why their French opponent is so obsessed, Stephen replies, "He fights like you, Jack." This ongoing conflict between duty, conscience, and leadership is the only dramatic arc in the story. What keeps viewers enthralled is the visceral experience of being on that ship—the subdued music of creaking lines, groaning wood, and tolling bells, the oppressively cramped quarters below decks, the cannons nicknamed "Jumping Billy" or "Sudden Death." Except for a glorious time-out on the Galapagos Islands (shot on location), the entire movie takes place at sea, and we feel the day-to-day camaraderie, tedium, exhilaration and raw nerve of the crew. The storm is thrilling and terrifying, the battles brilliantly fought timber-crunching infernos. Weir doesn't go in for cheesy fx explosions; in these battles, cannonballs rip decks, masts and men into splintering pulp, but they don't blow up on contact. From the first book in the series, Master And Commander, Weir borrows the scene of the brain operation Stephen performs on a crewman that endears him to the men—who watch with awed, ghoulish fascination. The Jonah subplot and the chase around the Horn are lifted very loosely from the tenth book, The Far Side Of The World (although in the book it was 1812 and the privateer was American). There is no mention of Stephen's work as an undercover intelligence agent, nor of Jack's penchant for indulging his "animal spirits" (but for a single flirtatious glance exchanged with a South American beauty). With blond, unruly hair, Crowe is the perfect body type for Jack, beefy from over-indulgence of wine and food, but physical enough to run up the rigging. Crowe's natural authority and Puckish smile also serve the captain well. (Recovering a young midshipman from a dangerous decoy mission, he quips, "Now tell me that wasn't fun.") Bettany is a bit too pink and fair for dark, sallow, saturnine, "ill-looking" Stephen, yet Bettany captures the doctor's detached, questing intellect, as well as his cold-blooded competence in the sickroom. The cast is wholly believable as a ship's crew; standouts include James D'Arcy as energetic First Lieutenant Pullings, Mix Pirkis as angelic, surprisingly hardy young midshipman Lord Blakeney, Max Benitz as teenage midshipman Calamy, and David Threlfall as Jack's grumbling steward Killick. ("Never a tune you could dance to," he carps, as Jack and Stephen tune up for their nightly fiddle and cello duets.) The dialogue sometimes lapses into conventional patriotism ("This ship is England!"), but is most often crisp and illuminating. There's so much of the captain's blood in the woodwork of the Surprise, says one crewman, they're practically relations. When Stephen wonders how he can repay Jack for saving his life, Jack tells him to "name a shrub after me. Something prickly and hard to eradicate." There are no actual pirates in this one, but the devastating broadsides, desperate nautical maneuvers and bloody hand-to-hand combat are highly piratical in nature (and better yet, historically accurate). Diehard O'Brian fans may find nits to pick, but no one can deny that Weir has made one of the most exciting seagoing movies ever.
MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND
(1996) [Available in VHS
/ DVD]
With Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Tim Curry. Directed by
Brian Henson. Rated G. 96 minutes. ( Set sail for delightful silliness on the high seas as Jim Henson's Muppets take on the classic Robert Louis Stevenson pirate adventure Treasure Island. Even though the pirates here are ostensibly the villains, they're still as brave, brawly and uproarious a crew as ever took to the seas in this right lively piece of buffoonery. Newcomer Kevin Bishop is sweet and engaging as the Cornish lad Jim Hawkins. (But hit the decks when he starts singing—yes, this is a musical.) When he finds a pirate treasure map at his mother's inn, Jim soon runs afoul of the notorious but lovable Long John Silver (the wicked and wonderful Tim Curry) and his cutthroat crew. Singing, mugging, wiggling his eyebrows and cutting loose with that insinuating, deep-throated Frank N. Furter chortle, Curry is an absolute joy and not to be missed. The Muppets are hilarious, as always. In this version, Kermit the Frog plays the role of good Captain Smollett, whose ship is taken over by Silver's gang so they can sail off to the secret island in their search for the treasure. Of course, Kermit is mercilessly vamped by Miss Piggy as "Benjamina Gunn," a jungle temptress marooned on the island who's become the queen of a tribe of unruly warthogs. But the Muppet pirates are the most fun. Roll-call among the pirate crew is worth the price of admission; in addition to Long John Silver, we get Short Stack Stevens, One-Eyed Jack, Black-Eyed Pea, and Wall-Eyed Pike. (Not to mention Old Tom, Real Old Tom, and Dead Tom—a skeleton in pirate drag, complete with cutlass and earring.) Musical numbers featuring the entire Muppet ensemble are actually pretty funny. And watch out for the scene-stealing Polly, Long John's talking, shoulder-perching lobster, whom he fondly calls, "as fine a crustacean as a man could ever want!" Good, clean, silly fun for all.
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NATE AND HAYES
(1983) [Available in VHS]
With Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O'Keefe and Jenny Seagrove.
Written by John Hughes and David O'Dell. Directed by Ferdinand
Fairfax. (PG) 100 minutes. ( In the 1840s, steamship travel is bringing an end to the era of wooden sailing ships. But Captain Bully Hayes (Tommy Lee Jones), the "last of the pirates," isn't giving up without a fight. Trouble is, while everyone (Hayes included) keeps calling him a pirate, we never see Hayes engaged in much piratical activity. In a prologue that seems more Indiana Jones than Captain Blood, Hayes and his crew journey inland to deliver a cache of guns to a tribe of "anti-colonialist" Pacific Islanders, then run for their lives when the island queen double-crosses them. ("They used to be honest," laments Hayes. "They've been exposed to western business practices," observes his mate.) In the flashback that makes up the body of the story, Hayes is making an honest enough living ferrying young American missionary Nate Williamson (Michael O'Keefe) and his luscious bride-to-be Sophie (Jenny Seagrove) to their island mission in the South Seas. When the truly nasty Aussie cutthroat Pease (Max Phillips) rounds up the islanders for slaves and abducts Sophie (not for the expected reason, but to use her as a human sacrifice!), Hayes and Nate go into action to get her back—not for profit, but for love. Hayes sails with the obligatory (and highly entertaining) multi-national crew: a white-haired Scots mate, a little Cockney, a silent Chinese swordsman (a hypnotic performer named Pudji Waseso who steals every scene he's in), and a pegleg whose peg is a human leg bone attached at the knee with a skull. And while Seagrove spends half the movie playing the white-gowned damsel-in-distress, she gets to shoot and swim and fight and scheme along with the boys in the last reel. The only seagoing action comes at the end. Hayes and his crew in Pease's stolen piratical schooner out-maneuver and outfox a lumbering armored German steamer with a swivel gun the size of a Sherman tank. They manage this feat the old-fashioned way; they play dead until the steamer gets close enough to board. The movie is fast-paced and spirited enough, and Jones has charisma up the wazoo. But like so many self-conscious modern swashbucklers it's all a little arch and campy, with too many coy "excuse me"s and corny puns as the heroes battle their way through the enemy ranks. The final insult is the comic opera German warship commander, a graduate of the Col. Klink school of sitcom villainy. Modern film-makers seem to think you can only do this sort of picture with a lot of high-tech explosive action and sniggering jokes. They don't realize that the pirate movie genre is like a vintage wooden sailing ship; it can perform splendidly, but you have to treat it with respect.
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OLD IRONSIDES
(1926) [Available in VHS]
With Charles Farrell and Wallace Beery. Written by Dorothy
Arznar, Walter Woods and Harry Carr. Directed by James Cruze. (Not
rated) 109 minutes. ( Forget about any silly prejudice you might have against silent movies where you have to read the dialogue onscreen. The action in this busy adventure saga is so brisk and exciting, and so full of the briny spirit of seafaring life, you can almost smell the salt. The star of the story is the U. S. S. Constitution, a "frigate of stout bark" dispatched in 1804 by the fledgling American republic to suppress the dastardly corsairs of Tripoli who were at the time in piratical control of the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, unfortunately, the pirates are the bad guys in this story, but the heroes must also resort to bold piratical tactics in order to win the battle. Outside Tripoli Harbor, under cover of darkness, Stephen Decatur tricks the corsairs into letting his little schooner Intrepid tie up alongside the corsairs' prize, the grounded U. S. ship Philadelphia. Out pops Decaturs hidden crew to swarm the bigger ship and burn it out from under her captors in fine buccaneer style. Meanwhile the movie gets up close and personal as the various ships' crews go about their business at sea. The camera goes right up into the rigging as the sailors reef the topsails, then follows them around the deck to tar the lines, take their tricks at the wheel, and sand down the decks so they won't slip on the blood during the battle to come. Wallace Beery plays a crusty old salt of dubious repute who lures farm boy Charles Farrell into a berth on his rustbucket of a merchant ship by promising they will soon hook up with the fabled Constitution—never dreaming that according to the laws of fate, that's exactly where they will be in time for the climactic battle. And very astute viewers may spot a pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff as a bearded corsair guarding damsel-in-distress Esther Ralston.
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PETER PAN (1953) [Available
in VHS
/ DVD]
With the voices of Bobby Driscoll and Hans Conried. From the
play by J. M. Barrie. Directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi,
and Wilfred Jackson. (Not rated) 80 minutes. ( Ask anyone to name their favorite fictional pirate and two names inevitably pop up. One is Long John Silver from Treasure Island. The other is Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Between Silver's peg leg and talking parrot and one-handed Hook's eponymous iron appendage, these two characters set the visual standard for a century of pirate imitators. Silver is the top scurvy dog in what is arguably the most influential pirate novel ever written. (And probably the most often illustrated by the likes of genre greats Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth.) But Hook sailed to prominence on a very different vehicle. Indeed, it's the overdressed, supercilious, cowardly comic-opera villain that is Captain Hook who's almost—er—single-handedly responsible for the ongoing popularity of J. M. Barrie's sentimental domestic comedy. First produced for the London stage in 1904, Barrie's play about a tribe of boys who refuse to grow up in a childhood dream world called Never Never Land might have gone the way of the Dodo if not for the presence of flamboyant, crowd-pleasing pirate chief Captain Hook, the lovable, hissable villain who's kept generations of audiences coming back for more. The most memorable movie version of Peter Pan is this 1953 Disney animated feature. The virtue of the Disney cartoon over generations of stage productions (including the famous ones filmed for TV starring Mary Martin) is that Peter is drawn as a "real" boy, not an adult woman in boy's clothes. Better yet, the animated Hook has the agility to wring every possible laugh out of his swordplay, pratfalls and surreal flights of fancy, along with an exaggerated cartoon visage worthy of his every scheme— hawk's beak, a jutting chin like the prow of a ship, quivering Salvador Dali moustache, wiggling eyebrows with a life of their own. Factor in the juicy, overripe trilling of Hans Conreid's vocal performance and you have one of the most endearing pirate icons ever to sail the silver screen. The story begins in the household of the Darling family in London. Young teen Wendy, on the brink of maturity, is spending her last night in the nursery with her two younger brothers when they are awakened by a visit from the legendary Peter Pan, the boy who won't grow up, searching for his lost shadow. (Peter is given a sassy voice by frequent Disney child actor Bobby Driscoll, who was 15 at the time.) Peter gets his fairy companion Tinker Bell to sprinkle the Darling children with pixie dust, teaches them to fly, and exhorts them to follow him to Never Never Land where they can remain children forever. Never Never Land is a children's paradise where Peter presides over a tribe of Lost Boys. It's inhabited by all the creatures kids love— mermaids and fierce-looking Red Indians to play with, and of course, pirates. Led by bombastic Captain Hook (who lost his hand to a hungry crocodile who's been following him ever since), the pirates are the serpents in the children's Eden, always plotting against them. They're more bluster than bite, however, and Peter is always wily enough to foil Hook's grandiose schemes. But the two of them engage in plenty of verbal sparring along the way, as well as some lively swordfights across the decks and up and down the rigging of Hook's pirate ship. One could take the Freudian approach to this material: the child's fear of puberty and the fact that Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, the father, are traditionally played (or in this case voiced) by the same actor. Or one could consider Tinker Bell, pictured here as a pouty, strutting little vixen in a skimpy chorus girl outfit who could have wandered in from a 1930s Golddiggers movie. But for most of us, the key to Peter Pan's enduring popularity is simple: it's the pirates. Of course Hook is a thoroughly benign blowhard of a villain, but he's devilish fun to watch cooking up his crack-brained schemes. A great deal of action is staged aboard the pirate ship and there are wonderful shots of the ship sailing through the sky (after a mega-dose of flying pixie dust) to take the Darling children home. Hook's co-dependent relationship with his loyal, long-suffering first mate Mr. Smee is very funny, and there are even a couple of lusty pirate songs sung by the whole motley crew: "The Elegant Captain Hook," a salute to their preening leader, and the buccaneer anthem "A Pirate's Life" (not to be confused with "Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life For Me," theme song of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride). Peter Pan is often a child's first experience with pirates, and it's one of the most memorable.
Neverland has never looked so lush and treacherous, nor has the subtext of incipient sexual longing ever been so prominent as in the new Peter Pan, P. J. Hogan's Freudian take on the J. M. Barrie childhood classic. Hogan skillfully revives Barrie's original concept of the story (before it was sanitized by generations of productions by the likes of Disney and Mary Martin) as a coming-of-age tale about a girl poised to leave the nursery facing the terror and allure of womanhood—and the fantasy boy who temporarily seduces her back to the world of make-believe. As Peter, the boy who won't grow up, Hogan dares to cast authentic boy Jeremy Sumpter (12 years old when the film was shot). Androgynous and feral, with his tousled hair and unsettling coquette's smile, Sumpter's Peter combines irritating boyish bravado with hormonal confusion as dense as Wendy's own; he doesn't know what he really wants when he brings Wendy to Neverland as the Lost Boys' surrogate mother. Young newcomer Rachel Hurd-Wood is a ripe and trembling Wendy, who loves to play pirates in the nursery with her two younger brothers and fears the grown-up world of propriety and marriage. Yet when Peter appears at her window and offers to teach her "to fly! To ride the wind's back!" she's expecting something more than childhood games. When Peter can't or won't understand what she wants of him, Wendy dallies with an even more ambivalent and unstable romantic object—Captain Hook (Jason Isaacs). Wendy is "not afraid, but entranced" by "the dark figure that had haunted her dreams." Isaacs' superb Hook is no comic buffoon. Psychopathic enough to gut one of his own crewmen with his hook, or blast a pistol ball through another for speaking out of turn, he's also a raging wit, vain of his own erudition, amusing himself with jokes no one else can grasp. ("Split my infinitives," he mutters when a battle starts to turn against him.) Exulting in his own malice, he breathes a death knell into the ear of a fairy bystander ("I don't believe in fairies,' he sneers), and flicks the desiccated body aside like a dead fly. Wheedling and manipulative, Hook seduces Wendy's vibrant imagination by telling her Peter can never love because he's "just a boy," and offering her a place in his crew. In the climactic duel with Peter, Hook throttles some pixie dust out of Tinkerbell, and cries with menacing rapture, "Hook flies! And he likes it!" (For the prerequisite "happy thoughts" he needs to stay airborne, he thinks of "killing, choking…Black Death…") Turning to psychological warfare, he taunts Peter with a vision of the soon-to-be-grown-up Wendy, where "there is another in your place—and he is called husband." Peter retaliates with the bitter truth that Hook is "old and alone." Isaacs revitalizes Hook with dark comedy and menacing brio. ("Silence, puling spawn!" he roars at the captured kids.) Yet there's a poignant underpinning: the poison he concocts from his own tear is a toxic brew of "malice, jealousy, and disappointment." The beauty of Isaacs' textured performance is that it invites us to ponder the tragedy of a grown-up Hook trapped forever in Peter's eternal childhood. The look of Neverland is splendid, with its verdant forests, blooming tropical foliage, and a Maxfield Parrish color palette of sky-blue, gold, and vermilion. A thousand shimmering fairies dance in the wood, and lift the pirate ship into the sky. For laughs, look for the parrot with the peg leg. And when Peter leads the Darling children into the London sky, they leave the atmosphere and enter deep space, careening between planets and stars before zeroing in on Neverland. The darker elements are just as gorgeous. Hook takes his captives to the Black Castle, a crumbling stone ruin with giant gargoyles. The mermaid lagoon in its dark, glittering jewel colors is a primeval swamp of the id; the mermaids are exotic sirens with webbed fingers and skin as silvery as their tails, who enchant the unwary with their eerie music and drag them into the deep. Indeed, all of Neverland seems connected to Peter's psyche as if it were a never-ending dream. When he is away, or in despair, skies cloud over, waters freeze, and frost covers Hook's icebound pirate ship. When Peter is happy, summer returns. French actress Ludivine Sagnier brings sexy, bratty verve to Tinkerbell, whose dialogue-free scenes are all done in comic pantomime. Veteran actor Richard Briers is all wry, long-suffering loyalty as Hook's mate Mr. Smee, laying out the captain's supply of wicked interchangeable hooks, or offering guest Wendy a glass of wine. ("I'm a little girl," she protests. "Rum, then," he agrees.) There's a bit too much slapstick buffoonery in London with the Darling children, the dog Nana, their hapless father (also played by Isaacs) and his stuffy associates at the bank. It takes Hogan too long to set up the premise, and he takes too much time spelling out the subtext of desire in these early scenes. (Wendy is caught in school with a suggestive drawing.) Very young children may be upset by the film's dark streak, and will certainly be bored by all the talk. Still, this is a resonant and imaginative retelling of a classic that we all thought we knew.
THE PIRATE
(1948) [Available in VHS]
With Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. From the play by S. N. Behrman.
Directed by Vincente Minelli. 102 minutes. ( Gene Kelly and Judy Garland team up with director Vincente Minelli and the music of Cole Porter for this charming musical set in the Caribbean islands during the 17th Century. Kelly has a high old time hamming it up as an egotistical actor named Sarafin who heads a troupe of traveling players. When they arrive at a sleepy colonial island, Serafin falls in love with a pretty and romantic orphan named Manuela (Judy Garland); to impress her, he pretends to be the notorious pirate "Mack the Black" Macoco. But don't worry: there's a real pirate in the story in the person of Walter Slezak as Don Pedro Vargas, the corpulent, toad-like mayor of the island. Borrowing a page from the book of Morgan, Don Pedro is the real Macoco retired from the sea to become commander of the port town. He's also betrothed to the restless Manuela, although neither she nor anyone else in town suspects his true identity. The joke here is how Serafin, the actor, makes so much more robust and satisfying a pirate rogue than the overfed and stodgy "real" pirate. None of this is what you'd call believable, but the elaborate sets and lavish Technicolor play up the wild surrealism of it all. And while fragile-seeming Garland is hardly the lusty Latina spitfire you'd like to see in this role, the movie takes off in the dance and action sequences. There's a wonderful dance routine choreographed by Kelly for himself and the acrobatic jazz dancing team the Nicholas Brothers. But the film is highlighted by a dazzling dream sequence in which Kelly dances up and down a ship's rigging in full pirate regalia, complete with a knife in his teeth. It'll knock your socks off!
Not exactly the "ultimate swashbuckler" the video cassette box claims Polanski has always wanted to make, this tongue-in-cheek shaggy seadog story has a tough time finding the right balance between comedy and adventure. Too much of the movie is given over to the slapstick antics of Walter Matthau's Captain Red, a blustery old hooligan with a curdled Cockney accent who'll do anything—foment mutiny, cut off his own peg leg, make a meal of a boiled rat or his own shipmate—to save his own skin. Or, more important, his treasure. Matthau is an entertaining old rascal but the part is written on a single bravura note, without shading. Similarly unexplored is the relationship between Captain Red and his sidekick, a pretty young Frenchman called the Frog (Cris Campion). At times, Campion seems almost sullen, like an unwilling indentured slave. At others, he loyally defends his mentor with one hand while saving the damsel and dueling with a villain with the other. Matthau treats him with gruff affection at times, but no real camaraderie is ever established between them, nor any of the tension of possible betrayal. They carry on as companions or adversaries at any given moment for no other reason than that the script demands it. But the real star here is the full-sized, full-rigged Spanish galleon Neptune that Polanski had built for the production. Picking up the shipwrecked Captain Red and "Froggy" at the outset of the story, the ornately carved ship and her wide decks provide the stage for much of the movie's action. There's a mutiny, an attempted hanging, a thrilling rescue, and sundry other adventures, as well as the cramped daily drudgery of sailors' work at sea. We get plenty of opportunity to ogle the Neptune from all sides. But the most exciting shots are those from the viewpoint of men in small boats at sea level gazing up in awe (or scuttling up the chains in stealth) as the huge prow of the ship heaves into view above them, filling up the frame. There's plenty of action at sea, as well as a nice tough of absurdity in Matthau's dogged pursuit of his latest treasure, a tall, unwiledy solid gold Aztec throne. ("Me frone!" he keeps calling it in his wheedling Fagin accent.) And despite its many lapses into ennui, the cyclical structure of the narrative ultimately makes a wry point about the endless go-round of action and aimlessness that made up the life of a 17th Century pirate.
PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END
(2007) With Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira
Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, and Bill Nighy. Written by Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio. Directed by Gore Verbinski. A Walt Disney release.
Rated PG-13. 168 minutes. ( I should learn to be careful what I wish for. In my review of the second PotC movie, I bemoaned the excesses of big, time-wasting slapstick comedy gags, but praised the development of story. Now, along comes the third installment (but possibly not the end of the series, judging from all the loose ends), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The big, creaky slapstick devices are cut way back—no pirates swinging in cages, no runaway water wheels—while the story grows to enormous, epic proportions. So why is At World's End so disappointing? Fans who wish the PotC movies would never end almost get their wish this time. Clocking in at just under three hours, At World's End is so loaded down with plot density—crosses and double-crosses, altered alliances, a supporting cast of thousands, gigantic supernatural fx, and a whole series of false endings—it never comes up for air. There's enough plot to sink the entire pirate fleet, which is just about what happens. And for all the provocative story elements left dangling at the end of the second movie, few are resolved here, and almost none of them in a very satisfactory manner. Worst of all, At World's End just isn't very much fun. If this is indeed the last of the PotC movies, the series ends with a whimper, not a bang. Things go awry right from the start as scores of downtrodden common folk—men, women, and children—march to the gallows to be hung for crimes of piracy or abetting piracy. Not exactly a rip-roaring opening act. Cut to Singapore, where Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush)—conveniently resurrected by voodoo priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) at the end of the last film—and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) have come to ask Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) and his pirate crew to help them rescue Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones' locker. Elizabeth needs to expiate her guilt for tricking Jack into Jones' clutches, Will wants to rescue his father from Jones' crew, and Barbossa wants to regain command of Jack's ship, The Black Pearl (evidently exiled with him). Meanwhile, Beckett (Tom Hollander), treacherous factotum of the East India Company and its fleet of warships, has harnessed the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman and its crew of crustaceous undead under the command of squid-headed Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) to protect commerce on the high seas. The mission to rescue Jack becomes a mere prologue to convening the Nine Pirate Lords (which include Jack, Barbossa and Sao Feng), to rally an international pirate fleet to depose the East India Company's chokehold and restore the freedom of the seas. Setting up all this plot and re-introducing the characters takes forever until the moment everyone is waiting for: the entrance of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). In fact, we're rewarded for our patience with a shipload of Captain Jacks, an entire crew of them, merrily hallucinated by Jack as he idles away his time on a bleak desert island in another dimension from the world we know. (The others have to plunge over a waterfall through a hole in the ocean to get there.) Why this desolate place is referred to as Davy Jones' "locker," and why Jack wasn't conscripted into the crew of the Dutchman like all of Jones' other victims, is never explained. From here, the plot gets a little fuzzy. There are four main ships and their crews to keep track of (the Pearl, the Dutchman, Sao Feng's three-masted junk, and the EIC flagship), but not a lot of shipboard action until the very end. Instead, characters constantly skulk between ships making deals to betray each other as their own priorities shift. Maybe the writers want to illustrate the wistful point someone makes early on, that "the only way a pirate can turn a profit any more is by betraying other pirates." But when anyone can double-cross anyone else in an instant, for any reason, there's no way to build camaraderie. Still, random pleasures do bubble up above the crush of so much plotting. Depp's iconic, ever-insouciant Captain Jack, one of the most entertaining and original screen clowns ever, buoys up every scene he's in. ("Four of you tried to kill me. One of you succeeded," he deadpans to his mates once they free him; the minute he's no longer undead, they all draw pistols on each other.) Depp's long-promised screen time with Keith Richards as Jack's veteran buccaneer dad is worth the wait, with Richards bringing his own ravaged cool to the proceedings. (He even strums a few guitar licks.) And a rollicking shipboard battle during which Will and Elizabeth exchange their marriage vows is a high point. (Although the fact that they have to wed before they can have their (mostly offscreen) love scene reminds us we're watching a Disney movie.) Assembling the Nine Pirate Lords and their crews is an audacious set-up, and it's cute that they start fighting each other over policy matters. ("This is madness!" snorts Elizabeth. "This is politics" Jack replies.) But what a waste that, once assembled, we don't get to see the pirate fleets of the world in action; the final battle only involves three ships. Meanwhile, an interesting subplot between Jones (who was once a man) and enchantress Tia Dalma deserves a better payoff. (There is one lovely scene when he visits her in the brig and her touch momentarily restores his human face.) (Except, by my reckoning, she's in a different ship's brig than the ship he's on, but I might have simply lost track.) Yet another subplot arises out of nowhere about the "goddess" Calypso (a Greek water nymph here promoted to "Goddess of the Sea"), which also gets short shrift. When Calypso assumes her goddess shape, she just gets really, really big (comparisons to Attack of the 50-Foot Woman are inescapable), then dissolves into a bunch of special effects that include the humongous "maelstrom" (whirlpool) of the finale. It's all these overblown supernatural elements (which account for at least 60% of the plot density) that finally sink this project. When gods, monsters, and other supernatural forces can interfere at any moment and change the rules, it's impossible to sustain any sense of drama. (Why can Jones glide through walls and pluck swords out of his amorphous body while his equally undead crewmen fight, bleed, and die like mortal men in the final battle?) And when anyone who dies can be resurrected by supernatural forces, there's not much tension. Wouldn't it be more fun to have Captain Jack and his allies (allies who are emotionally invested in each other, and who earn our emotional investment, not serial traitors willing to betray each other every five minutes) living by their wits and abilities alone out on the open seas, in more or less real life? That's the story we long to see in the PotC franchise, the story At Worlds End, for all its plots, fails to deliver. A pirate movie without camaraderie, drama or tension is a pitiful thing; like the maelstrom of the finale, it keeps going round and round, growing bigger and bigger, without ever getting anywhere. (Final verdict: Captain Jack Sparrow: (****) At World's End: (**)
Pirate fans have been waiting for a great movie to put the genre back on the treasure map ever since Cutthroat Island sank at the box office in 1995. Until that happens, the action comedy Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl is better than nothing. No cheesy B-movie, it's a lavish Disney extravaganza with an A-list cast, reels and reels of swashbuckling action, tropical islands, mountains of glittering treasure, an abducted lady, a desperate rescue, and three separate fighting ships under glorious sail. It's great fun on the surface, but its underpinning is as insubstantial as the decomposing bones of its undead pirate characters. You can't accuse producer Jerry Bruckheimer (know for such notorious guy movies as The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor) of not delivering enough bang for the buck. But there's so much going on in PotC (as it's known among the cognoscenti), the movie sometimes loses its bearings. Three opposing factions with unclear agendas make much of the action confusing. A good half-hour of cornball comedy relief and slow-moving exposition cut from the bloated 135-minute length could have focused the story and made the material into something really wonderful. That said, it's hard to find fault with a movie that gives us so irresistible an icon as Johnny Depp's eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow. Dressed in full pirate regalia, from his bucket-cuffed boots, tri-corn hat and arsenal of personal weapons, to the fetish beads in his long hair, gold teeth, and braided goatee, Jack makes a grand entrance into the West Indian harbor of Port Royal—standing tall on the crows nest of a slowly sinking single-masted boat. It's the perfect introduction to the often misfortunate but never daunted Captain Jack. Depp has said he based his characterization on Rolling Stone Keith Richard and it shows in his eye-rolling, self-mocking asides, extravagant gestures and perpetually stoned demeanor. (Not to mention loads of black eyeliner.) Strangely, it fits: Jack is the cagey wild card, a kind of wisecracking Holy Fool in a story that leaves the romance to a pair of young lovers: spirited Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), the governor's daughter, and earnest Will (Orlando Bloom), the lowly orphan blacksmith she loves. But it's a shame more isn't made of Jack's passion for the freedom of the seas that should be his defining manifesto (it's only mentioned once). With his seafaring passion thus downplayed, and separated from the romantic action, the character feels a bit neutered. Yet Depp is enormous fun to watch every minute he's onscreen. Scripted by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (Shrek), and directed by Gore Verbinski (hot off The Ring), the story concerns a treasure of Aztec gold with a curse on it. For years, the crew of the pirate ship Black Pearl under Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) have lived as undead zombies for disturbing it. To end the curse, they must recover the last medallion of the gold, which has fallen into Elizabeth's possession. Barbossa's crew attacks Port Royal and abducts Elizabeth on the same day outlaw transient Jack Sparrow in thrown in jail for attempting to steal a ship. Jack knows where Barbossa is headed, and Will breaks him out of jail to help rescue Elizabeth. They cut out a navy ship with a clever, exhilarating ruse, sail her to Tortuga to pick up a crew, and take off after the Black Pearl—formerly Jack's ship—with another navy warship in hot pursuit. This is where the action gets a little murky. Instead of crafting real drama, the movie opts for gruesome or jokey fx with pirates morphing into skeletons in the moonlight and lots of pointless combat with undead pirates we already know can't be killed. But the live-action stuntwork looks terrific (even though pirate historians will cringe when characters are made to walk the plank) Will and Jack duel in an entertaining swordfight ("You cheated!" cries Will; "I'm a pirate," Jack reminds him), but it's odd that Will is fighting the man who just saved the life of his beloved. Indeed, the dynamics between Jack and Will and Elizabeth shift so erratically, as individual scenes demand, we never feel a coherent bond growing between them. The finale is rollicking fun in the Three Musketeers mode, but the impact is diluted because their sudden camaraderie is unearned. Knightley is a heroine who thinks and fights for herself (in one funny bit she goes to draw a sword out of the family coat of arms only to discover its fake). Although Elizabeth is the usual feisty noblewoman, she's unlike the traditional pirate movie heroine because she doesn't romance the pirate captain—not even when she's marooned with Depp's Captain Jack on a desert island with a lifetime supply of smugglers' rum, where her only thought is escape. (You've gotta think: is this woman nuts?) There's also a female pirate in Jack's crew (Zoe Saldana) about whom we'd love to know more, but she only gets about three lines worth of screen time. (However plenty of time is made for a twitty pair of Redcoats and equally silly duo of undead pirates, one of whom keeps losing his fake eyeball.) On the plus side, Rush is unexpectedly poignant in conveying Barbossa's plight: indestructible, but unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of food or drink or human touch. And it's gratifying that Jack and his pirate crew are neither made to reform nor abandon their piratical ways. Had the filmmakers pursued these more resonant threads of their story, what a stirring adventure PotC might have been. Still, in the tradition of The Crimson Pirate (PotC even plunders one of its famous sight gags), PotC offers up a rousing good time with its acrobatic stunts and unflagging good cheer. One fears that as long as Hollywood treats the material as a theme-ride joke, the genre will never completely rise up out of the scuppers. But with the impressive plunder taken at the box office, PotC may pave the way for a new wave of pirate movies to come.
PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
2006. With Johnny Depp, Orlando
Bloom, Keira Knightley, and Bill Nighy. Written by Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio. Directed by Gore Verbinski. A Walt Disney release.
Rated PG-13. 150 minutes.
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RETURN TO NEVER LAND
(2002) [Available in VHS
/ DVD]
(G) 72 minutes. ( Unfasten your seat belt, spread your arms and fly back to childhood dreams with this belated sequel to one of Walt Disney's most popular cartoon features, "Peter Pan." The new film lacks some of the sprightliness of the 1953 original, and the new songs are remarkably undistinguished. But the chance to frolic again in Never Land is irresistible, especially when bombastic Captain Hook and his scurvy pirate crew take center stage. With a more somber initial setting—WWII London during the Blitz—the story focuses on the grown-up Wendy's daughter, Jane; with her Daddy away at the front and London in ruins, Jane doesn't believe her mother's fairy stories about Peter Pan. Until she's whisked off to Never Land by Hook as bait in the pirate's latest scheme to capture his nemesis, Pan. Rescued by Peter, she's inducted into the tribe of Lost Boys as "the first Lost Girl," and, of course, runs afoul of the pouty chorus-girl pixie, Tinker Bell—until the lasses team up to save the day. Like Dorothy in "The Wizard Of Oz," Jane only wants to go home, but first she must unlock her imagination and learn to fly. It's a sweet enough premise, but "Never Land" is most fun when it's all about the pirates. This time, their ship can fly, and the image of that three-masted square-rigger soaring over the London skyline is a knockout. So, too, is the shadow of Hook in all his plumed, bewigged and booted glory thrown by moonlight across Jane's bedroom floor. His crew is no more brave or competent than they ever were, but Hook has lost none of his malicious, wheedling duplicity; that's what makes him so much fun. But when all the swashbuckling is over, "Never Land" rises to a wonderful epiphany in the poignant, if fleeting, reunion of ageless Peter and grown-up Wendy that'll bring a tear to the eye of even the scurviest dog. (Although right-thinking pirate afficianados will find even more to cry about in the climax, when Hook's magnificent ship is thoroughly scuttled. Now that's sad!)
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THE SEA HAWK
(1940) [Available in VHS]
With Errol Flynn, Brenda Marshall and Flora Robson. Written by
Howard Koch and Seton I. Miller. From the novel by Rafael Sabitini.
Directed by Michael Curtiz. 126 minutes. ( This Errol Flynn swashbuckler is one of his best. He plays Drake-like 16th Century English nobleman Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, whose acts of piracy against the Spanish fleet win him favor in the court of Queen Elizabeth. Flora Robson plays the stately and wily Queen Bess. Claude Rains and Henry Daniell are splendid as the conniving bad guys, Rains as an ambassador from King Phillip II of Spain and Daniell as a traitorous courtier in league with the Spanish. Brenda Marshall, an appealing down-to-earth brunette not much remembered these days, is Flynn's love interest, the niece of the nasty ambassador. Okay, so it isn't exactly the story Rafael Sabitini wrote (from which the title at least is taken). And the movie received some heat in its initial release from critics who were dismayed that the film, like Queen Bess, seemed to condone the moral "wrongdoing" of Thorpe's privateering. But for what it is, the movie offers plenty of robust action and seafaring chutzpah. Thorpe and his crew sail to Panama to intercept a shipment of Spanish gold, only to be betrayed, captured and set to work as galley slaves. Later they free themselves, battle for control of their galleon and sail home to England. Scenes of court intrigue are less satisfying—except for the fabulous costumes and sets. This elaborate and expensive production shows off the huge new Warner Bros. soundstage where two full-scale sailing ships were constructed esecially for this film. Michael Curtiz directs; he had collaborated with Flynn five years earlier on another Sabitini adaptation, the legendary Captain Blood. Erich Wolfgang Korngold provides a rousing musical score. One of the classic swashbucklers from the "Golden Age"— of Hollywood, that is.
Most of what you go to pirate movies for is respected in this DreamWorks animated feature, the latest screen incarnation of a durable seafaring adventurerer from the Arabian Nights—plenty of rousing shipboard action, unrepentant scalawags, and a rogue hero with a heart of gold. None of the characters look remotely Arabian, of course, and pirate captain Sinbad speaks in the California beach-boy voice of Brad Pitt (although the character is at least drawn as a brunette). Still, Pitt brings the right fun-loving bravura to the part: "Let's get wrecked!" he cries, as he and his outlaw crew prepare to swarm aboard a prize ship. The story has seagoing thief Sinbad and his multicultural crew driven into a chaotic adventure by—appropriately enough—Eris, the trouble-making "Goddess of Chaos." As purred by Michelle Pfeiffer, she's the slinky Catwoman of the Immortals. Eris confiscates a treasure called the Book of Peace, a mystical tome which, when opened, confers harmony and prosperity on the human race. But when it's shut away, the earthly realm falls into darkness and ruin. Framed for stealing the Book of Peace, Sinbad is sentenced to die unless he sails to Eris' underworld domain, Tartarus, to bring it back. If he fails, his best friend from childhood, Proteus (Joseph Fiennes) will die in his place. To make sure Sinbad sticks to his mission and does not, for instance, sail off to Fiji, the tropical paradise of his dreams, Proteus' fiancée, Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones) stows away on Sinbad's ship to join the adventure. The inevitable romance between Sinbad and Marina begins with the usual insult-slinging familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Maureen O'Hara movie, piratical or otherwise. Marina is the B-type of pirate movie heroine, the feisty spitfire who despises the big lug but falls for him anyway. (As opposed to the A-type, the disapproving genteel noblewoman won over by the pirate hero's noble heart.) But Marina raises the bar for pirate heroines in a terrific sequence where she saves the ship and the lives of the entire crew by herself. In a treacherous passage studded with the rotting hulks of wrecked ships, all the men are bewitched by the haunting song of the beautiful but demonic sirens. Only Marina and Sinbad's loveable bulldog Spike are immune, so it's up to her to keep the ship on course while preventing the smitten men from destroying themselves in lust-crazed abandon. (Sort of a metaphor for life.) It's a rip-roaring sequence that also endears Marina to the grateful crew for the rest of the voyage. The shipboard action is the best stuff in the movie, full of adrenalin-rush antics that would be impossible in live-action. There are knockout scenes of Sinbad and his crew capturing a prize ship, of Sinbad and Proteus battling an enormous sea serpent intent on scuttling their ship, and of Sinbad's desperate maneuvering to reset the sails to open like wings when his ship sails off the very edge of the world. This is very cool stuff. But scenes on dry land tend to drag by comparison, establishing the plot and the characters' inherent nobility. ("Enough talking! Time for some screaming," purrs Eris, and we couldn't agree more.) Even the landbound action scenes—like Marina and Sinbad pursued by what looks like a giant cockatoo through snowy mountain peaks—lack the thrills of the seagoing scenes. And the filmmkers have an unfortunate fondness for slime jokes, from the ever-drooling Spike to the orifice fluids of various monsters. Still, when Sinbad and company are ot on that ship, it all comes together. The multicultural crew contains the usual suspects we've come to know and love in the genre: the brawny African mate (voice of Dennis Haysbert), the salty old seadog, a pair of Chinese-looking twins who are always wagering on whether or not their captain will survive this or that adventure, and an acrobatic Itaian who scuttles spider-like up and down the rigging and bears a notable resemblance to Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, complete with long hair, wall-to-wall cheekbones and goatee. Best of all, none of them are required to reform their evil ways; they get to sail off into the sunset as piratical as ever. Steel yourself for some cornball dialogue and slow exposition, but otherwise Sinbad serves up plenty of fun.
Two years after they appeared together in the successful THE SPANISH MAIN, Maureen O'Hara and Walter Slezak were cast again in this Arabian Nights swashbuckler. The hero this time was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., doing his darnedest to be as athletic, jovial, and devil-may-care as Doug Sr., leaping about the sets, throwing back his head in energetic laughter, and employing big, silent screen-type gestures at every opportunity. His outsized performance fits this lavish Technicolor extravaganza, with its opulent, glittering sets and costumes, and its vivid color palette in shades of blue, white, cocoa, and rust. On a Persian beach, Sinbad (Fairbanks), the boastful tale-spinner, is recounting his exploits for a group of jaded listeners. To jazz things up, he offers to tell them of his little-known "eighth voyage." The story unfolds in flashback as Sinbad and his sidekick swim out and climb aboard an abandoned ship with a crew of dead men. There they find a map leading to the lost treasure of Alexander the Great. But the map disappears by the time they bring the ship into port, where it's confiscated by the local caliph and offered up for auction. Sinbad is outbid for the vessel by the siren Shireen (O'Hara), who is blithely throwing around the money of her companion, the sinister Emir called Mafi (Anthony Quinn). The two of them entertain Sinbad at the Emir's palace, thinking he knows the location of the treasure, and Sinbad kidnaps Shireen, spirits her off to the ship, and casts off, believing she knows the route to the treasure island. The Emir pursues them in a ship of his own, and the story unfolds in a series of lies, mistaken identities and spirited treacheries. O'Hara is no more convincing as a red-headed Persian than she was as a Spaniard in The Spanish Main. And even draped in Arabian garb, she retains the fluffy-haired, big-shouldered, pinch-waisted '40s glamour look. But she has a more interesting role here as a schemer, plotting and counter-plotting against the men to pursue her own agenda. ("I could make Sheba look like a frump!" she gloats to herself.) And Slezak is a lot of fun as a Mongolian barber in Fu Manchu eyebrows and goatee, dispensing Oriental wisdom while hiding secrets of his own. The movie is full of funny supporting characters and entertainingly florid dialogue. The great Sheldon Leonard (who later became a TV producer and personality in the '60s), pops up as a deadpan auctioneer, crying "Who will offend me with an offer?" Romancing O'Hara, Quinn tells her "We will ride the world like an elephant!," only to denounce her as "Spawn of slaves!" when she betrays him for Sinbad. As Sinbad's faithful sidekick, George Tobias can't quite conceal his Brooklyn accent: "Honest ships giver her a wide boith," he declares. Despite the race to treasure island motif, you never get much of a sense of being out on the open seas, although there are some exciting shipboard moments involving Greek Fire catapults and the prow of one ship bisecting another. But the movie can be amusing on its own giddy terms. As Sinbad exults, "I'm the biggest fraud in the Islamic world!" and neither her nor the movie take themselves too seriously.
Most often cast as the suave modern sophisticate in movies like Casablanca and Now, Voyager, Paul Henreid plays against type as the pirate hero of this Technicolor Hollywood adventure. Teamed up with genre veterans Maureen O'Hara, as the blue-blooded heroine, and Walter Slezak as the oily villain, Henreid is out to prove his swashbuckling chops: hauling himself up the wales of a ship, trading quips with the ladies, and laughing like a demented man through every swordfight. He lacks the effortlessness that made Errol Flynn so much fun in these roles—it's hard work for Henreid—but he treats the part with respect and does a respectable job. Henreid's character, Laurent Van Horn, is an honorable Dutch merchant captain driven to piracy by circumstances. In the 16th Century, his ship of Dutch pilgrims en route to a new life in the Carolinas is wrecked off Cartagena and falls into the clutches of His Spanish Excellency Don Alvarado (Slezak). Van Horn and his crew are thrown into prison and all the Dutch immigrants are sold into indentured slavery. But Van Horn escapes and turns to piracy to survive. Five years later, Spanish noblewoman Francisca (O'Hara), daughter of the governor of Mexico, is sailing into Cartegena aboard a richly laden Spanish galleon to meet her groom-to-be, Don Alvarado. The Dutch navigator on her ship ("Hollanders are worse pirates than the English!" she fumes) turns out to be Van Horn, who is now the notorious pirate known as the Barracuda. His pirate vessel comes alongside and captures the galleon and everything in it, including Francisca—who is hauled aboard in a giant net full of booty with the Barracuda standing on top, in one of the movie's queasier metaphorical moments. Outraged at her captivity, Francisca nevertheless bargains with the Barracuda that she will marry him if he refrains from attacking the next fat Spanish ship. While her resolve to kill him on their wedding night melts away after his first kiss, he's too honorable to consummate their marriage and leaves her high and, er, dry. Things pick up in Tortuga, the buccaneer paradise, where pirates lounge around all day drinking rum and singing pirate songs. One of them is Anne Bonny (Binnie Barnes), looking like Peter Pan in short hair, tunic and tights. Anne has a thing for the Barracuda ("You Dutch codfish!" is her favored term of endearment), and she challenges Francisca to a pistol duel over him. (Of course, he loads the guns with blanks so the headstrong girls won't harm each other.) A rival pirate captain, a betrayal by the Barracuda's silky first mate, and a jailbreak from Don Alvarado's dungeon lead to the big finale. By the time Francisca gets a load of the noxious Don Alvarado, she's glad enough to throw in her lot with the Barracuda. Women are treated like perky little pets in this movie, who occasionally have to be restrained for their own good. (They're always getting hefted over men's shoulders and hauled around bodily.) Even Anne Bonny is treated with a kind of tacit male indulgence. At least she goes out fighting in this story, although not in the way historians have surmised. (But then, the historical Anne wasn't active in the Indies for another century and a half.) Meanwhile, the villainous Slezak, author of all the others' misfortunes, is dispatched not with a bang, but a whimper, by some little extra who doesn't even have a speaking part, instead of in a rousing confrontation with the hero. As a lavish piece of '40s-era escapism, The Spanish Main has its moments, but it doesn't bring anything new or inventive to the genre.
From the fertile imagination of Neil Gaiman comes Stardust, a cheerful romp of a movie that combines a fairy tale quest adventure with an offbeat love story and dark comedy. It's a weird mix at times, but all the elements work together in this lighthearted adaptation of Gaiman's 1997 four-part graphic novel. Director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) pieces it all together with thoughtfulness, dexterity, and galloping rhythm, from a script he co-wrote with Gaiman's friend and fellow novelist Jane Goldman. As you can see from the preview trailers that precede Stardust, everyone in Hollywood right now is tripping over their crystal balls trying to discover and exploit the next blockbuster, Harry Potter-style kiddie fantasy. (As if Harry himself and his mates haven't already grown up in the magnificent final volume of J. K. Rowling's series). So it's refreshing that Gaiman's protagonists, while youthful, perhaps naïve, are at least adults as the tale begins.
The story is set "150 years ago" in the placid
English country village of Wall, named after the stone boundary that
separates it from the perilous magical realm on the other side. An
elderly gatekeeper (the droll David Kelly) patrols the wall, but one
night, young Dunstan sneaks across into a marketplace in the
fabulous kingdom of Stormhold. Dunstan spends one imprudent night
with a beguiling woman (Kate Magowan) enslaved to Ditchwater Sal
(Melanie Hill), a scabrous old witch peddling charms; nine months
later, an infant son is delivered to Dunstan back in Wall.
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TREASURE
ISLAND (1950) [Available in
VHS
/ DVD]
With Robert Newton and Bobby Driscoll.
Written by Lawrence Edward Watkin. Directed by Byron Haskin. A Walt
Disney release. (Not rated) 96 minutes.
( This is the perfect pirate movie if you happen to be eight years old—and male. Robert Louis Stevenson's evergreen adventure classic about a plucky boy befriended by a rascally old pirate has been made and remade throughout the history of film, from the silent era to the Muppets and beyond. But this is the version everybody remembers, thanks chiefly to Robert Newton hamming it up with shameless glee in the pivotal role of conniving pirate captain Long John Silver. For all his tough talk and duplicity, Newton's Silver is one cuddly cutthroat, especially in the scenes when he bonds with stowaway boy Jim Hawkins in the hunt for buried treasure. In the plot that launched a thousand pirate stories (penned by Stevenson as a magazine serial in 1881-2), Jim Hawkins is the son of a widowed innkeeper on the rugged southwestern coast of England ca. 1740. Obtaining an old pirate treasure map from a mysterious lodger, Jim enlists the aid of a local doctor and the neighborhood squire, who finances an expedition to the Caribbean isle where the fabled treasure of pirate Captain Flint is buried. The ship Hispaniola is placed under the command of one Captain Smollet. A one-eyed, one-legged old salt calling himself Long John Silver hires on as ship's cook for the voyage, bringing along a crew of able seamen. When the grown-ups try to leave him behind, Jim stows away in an apple barrel. Discovered and made cabin boy, fatherless Jim is befriended by colorful old Long John. But in sight of the isle, Silver reveals himself to be a pirate captain and the rest of the crew are his men; they plan to take over the ship and make off with the treasure. It's the pirate rogues vs. Smollet and his gentleman voyagers with Jim and his divided loyalties stuck in the middle. There's never any doubt who the bad guys are in this movie; the pirates are all slavering cutthroats whom Silver barely holds in check by snarling bluster alone. (They must be the villains because some 20 or 30 of them are continually confounded and routed by four gentlemen and a boy.) For atmosphere, they actually sing "Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Rum." Comic relief—beyond Newton himself—is provided by Geoffrey Wilkinson as addled old maroonee Ben Gunn; in his stringy hair and rags, he's like a refugee from a particularly loony Monty Python skit, his every move accompanied by excrutiatingly cutesy xylophone licks on the soundtrack. On the other hand, Jim's fatal encounter with the nasty Israel Hands in the ship's rigging by moonlight is gripping and exciting. But of course it's Newton who sails this movie with his flamboyant posturing, croaking out "Avast!" and "Shiver me timbers!" at every opportunity. Contrary to popular mythology, Newton's Silver does not have a peg leg; he stomps around on one (real) leg and a crutch. He does however sport a parrot on his shoulder, and one (supposedly) fake eye—although given the wild, cartoony way Newton pops and rolls his orbs, it's hard to tell the difference. Pirate afficionados might wish he wasn't so eager to sell out his pirate brothers ("that scum" he calls them) to the bland good guys. For little boys, however, Newton's bombastic yet tender-hearted Long John Silver is the pirate of their dreams.
Swashbucklers In Space Concept rules content in hybrid adventure 'Treasure Planet' Disney's annual holiday cartoon offering, Treasure Planet, starts out with a high concept—Treasure Island in space. Freely adapted from the classic Robert Louis Stevenson pirate novel, it's an odd hybrid of swashbuckling historical adventure, space opera, and Disney cuteness. Adapted by co-directors Ron Clements and John Musker and a fleet of writers, Treasure Planet tries to be faithful to the spirit of Stevenson while updating the story for modern sensibilities and throwing in a lot of space-age gizmos to appeal to its target audience of adolescent boys. In this version, hero Jim Hawkins is no longer an adventurous boy living with his widowed mother; he's a troubled teenager (voice by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whose father walked out on his mother, leaving them behind to run the dockside Benbow Inn. Jim goes in for illegal space-surfing on his souped-up rocket board, for which he's been busted so often he's facing Juvenile Hall. The setting is an unnamed galaxy in an unspecified era. The Benbow Inn occupies a finger of hardware thrust out into space where vessels dock in mid-air. Jim wears his hair long on top and buzzed on the sides with a short pony-tail; his mother wears a long skirt and an 18th Century mob cap. They are the only human characters in the story. Their inn has Tudor architecture and mullioned windows, but their clientele are all aliens, cyborgs or anthropomorphic animals. This mix of images is artistically bold, but it robs the characters and the story of the dramatic weight they might have if they were rooted in a particular time and place. The stranger who sets the plot in motion is still named Billy Bones (a nifty cameo by Patrick McGoohan), but he's a reptilian sailor (or as they say here, "spacer") whom Jim barely manages to haul into the inn before he expires —leaving Jim the map to the fabled Treasure Planet, legendary hiding place of the lost treasure of Captain Flint. Jim and family friend Dr. Doppler set out to find the treasure, hiring a vessel (wryly named the R L S Legacy) commanded by no-nonsense, cat-like female Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson) and her devoted alien first mate Mr. Arrow (Roscoe Lee Browne). Jim is relegated to cabin boy for the voyage, assisting salty old ship's cook John Silver (Brian Murray, hamming it up in a florid accent borrowed from Robert Newton in the classic 1950 RKO movie adaptation). Silver is half-cyborg, with one x-ray eye, a hardware claw for a hand and (of course) a robotic peg leg. Fatherless Jim bonds with the flamboyant Silver, then learns that Silver and the rest of the dubious crew he's hired are all pirates plotting to mutiny and seize the treasure for themselves. The retro 18th Century details make more sense when we get our first look at the R L S Legacy, an old-fashioned sailing ship whose "solar sails" spread out like giant fans above the yards. Apparently built entirely of wood, it allows Jim to scuttle up and down the shrouds with the wind in his hair (solar wind?), a much more romantic image than any cybernetic space capsule could provide. A gravity device keeps the crew tethered to the open-air deck (it's never explained what they're breathing), and the ship is a majestic sight— especially sailing through the midst of a pod of huge "space whales." The writers dispense with many characters and subplots, while reinventing others. Instead of a squall at sea, there's a violent space storm when a nearby star goes supernova. Instead of a parrot, Silver's pet is a cute pink blobby alien called Morph who can shape-shift to imitate any object or person—a device the writers never use as effectively as they could. For reasons unknown, the villainous Israel Hands here becomes a giant hissing spider-like creature called Scroopf. And the addled old pirate Ben Gun found marooned with the treasure is a wacky robot called B. E. N. (Martin Short) whose cyber-brain has been tampered with. Musical numbers are also mercifully pared down to a single song montage, and with plenty of shipboard action, Treasure Planet looks terrific. It lacks the dramatic and emotional resonance to elevate it above the level of a high-concept stunt, but it's put together with imagination, humor and skill.
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YELLOWBEARD
(1983) [Available in VHS]
With Graham Chapman, Peter Boyle, Peter Cook and Madeline Kahn.
Written by Graham Chapman, Peter Cook and Bernard McKenna. Directed
by Mel Damski. (PG) 101 minutes. For a swashbuckling pirate comedy, Mel Damski's Yellowbeard doesn't offer much in the way of good solid yo-ho-hos. A few smirks, titters, and tee-hees, maybe, but one expects more. A parody of the already flamboyant pirate movie genre featuring three Monty Pythons, one Beyond The Fringie and certifiable nutcases like Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle and Madeline Kahn, this movie ought to be a riot. But Yellowbeard is more like civil disobedience. On the bright side, star and co-scriptwriter Graham Chapman makes a fine rip-roaring Yellowbeard, a ferocious 18th Century buccaneer searching for the lavish treasure he buried 20 years earlier. In contrast to the more noble Errol Flynn brand of movie pirate, Yellowbeard is unabashadly and unconscionably vicious, boasting of the 5,000 innocent men he's killed ("Most of them unarmed, or at least badly mutilated!") and ready to decapitate his only son, Dan (Martin Hewitt), when he learns the secret treasure map is tatooed on the lad's scalp. Yellowbeard is so mean that Death doesn't even slow him down. At one point he dies "…the way he always wanted to—horribly," only to burst back in the next scene, snarling, "Us Yellowbeards are even more dangerous when we're dead!" Chapman is all eye-popping, teeth-clenching physical abandon, and a loony delight to watch. John Cleese is also priceless as a raggedly blind spy with the ear-cocking tic of a paranoid sparrow. And Kahn has fun with the role of Dan's mum, a feisty barmaid. Peter Cook (looking remarkably like George Harrison in a long, dark wig) provides a series of droll, delicate comic bits as a tippling lord who joins the treasure hunt, but his skilled miniaturist work is all but lost on the film's larger canvas. Boyle plays Yellowbeard's vindictive former bosun-turned-nemesis, and Feldman (this was to be his last film) is Boyle's bumbling henchman. Eric Idle pops up as a priggish government agent hoping the pirate gang will lead him to the loot. But none of these great comics makes much of an impression with their average material. And the scenes with Cheech and Chong (representing the Spanish Inquisition) go on forever, Cheech endlessly butting his head against walls and floors while Chong persists in lisping like Sylvester the Cat. Yellowbeard looks fine, with lovely Mexican scenery standing in for the Caribbean. It's handsome sets and props include the full-scale sailing ship built for Mutiny on The Bounty in 1962. And the movie pays homage to all the traditional ingredients of swashbuckling epics, from thrilling swordplay, secret maps and stolen booty to press gangs, stowaways and mutiny at sea. It's heart seems to be in the right place but most of the big laughs must have gotten shanghaied on the way to the screen.
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INCOMING: NEW PIRATE FILMS ON THE HORIZON
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