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A performer who understands silent-movie heartiness and a filmmaker versed in ornate sweep, that's how to revive Fairbanks swashbuckling. Turbulent 17th-century England kicks it off, silhouettes before an anti-King James II poster ("Down with the usurper, to arms!") and Errol Flynn's dash and humor as the adventurer who's "hung up the sword and picked up the lancet." Doctor Blood before Captain Blood, the crime of tending to a rebel's wounds sends him to the Caribbean as a slave, "an uncertain world entirely." The first half is a plantation insurrection triggered by cruel imperial business (Lionel Atwill) and touched by coquettish compassion (Olivia de Havilland), certainly an influence on Spartacus and maybe Sansho the Bailiff even. The "timely interruption" of the Spanish pirate raid neatly signals the second half, the anarchic high-seas limbo (or is it a utopia?) of "men without a country, outlaws in our own land and homeless outcasts in any other." The buccaneer hideout in Tortuga is a jumpin' party town where Basil Rathbone as the cutthroat partner models a Gallic taunt for Monty Python, his duel with Flynn incorporates sand, crashing waves and slippery rocks for a ripping tribute to Parker's The Black Pirate. Michael Curtiz slashes cavernous sets with Teutonic slanted shadows and multiple planes of action, the heaving of vessels becomes integral part of his continuously tracking and craning camerawork. Through all of this, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's themes throb and stir in journeys of their own, exceptionally visual music. "Heroic? It was epic!" A cannon's smoking muzzle (cf. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) announces the stretto, and the rascal's reintegration into society. With Ross Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, Robert Barrat, Hobart Cavanaugh, Forrester Harvey, Donald Meek, Frank McGlynn Sr., J. Carrol Naish, Pedro de Cordoba, and George Hassell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |