Captain Pirate

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 … Read more