Treasure Island **** (1934, Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Lionel Barrymore) – Classic Movie Review 2060

‘You ain’t gonna let honesty stand in the way o’ bein’ smart? ‘ – Long John Silver.

Director Victor Fleming’s 1934 adventure movie is a splendidly rambunctious, rumbustious retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 classic young adults’ novel about a boy’s life with pirates on the high seas.

At the centre of it, Wallace Beery hams it up in great boisterous style as the lovable rogue pirate captain Long John Silver. Cheery child star Jackie Cooper (just 12) co-stars with Beery as the young cabin boy Jim Hawkins whom Silver befriends.

Here, Beery is effortlessly commanding the rest of the highly capable, shipshape crew of beloved eccentric character actors – Lionel Barrymore (as Billy Bones), Lewis Stone (Captain Smollett), Nigel Bruce (the bumbling Squire Trelawney), Otto Kruger (Doctor Livesey), Charles ‘Chic’ Sale (Ben Gunn), William V. Mong (Blind Pew), Charles McNaughton (Black Dog) and Douglass Dumbrille (pirate of the Spanish Main).

In Stevenson’s famous story, young Jim discovers a treasure map and is torn between his loyalty to his benefactors Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey and his affection for Silver as they sail off with a pirate crew to a remote Caribbean island on their quest to recover the buried treasure of the buccaneer Captain Flint.

Hunt Stromberg is the executive in charge of the MGM adventure, ensuring that it is a properly lavishly produced 30s blockbuster. It’s very nicely shot by Ray June, Harold Rosson and Clyde DeVinna, though it’s a shame it is not in glowing Technicolor. And the ideally cast Beery turns out to be only a tiny notch down from Robert Newton in his inimitable playing of Silver in Walt Disney’s otherwise inferior 1950 version of the story.

The 1934 Treasure Island was a big hit, costing $825,000 and taking $1,164,000 in the US and $1,110,000 overseas. It is a remake of director Maurice Tourneur’s silent movie of Treasure Island in 1920, which is now a lost film, in which Beery was cast as Israel Hands but was replaced by Joseph Singleton.

Jackie Cooper died on May 3 2011, aged 88. In his autobiography he wrote that an older English boy should have played Jim Hawkins.

Remakes: Treasure Island (1971) with Orson Welles making a 10-course banquet of Long John Silver; and again in 1990 with Charlton Heston, Christian Bale and Oliver Reed.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2060

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