Captain Pirate? Pirate Captain, surely? This swashbuckler from 1952 went by the much more obvious title of Captain Blood, Fugitive in some regions, which makes more sense all round, since this is a sequel to Fortunes of Captain Blood from two years earlier.
Fortunes had done pretty good business and so this revisit gets an upgrade, black and white to Technicolor, and keeps its two key cast members, Louis Hayward and Patricia Medina, he the dashing pirate hero, she his hispanic lady love and bounteous fount of virtue.
It also keeps the earlier film’s structure, which was essentially a detective plot with a wash of piratical timber-shivering over the top. Here, it opens with an essentially tamed Dr Peter Blood about to get married and happily ensconced on an estate in Jamaica, where he tends the wounds of escaped slaves and rails against the iniquities of a system built on depriving his fellow man of his freedom. But Blood is forced to put the nuptials on hold and head back onto the high seas to prove that he is not responsible for a string of daring raids, widely reported as being the work of Captain Blood the once infamous marauder.
Commandeering a ship and getting the old crew back together, he is soon the Blood the audience requires – engaging in sword fights and donning cunning disguises and fake beards to infiltrate enemy territory.
There are doubloons and pieces of eight and Blood’s crew have a tendency to “aaarrgh” in ragged unison. Add in unreliable Spaniards, devious Frenchies and high-ups in plumed hats who cannot be trusted no matter which country they’re originally from – plus cannon fire – and pretty much all the boxes are ticked on the sheet marked piratical swashbuckler.
It’s a B movie, with Hayward no match for Errol Flynn, though he’s lithe and committed to the role and leaps about more effectively than you might expect for a man who reportedly smoked 60 cigarettes a day (though in the final action sequence you can see Hayward’s chest heaving mightily).
Everyone is on their game, whether it’s extras playing Blood’s crew members or the support actors playing the characters the detective pirate interviews en route to establishing the identity of the fake Captain Blood. They are a particularly flavoursome set of potential baddies – among them a lusty freebooter (George Givot), a devious Brit (Ted de Corsia), a nightclub singer (Malú Gatica) and a bar owner and contraband connoisseur (Nina Koshetz).
The colours are vivid, as you’d expect from Technicolor, and the sets have been dressed garishly to make the most of its unnatural looks. Though it’s actually the outdoor sequences that are the best in terms of bright good looks, thanks to DP Charles Lawton Jr. That said, the seagoing sections won’t be fooling anyone. Those are clearly model ships on the high seas, the flappy, loose, lightweight sails a particular giveaway.
The side characters excepted, it is absolutely what it should be and nothing more which makes it either a perfect example of the genre or disappointing, depending on how you mark these things.
This was Hayward’s last swashbuckler and after this he started his slide sideways into TV. In some quarters (Wikipedia, for example, on the day I’m writing this) this is reckoned to be the last film directed by Ralph Murphy, though the IMDb says he directed two more movies, not including TV movies, before also transitioning into TV.
Either way the veteran director with more than 20 years’ experience keeps things moving and mounts some exciting action sequences. This film rattles along. It won’t surprise you but then it probably isn’t meant to.
Captain Pirate (in a box set with Fortunes of Captain Blood) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
