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The buccaneer galleon under Caribbean skies, the ideal stage for a lass figuring out her identity with sword and pistol. "The unlikely tale" that opens like a leather-bound storybook (cp. Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe), Captain Providence (Jean Peters) tending a wound in the wake of her latest onslaught. "I bear many scars from the British." "This one will mar your beauty." New to her crew is a Parisian smoothie (Louis Jourdan) equipped with a treasure map and the determination to pierce through her distrust of men. A brush with roaring Blackbeard (Thomas Gomez) hints at tangled pasts and ulterior motives, and there's the stranded bride (Debra Paget) at the Jamaican outpost. In the forever shifting sea, conscience is a rum-soaked doctor (Herbert Marshall) who contemplates the action and sighs, "Now I've tasted every crime." Three years ahead of Johnny Guitar, a serene dash of Technicolor delirium from Jacques Tourneur, the inquisitive feminine spirit of I Walked with a Zombie filtered through the swashbuckling verve of The Flame and the Arrow. Long Jane Silver aboard the Sheba Queen, bear-wrestling at the Black Anchor Inn, a whole ocean of subtle revelations (even auctioneers at the slave market have manners). "A fish on land" is a fear and a dream to the imperious tomboy, who exchanges trousers for the golden gown she'll force upon her rival. The piracy of gender-bending in a corseted society versus the travesty of "normalcy" that is a honeymoon in a sandy void, the dilemma is resolved in a sustained close-up of the heroine during a cannonade. Deep Dutch blues, a salute to the Treasure Island of Tourneur père, a defense of "the vilest, black-hearted she-devil that ever came out of the sea." Perhaps even more than Moonfleet, the root of Rivette's Noirot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |