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.

IT! The Terror From Beyond Space

It!’s Alive

IT! The Terror From Beyond Space
1958 USA
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1 

A manned mission to Mars meets with tragedy at the hands of... well, a martian. The only survivor from the initial mission is under suspicion and another spaceship, crewed by seven people, is sent to Mars to bring him home to Earth for a court martial and a firing squad. Nobody believes his story and thinks the man killed his entire crew... until they realise a murderous alien creature has stowed away on their spaceship for the return flight back to Earth and has started picking off the crew one by one and then pulling them into the ventilation shafts where it’s been hiding. Hmm... yeah, this does sound familiar doesn’t it.

You know, I really do like Ridley Scotts ALIEN but, like other famous scientifiction extravaganzas such as Star Wars, it’s really easy to see where he, or at least his writers, got the basic story ideas to glue together in their own inimitable fashion... pulled right from science fiction short story writer Jerome Bixby’s own screenplay for this movie. And, just as famously, from Mario Bava’s excellent sci-fi horror movie Planet Of The Vampires... in which the crew of a ship take a look around a starship stranded on a planet and find a large, dead skeletal alien pilot still on board. That the ship in Bava’s film used music as a control device would not resurface in the movies of Ridley Scott until Prometheus, of course.

Anyway, IT! The Terror From Beyond Space is a movie I’ve been waiting to get around to watching for over 30 years, and I’m finally glad I got to see it because it’s actually a lot less unintentionally funny than I thought it would be and is a nicely crafted sci-fi, “creature on the loose” style thriller, actually. Writer Bixby’s work was of the calibre that he even wrote a few episodes of the original Star Trek TV show and I think that’s kind of pertinent here because this does work as much as an ensemble piece of sorts as anything else and it does, to some extent, have the feel of one of those classic 1960s Star Trek episodes.

The acting is pretty solid for the time and, looking at the cast, I couldn’t tell you any of their names (except one which I’ll get to in a minute because I hadn’t realised he was in it until the end credits) but these are all faces you’ve seen dozens of times in movies and in gazillions of episodes of old TV shows over the years. The kind of relied upon actors who get called in to pretty much all the TV shows of their day and play a different character in one episode a year for them (once everyone’s forgotten them from the last time around). So no star names but all solid, reliable and confident performances from jobbing actors who were rarely out of work. Confident enough that they will have you fearful of a “not so realistic” man in an alien monster suit who is rampaging a few floors down from them.

And it turns out that the “man in a suit” alien is none other than Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, old Western hand and star of one of my favourite serials of the 30s, Undersea Kingdom! Which is basically a Flash Gordon serial rip off but, hey, it’s one of the better ones (asides from a few little factors... hmmm, I should review that serial some day). It’s nice to see the guy working but I felt a bit disappointed that the Atlantean robot busting Corrigan had been relegated to such a role, where you don’t even know it’s him unless you are told. Bit of a come down. Mind you, one of his early roles was as the orangapoid Buster Crabbe fought in the original Flash Gordon serial... so at least he had some kind of grounding in his kind of “acting”.

There’s some unintentional comedy in the form of some massive 1950s sexism near the start of the movie in a scene reminiscent of the dining sequence in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, where the crew of the ship are all eating together. It’s kind of telling of the times that the only two of the crew who aren’t having their supper are the two female crew members. Why? Because they’re busy clearing the plates away and making meals for the men. This stuff is comedy gold but I’d better not say too much about it. It is, however, an interesting indication of the prevalent attitudes of the time.

The film itself is very short and comprises scenes of the crew slowly being chased up, level by level, in their rocket ship by the titular monster, who wants to eat them. The monster is kinda done quite well in the earlier scenes, mostly stalking and killing as silhouette shadows on the wall in the way that films did so well then... however, the director certainly doesn’t balk at showing the monster as often as required and when you get a closer look at it, well it’s nice but not in any way impressive as something that could really be alive and is, perhaps, a little less skillfully designed than the kind of monsters that were coming out of studios like Universal at the time. The Creature From The Black Lagoon make-up, for example, would have been hard to top even from the company that spawned him... and that certainly proves to be the case here, I’m afraid. The monster in this one’s expression of savage anger can easily turn to comedy if you are not in the mood for it, to be honest.

It’s also an interesting film in that it leaves a few plot threads dangling at the end. One of the crew members is trapped on a level with the creature and is asked to hide in the airlock at one point while the crew attempt to extract all the air from the ship... however, the guys face plate on his helmet is broken and we’re not enlightened as to whether he survived at the end of the movie or not. Also, at least one of the crew members, probably two, is infected by the creature with a condition which is very much like leukemia, which needs treating with blood (which you just know is going to be stored on the same level as the creature) and, although he gets the blood, you don’t really know if he and his sick companion are going to make it to earth or, whether the leukemia is in any way treatable or not. It’s something which is just ignored after its usefulness as a dramatic device to throw the humans back into the mix again with the creature has been fulfilled, but glossing over it as a minor detail didn’t really leave me satisfied as to the outcome, to be honest. Then again, of course, this movie is set in the far, far, far future of... um... 1973. So maybe by the time we get to that far flung year they’ll have developed a cure for leukemia. Who knows? Oh, wait.

But the film is effective enough and also has a charming B-movie style score to it by iconic composers Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter (which is available from Monstrous Movie Music here). It all adds to the fun of the piece and the score CD is well recommended by me, as is the movie which is one I’ll definitely pick up to watch again in a couple of years. Maybe as a Christmas holiday double bill movie or something. Anyway, for any fans of fifties horror/sci-fi movies, this movie is grade A fun and you won’t want to miss out on it. So sit back, relax and watch it while the women folk do the dishes (as the film tells us this is obviously the way things are meant to be).