The Crimson Pirate ***** (1952, Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat, Eva Bartok) – Classic Movie Review 3471

Director Robert Siodmak’s 1952 classic stars a wonderfully agile Burt Lancaster as Captain Vallo, aka The Crimson Pirate, and his former circus acrobat partner Nick Cravat as Ojo.

Lancaster and Cravat are awash in acrobatic swashbuckling, sizzling swordplay and stylish intrigue on the Mediterranean high seas in Siodmak’s superb adventure movie, in which Captain Vallo gets mixed up with a revolution in the Caribbean in the late 1700s.

A perfect mixture of action and spoof, Lancaster’s follow-up to his 1950 triumph in The Flame and the Arrow looks breathtaking in cinematographer Otto Heller’s brilliant Technicolor images and is always the finest entertainment.

Lancaster easily equals the acrobatic triumphs of Douglas Fairbanks Snr, king of the genre in the silent movie days.

Also in the cast are Eva Bartok as Consuelo, Torin Thatcher as Humble Bellows, James Hayter as Professor Elihu Prudence, Margot Grahame as Bianca, Noel Purcell as Pablo Murphy, Frank Pettingell (Colonel), Leslie Bradley, Frederick Leister, Eliot Makeham, Dana Wynter, Ewan Roberts, John Chandos and Christopher Lee as the military attaché Joseph.

The overrun final budget was a high $1,850,000, up from the original $1.1 million, provoking Warner Bros to demand that future Lancaster films were limited to $900,000. Lancaster replied by making a new deal with United Artists.

As in The Flame and the Arrow (1950), Cravat plays a mute because he had a thick Brooklyn accent.

Christopher Lee says in his autobiography that Siodmak upturned the screenplay: ‘The script started life as serious, nay solemn. But Robert Siodmak, the director, with all the sure touch of real tension behind him in The Killers (1946) and The Spiral Staircase (1945), took stock of the material in 48 hours and turned it into a comedy.’

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3471

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/