Fortunes Of Captain Blood

Iron Pirate

Fortunes Of Captain Blood
USA 1950 Directed by Gordon Douglas
Columbia DVD Region 2

Okay, so this will probably turn out to be a fairly short review.

This is a film I watched with somebody on their birthday, sourced from a Spanish DVD but in the original English... well... American English at any rate. It’s the first of two movies made by Louis Hayward, top lining him as the title character of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood novels. Now I can’t remember if I saw the much more famous Errol Flynn iteration of the character but, if I did, the last time I saw that would have been when I was less than six years old, I reckon and I have no real recollection of it nor, indeed, much knowledge of the character at all.

Now, as pirate films go, this is really not up there with the best of them. That being said, I do quite like Louis Hayward as an actor and it’s certainly not as bad as some modern pirate films I’ve seen in recent years.

Shot in black and white, Fortunes Of Captain Blood doesn’t really have much of a plot to it, in all honesty. That is to say, not a very complex one at least. Starting off with Captain Blood going to an island for supplies, some of his men are ambushed and held to be sold into slavery by an officer of the navy who has been commissioned to catch Captain Blood and rid the seas of him. Blood goes to the island where his six men are being held and, for the rest of the movie, negotiates his way... sometimes with a sword... to finding a way to free his men from the jail. This involves befriending a pretty woman played by Dona Drake, acquainting himself with a prison warder and getting him drunk and then getting into various bits of trouble and banter, all the while posing as a local fruit seller and falling in love with the richest lady on the island, Isabelita Sotomayor, played by Patricia Medina, an actress who has been in loads of things over the years and has quite striking eyes.

When his carefully laid plan goes a little wrong towards the end of the picture, the usual pirate movie things happen such as sword fighting, spiking the cannons and sacrificing his ship, The Avenger, to switch and take over the opposition’s vessel while they are busy trying to accept a surrender on the now empty vessel etc. And, although a lot of the film is more about delivering semi-sparkling, sometimes quite witty but sometimes quite hum-drum dialogue, the pacing is such that the film is livelier than it probably should be and Hayward is quite thoughtful in his acting, with the inner workings of his characters mind easily perceived on his features, even when he’s not wagging his lips at any enemy or ally who happens to be passing.

The man in the director’s chair on this one and, probably, the other reason why the pacing on a mainly 'talky' picture is a little lighter and fluffier than one might expect, is Gordon Douglas. Douglas, of course, directed many movies in his career, pretty much all of them notable for nobody really taking note of who the director was. However, this particular run of the mill director has some notable classics in his CV, as far as this audience member is concerned, such as the giant ant movie Them!, In Like Flint, Rio Conchos (reviewed by me here), Tony Rome and also its sequel, Lady In Cement. Once again, I couldn’t pick up on any directorial signatures from Gordon here but the whole thing is put together, mostly, competently with some good model work done (in places).

One thing I didn’t expect to see in a film from 1950 was blood... I mean, apart from the name of the title character, that is. This feels almost too early as even pre-code films didn’t feature that much blood in them and, although the inclusion of the red stuff... erm... black stuff in the case of this monochromatic motion picture... was totally new to films following the introduction of the Hayes code, I do find it strange that a film which has swordplay of the usual sort of a film from this time, where the hero can just run someone through with his blade and they will clasp their bloodless torso and fall over, has anything stronger. But there you have it, there are two instances here where actual fake blood is used. The first time is when Louis Hayward removes a musket ball from the wound of one of the characters and the ball and blood are clearly seen as he disposes of it and the other occurrence in the film is when somebody fires their pistol at one of Blood’s men and it misses its target but puts a bloody crease in the cheek of the intended victim. I really wasn’t expecting this but, thinking back now to my viewing a few years back of Rio Conchos by the same director, maybe it’s something I perhaps should have been on the look out for as these gory details seem almost unnecessary in context of the rest of the action and maybe this hints at a glimpse of directorial signature after all?

And that’s mostly all I have to say on the subject of Fortunes Of Captain Blood. I can’t tell you how well it measures up to the original 1936 novel, The Fortunes Of Captain Blood, but I can say that it’s well acted, less sluggish than one could expect from the somewhat tired script and it also has a surprisingly rousing score by Paul Sawtell,  someone who I usually associate with much less flamboyant scores than what he’s provided here. So, if you are a fan of either Louis Hayward or, indeed, one of Sabatini’s more well known characters, then you might want to give this one a look. It’s no The Crimson Pirate but it’s a nicely executed affair which makes for reasonable ‘afternoon viewing’. Maybe check this one out if you have nothing better on.

The Saint’s Return (aka The Saint's Girl Friday)

Saint Louis' Blues

The Saint’s Return
(aka The Saint's Girl Friday)
Hammer/RKO UK 1953
Directed by Seymour Friedman

I’ve remarked more than once that my favourite actor to embody the famous Leslie Charteris character The Saint has always been Louis Hayward. Now that’s alway been on the strength of his performance in the RKO entry The Saint In New York (reviewed by me here). He stopped after one movie and George Sanders took over for a while before Hugh Sinclair pretty much finished the series off (although he was starting to grow into the role I think).  Hayward did, however, return to the character 15 years later in a movie made in England by Hammer Studios, who would soon become quite famous for their horror movie output. Now I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen The Saint’s Return before, which does try to be a continuation of that original film series and, indeed, the film was briefly distributed by RKO for Hammer in the US, under the title The Saint’s Girl Friday.

The film starts off with a high speed car chase as a woman is killed when her car is forced of the road by nefarious bad guys. And when I say high speed car chase I mean a ‘not that fast’ car chase with some obviously sped up footage, in this case. We then find The Saint flying back from the US and Inspector Teal, played here by Charles Victor, receiving a telegram from his American counterpart Inspector Fernack (sadly unseen in this film) to warn him of that fact. When we catch up with Louis Hayward’s soft spoken version of The Saint, he has his valet Hoppy with him (played by Thomas Gallagher) and from him hears the news that his old lady friend who had contacted him to come to England to help her has died, courtesy of the car chase at the opening of the picture.

This news obviously fires up Simon Templar but the brilliance, still, of Hayward’s performance is that this anger at the death of a friend is conveyed mostly by body language only. Hayward remains soft spoken throughout the picture and his rage is a smouldering undercurrent, punctuating the actions of his adventures while he offers opinions and advice to his enemies. This adventure is a pretty standard plot involving gambling IOUs and revenge against the people who killed the lady who brought him to London in the first place. I’ll say no more of the plot here other than it has a kind of neat twist reveal on the secret identity of the ringleader of the mob of gamblers which I actually didn’t see coming. So I should be happy about this, right?

Alas, I wish I could say this is a good movie but it’s actually quite a bad one. And it really shouldn’t be. Hayward seems to just stroll through his performance because, frankly, the script just isn’t as clever or witty as those earlier Saint movies and the action choreography on the few fist fights there are is quite lethargic and neither looks, nor feels, like anyone here is in any danger. Now there are a lot of great British actors and actresses who turn up in minor roles here including such notables as Sydney Tafler, Sam Kydd and the glamourous (as she was then) Diana Dors and this should all be enough to save the day as far as this film is concerned but... it just doesn’t. Doctor Who fans might like to note that there’s even a smallish role for William Russell in the film, going by his real name of Russell Enoch, ten years before his famous role as Ian Chesterton, the first Doctor’s companion, made him a household name for a short while.

Ivor Slaney’s score does it’s best to feel like it’s a ‘proper’ Saint movie and he incorporates the much disputed Webb/Charteris melody which was still in use for Ian Ogilvey’s run on the character in the 1970s but... yeah, the music really doesn’t lift the picture as much as one might like. The film is as short as the more recent of The Saint films prior to this but it still somehow feels somewhat padded and, in some ways, just like watching a TV episode. Indeed, the director of this would go on to work with Hayward again the following year on a TV incarnation of the US Lone Wolf character... I’ve never had the opportunity to see any of the Lone Wolf films or TV shows over here in the UK (no, not the Japanese manga character) but, from what I understand, he’s pretty much another variation on Simon Templar anyway (much like The Falcon was, if memory serves).

This film made me think of Timothy Dalton a bit and the two James Bond films he made. I think Hayward is in the same position as him. Timothy Dalton made only two James Bond films... The Living Daylights (reviewed here) and Licence To Kill (reviewed here). The first of these two was absolutely spectacular and got me back into appreciating the Bond character again... the second of these two was a terrible, terrible movie which actually put me off watching the Bond films for a long time until the wonderful Goldeneye. The point is, although Licence To Kill was an awful film and hard to watch, Dalton was still giving an absolutely solid performance as Bond, he just had a useless script to work with. I think the same thing could be said of Louis Hayward and his two movies for The Saint series. He jump started the franchise with an absolutely brilliant film, The Saint In New York but when he finally came back and did a second one, well, the script and direction just seems to have let him down. I can kinda see why Hammer or RKO have never made this one available on DVD or Blu Ray but, as awful as it is, one of those companies really should have a think about doing a commercial release of this one. It needs to be out there for people to see.

As for me and The Saint... well, I don’t plan on revisiting any of the TV shows anytime soon but I am curious to see what Val Kilmer did with the role in the most recent cinematic version of the character. Before that, though, I’d really like to see the two French movies made in the 1960s so, if anyone knows where I can track down copies of these with English subtitles, please let me know. As for The Saint’s Return... there are much better places to start on in the series than to try and sit through this one.

The Saint In New York

Saint Louis Blues

The Saint In New York
US 1938
Directed by Ben Holmes
ODEON (for RKO) Region 2

When I first went to see Tarantino’s excellent Inglorious Basterds at the cinema (the first of many cinema trips to see that shiny opus), I was delighted to notice that the main female protagonist, Shosanna, was sitting in a cafe in France reading a copy of Leslie Charteris’ novel The Saint In New York in one scene (I think that’s about the sixteenth in the long running series of books). Delighted because it took me back to my youth in two ways...

First to those old BBC2 5.40pm weekday showings of The Saint movies in the late 1970s/early 1980s. This was a popular dinner-time slot as they would have a regular series of films or serials at this time of night and we all used to watch them. Asides from serials like Daredevils Of The Red Circle, Hawk Of The Wilderness or Undersea Kingdom, Auntie Beeb also showed us as full runs as they were able to of Charlie Chan, The Saint and The Falcon movies from the 1930s and 1940s.

Secondly, it took me back to the discovery of a second hand book shop, about 25 minutes walk from my school, which I discovered a number of years after these movies. It was a great shop, a real treasure chest of gazillions of books in four or five rooms (a converted house), owned by a lady with whom I used to have many literary chats. But it was unusual in that it would only open its doors on a Thursday afternoon (most Thursdays... not all) and so you only had a small window of opportunity per week to visit. By then I also had a Saturday job so I had some small (very small income) but this was in the days when you could pick up some really great second hand books for 20p to 30p a pop. So, yeah, I used to take a carrier bag with me and go off, on a weekly basis with a half a dozen books or more... three of which, at least, would be read by the end of the week (I used to read a lot more than I do these days... sadly).

Here I would pick up literally dozens of Doc Savage novels (those brilliant, black spined Bantam reprints from the 60s and 70s) along with a helping of the Modesty Blaise novels, The Shadow novels, the “Harry Palmer” novels, the James Bond novels, the Quiller novels, the Boysie Oakes novels, the Conan novels, Michael Moorcock’s novels, Philip K. Dick’s novels... and around about 30 to 40 of the old editions of The Saint novels... all of which I loved.

Now I remembered watching the old Roger Moore series as a kid on telly, but these novels (and what I could remember of the films) were quite a bit different in style to those. I loved The Saint character in these books because he was so light hearted, thumbed his nose at all authority and talked absolute nonsense to people as he took the p*** out of the poor criminals he would go up against. Of course The Saint was a thief himself, but he only concentrated on plundering those who deserved it (criminals themselves, usually) or possibly the rich folk who wouldn’t really miss it (if memory served). I was (and still am), very much into The Marx Brothers at the time and the character as portrayed in the books had a very Groucho Marx/Bugs Bunny attitude to him... while still being a deadly fellow you wouldn’t want to come up against in a fight. He’d outsmart you.

Of all The Saint movies I saw as a kid, I remember this very first one, starring Louis Hayward as Simon Templar/The Saint (sometimes, he also used the alias Sebastian Tombs to get his St. designation from his initials) as being the absolute best of the bunch in terms of the actual character as read in the books up there on the screen. Hayward plays him as light and fluffy (and as deadly) as in the original stories, which were obviously contemporary literature of the time. Unfortunately, George Sanders would take over the role after this first one, followed later by Hugh Sinclair. Louis Hayward would return to the role once more in the fifties (although the DVD companies seem to be a bit shy about remembering that fact in their liner notes at the moment, for some reason) in The Saints Return aka The Saint’s Girl Friday (1953) in some kind of bizarre Hammer films/RKO co-production from what I can make out (the IMDB is even a bit sketchy on this... anyone know the full details?). I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen that one or not and, as far as I can tell, it’s never been released on home video... no doubt due to a rights issue, I would expect. This is, of course, much more criminal than the acts of the gangsters and thugs that Simon Templar would find himself crossing paths with and a commercially available DVD should be made available immediately, in my humble opinion.

Anyway, as I was saying, nobody quite captured the spirit of The Saint as Louis Hayward did in The Saint In New York. The film is typical of its era, although I believe it had a certain amount of trouble in the violence stakes at the time... there’s a lot of shooting in this one. But perhaps it’s the attitude towards the casual killing of ones enemies that may have rankled the censors and critics of the time... The Saint does cold bloodedly execute a criminal without warning... sniping him while disguised as a nun, no less. Also, at one point, The Saint uses a criminal’s body as a shield while he reaches for a gun to take down the other shooter himself... not very practical in terms of actually being a shield but the movie does have the little touch of realism that Templar takes a bullet in the shoulder for his trouble.

The dialogue is very true to the spirit of the novels too... the witty banter singing itself off the screen almost like a 1930s screwball comedy, which were also contemporaneous to this movie and novel, of course. From what I can remember, nobody does it better, and I shall see how the George Sanders movies hold up to this formula very soon as I have them all on a Warner Archives edition ready to watch.

Added to all this is the shadowy chiaroscuro stylistic element of a film noir... perhaps a bit early for this kind of darkened, shadowy style of lightning if you believe the text books on film history, but not so early, in my opinion, that the lightning lessons from those early German Expressionist cinematographers who I personally think helped build the foundations of “American Film Noir”, weren’t already in practice in the US. Either that or the ODEON DVD transfer and print are muddier than I was expecting. There’s even has a bit of a tragic ending in this one where... oh no, I’d better not tell you. You need to see this one for yourself.

If you’ve never seen any of The Saint movies before, then this one is definitely the one to start off with... it’s a doozy. If, however, you only know the character in film from the George Sanders sequels which carried the series forward, then you really owe it to yourself to see the original flick. The first in a long line of actors who would play the character on screen... Louis did it the best.