 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||
|
|
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
|
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!"
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
A
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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 calle |
