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Blackbeard, the Pirate

Blackbeard, the Pirate
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Raoul Walsh
Source: Amazon streaming video

Blackbeard, the Pirate

On November 22, 1718, Edward Teach, the notorious pirate known as Blackbeard, was killed on his ship the Adventure during a fierce boarding action led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. By the time he was brought down, Blackbeard had been shot five times and suffered twenty wounds from edged weapons. For the most famous image depicting this event, look no further than the painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris on the cover of your editor’s Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure anthology.

Blackbeard’s career and death are also depicted in this film, in which Lt. Maynard, ordered to Port Royale in pursuit of Henry Morgan and the loot from the sack of Panama … wait, what? Whoa, this story is set in the 1670s, before Ned Teach and Rob Maynard were even born. In fact, this entire moving picture is nought but a tissue of lies! Avast! Bloody pirates—they’ll steal half a century right out from under you if you so much as look the wrong way.

History failure notwithstanding, this was one of the most popular pirate movies of the ‘50s, thanks mainly to Robert Newton’s unhinged and completely over-the-top performance as Blackbeard. Newton took all the mannerisms and speech patterns he’d developed for the rôle of Long John Silver in Treasure Island and cranked them up to eleven, frequently veering into farce and self-parody, but no less entertaining because of that. (So many “Arr”s!) Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t hold up so well. The plot is sadly muddled, starting out with Maynard undercover chasing Morgan but captured by Blackbeard, along with Edwina, a pirate-captain’s daughter who’s secretly stolen Morgan’s treasure, all of them blundering about loudly at cross-purposes, and it never really gets sorted out. Characters’ motives change suddenly from scene to scene, people stranded on islands show up back in port without explanation, and even the big ship-to-ship showdown between Blackbeard and Morgan ends in an unsatisfying draw. It’s a mess.

One could overlook the ham-handed story if the performances supporting Newton were entertaining, but the rest of the cast is just bland and forgettable. Worst is Keith Andes, who plays Maynard, the English naval lieutenant and ostensible protagonist, exactly as if he were a tough-talking New York district attorney going up against the mob—imagine a slim Peter Graves but with no sense of humor. We’re supposed to root for this guy against Blackbeard and the other pirates, but it’s flat-out impossible. His intermittent romance with Edwina (Linda Darnell) is likewise arid and unconvincing, no matter how hard Darnell tries to look adoringly at him. Yeah, no.

At least there’s a lot of action, solidly directed by Raoul Walsh; the cutlass duels in particular are quite good. The shipboard scenes are also decent, with the quarters below decks properly close and cramped, including visits to the lazaret and the orlop (or, as Newton calls it, “the arr-lop”). And Blackbeard’s crew are as filthy and repulsive a set of brutes as you’re likely to see in the otherwise over-tidy 1950s, so bonus points for that. But you won’t be able to swallow the story unless you swallow a stiff rum or three first.

By |2018-01-02T21:06:17-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Blackbeard, the Pirate
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Black Swan

Black Swan
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1942
Director: Henry King
Source: Fox Studio Classics DVD

Black Swan

Trust me, mates, this is one of the finest pirate movies ever made. It’s not as iconic or influential as Captain Blood or Treasure Island, but it’s every bit as good, and deserves to be better known. Like Blood, it’s a reasonably-close adaptation of a Rafael Sabatini novel, with crackling dialogue by Seton Miller (Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk) and the great Ben Hecht (The Front Page, Gunga Din). It’s one of director Henry King’s many collaborations with star Tyrone Power, and the first of their series of swashbucklers. King understood that the audience wanted a vivid, fast-moving tale, and that Power wanted rôles with both strength and nuance to them. And in this Technicolor epic, the team delivered all of that.

This movie pulls no punches: even before the main titles, a pirate ship takes down an English merchantman, and immediately after those titles, two buccaneer crews raid and sack a Spanish colonial port. And these are real pirates, not Robin Hood’s Merrie Men: murder and pillage are rife, and rapine is implied. Less than five minutes into the film, Captain Jamie Waring (Power) and Captain Leech (George Sanders, that magnificent bastard) are lolling on the beach, splitting the spoils, as Waring laments the capture of their leader, Captain Henry Morgan. Then Spanish reinforcements counterattack, Waring is taken, and put on the rack by an oily Spanish Don who demands to know where Morgan really is. Boom! Pirates swarm the castle, Waring is freed, and in walks their commander, Captain Morgan himself.

So far the movie’s been good, even better than good, but when Laird Cregar enters in the rôle of Henry Morgan, it’s elevated to remarkable. Because Cregar simply is Sir Henry Morgan, brought back from the dead after three centuries, more alive and larger in every way than every other person in Port Royal, Jamaica, and the entire Caribbean. His screen presence even out-powers Tyrone Power. There’s only one other star in the film with the megawattage to match him….

Maureen O’Hara, in the first of her many memorable swashbuckling rôles, playing the fiery Lady Marguerite Denby, daughter of the Governor of Jamaica—that is, the former governor, since Morgan has replaced him. Pirate Jamie Waring and Lady Marguerite commence a smoldering love/hate romance, and off we go!

The plot works well, with plenty of moving parts that satisfy: new governor Morgan trying to compel peace, renegade pirates plundering the Main, treacherous nobles selling out to the sea rovers—events keep moving without ever getting too complicated. The real fun in the middle part of the film comes from the interactions between the respectable citizens and Morgan’s buccaneers—theoretically the swabs have been rehabilitated, but they just can’t get the hang of polite society, because pirates gonna pirate.

Then treachery rears its head, and we’re into act three, bedad! Rather than tip the final twists and turns of the brilliant finale, let’s just point out a few things about this movie that shouldn’t be overlooked. First, there’s a fine and flavorful score by Alfred Newman that sets the mood perfectly. Second, we get the reliably-rascally Anthony Quinn leering and wearing an eye patch as George Sanders’s second in command. And last but by no means least, it’s a thrill to report that the tavern where the pirates meet is called Ye Porker’s Sterne, with an appropriately lurid pictorial sign hanging above its front door. Bedad!

By |2018-02-11T17:27:23-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Black Swan
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Black Shield of Falworth

Black Shield of Falworth
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1954
Director: Rudolph Maté
Source: Amazon streaming video

The Black Shield of Falworth

The Victorian children’s novel Men of Iron (1891) by the American author and artist Howard Pyle was influential in solidifying the tropes of the “knights in shining armor” medieval adventure tales popular right up through the 1950s. Pyle’s story was a simple morality play in which Myles, a young Englishman whose father was betrayed by an ambitious noble, trains as a squire and then as a knight, finally avenging his father’s betrayal. Pyle’s vivid depiction of would-be knights training with sword, shield, armor, and lance was recycled countless times in tales of medieval chivalry over the next three-quarters of a century. Men of Iron also established in popular fiction the conventions of trial by combat (“And may God defend the right”), the favorite climactic plot device of the lazy knight-pulp writer.

All of these tropes are on display in classic fashion in Falworth, Universal’s adaptation of Men of Iron. Concocted as a star vehicle for Tony Curtis, in his first big-budget epic, Pyle’s simple tale is simplified even further for the screen, while its romance aspect is fleshed out to provide additional screen time for the radiant Janet Leigh, Curtis’s wife, in the rôle of the female romantic lead, Lady Anne. Curtis’s nimble athleticism serves him well in the part of the hot-headed and energetic Myles, though when reading his lines his delivery is still sometimes embarrassingly amateurish. It doesn’t help that a lot of the dialogue is in the highfalutin elevated diction considered appropriate for tales of medieval chivalry ever since Sir Walter Scott (e.g., “Have you not had your fill of buffoonery?”), but thankfully it’s toned down considerably from the language in the novel.

The guy who gets the best lines is Torin Thatcher—you know him as the sorcerer in 7th Voyage of Sinbad—appearing here as Sir James, the surly one-eyed master-of-arms-cum-drill-sergeant who trains Myles in the knightly martial arts. His is easily the film’s most enjoyable performance, clichéd though it may be, and when he barks a threat to hurl Myles from the battlements if he gets into another brawl, you believe him.

Falworth is Universal’s first Cinemascope extravaganza, and no expense was spared on the colorful costumes and expansive sets, with absurdly spacious castle interiors and grand courtyards where platoons of men-at-arms ply their medieval weaponry. The romance is familiar stuff, the villains’ plots are all too predictable, but the fight scenes are tight and well-choreographed, the whole thing is a pleasure to look at, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything but a simple tale of pluck and virtue triumphant over mean-spirited wickedness. (Oh, and by the way, persistent movie myth notwithstanding, Curtis never says,”Yonda stands the castle of my fadda”—for that, see “The Son of Ali Baba.”)

By |2018-02-11T17:27:00-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Black Shield of Falworth
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Black Rose

Black Rose
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1950
Director: Henry Hathaway
Source: Fox Cinema Classics DVD

The Black RoseThis movie works well as a spectacle depicting 13th-century England and parts of Mongolia and China. As an adventure or character-driven story, however, it’s not so good. This is one of those films in which the angry and stubborn protagonist is told at the beginning what he needs to do to find peace and purpose, spends the next two hours determinedly rejecting that advice, before finally embracing it in the last ten minutes of the picture. Lame! In this case, Walter of Gurnie (Tyrone Power), an illegitimate son of a Saxon lord, is the angry protagonist who’s suffered injustice at the hands of his Norman relatives. Edward II (Michael Rennie)—the King of England, no less—tells Walter he needs to put aside his hatred of the Normans for his own good and that of the realm and its people, but Walter angrily insists on leaving England to seek his fortune in distant lands—in far Cathay, if necessary, which he heard about from his Oxford mentor, Roger Bacon.

Cut to central Asia, to which Walter has fast-traveled with his loyal sidekick, English longbowman Tristram Griffen (Jack Hawkins in an early rôle, his cragginess softened by youth). They join a Mongol caravan headed further east to the court of Kublai Khan, bearing tribute of gifts and women to the great conqueror. One of these women is Maryam, a half-English daughter of a captured Crusader, known as “The Black Rose” for her rare beauty. Maryam escapes the harem and joins the Englishmen disguised as a serving boy, and immediately falls in love with Walter, but he thinks having a girl along is a dangerous nuisance and irritably refuses her affections. (Do you see the pattern?) Maryam is played with conviction by the French actress Cécile Aubry, who though age twenty-one at the time of filming really looks like she’s about fourteen (ew!), which makes Walter delaying his inevitable fall for her something of a relief.

The commander of the caravan as it grows into an army is a genuine historical figure, a Mongol general called Bayam of the Hundred Eyes, played by Orson Welles as an engaging rogue. Since Welles was himself an engaging rogue, this isn’t much of a stretch, and though he’s a pleasure to watch here one can see that he isn’t really working very hard. Bayam acts as a counterweight to good King Edward, giving Walter diametrically opposed advice, which actually starts him at last on the road to realizing what a sap he’s been. Along the way there’s a deadly archery contest, several offstage battles, a torture gauntlet, and Walter’s discovery of the Eastern secrets of gunpowder and the magnetic compass. When the gang finally reaches Cathay there’s a long half-hour of clichéd Orientalism before a muddled ending that returns Walter, with Maryam, to England. Alas, we already know how it’s going to end because every single event in the plot has been thoroughly telegraphed. Oh, well, at least it looks good: the movie was shot at scenic locations in England and Morocco (standing in for Asia), plus the desert scenes have camel jokes that are almost funny.

 

By |2018-02-11T17:26:08-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords, Swashbuckler Movies|Comments Off on Black Rose
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