Legendary Pirate Movies (BFS/AMT)

 

Picture: C-     Sound: C-     Extras: D     Films:

 

Captain Kidd   (1945)   C+

Son of Monte Cristo   (1940)   B-

Long John Silver’s Return To Treasure Island   (1954)   C

 

 

With the commercial success of Disney’s grossly overrated Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), there is a sudden new interest in past such films.  Features about pirates are scarce, though a Swashbuckler film cycle would occasionally surface.  Oddly, Hollywood is not rushing to do more, treating Disney’s hit like a fluke, but one low-cost set offers three films with middling results.

 

Captain Kidd is lucky enough to have Charles Laughton in the title role, but the story is minimal and B-movie grade at best.  In black and white, it has the feel of old Hollywood more than the others here, but that is little compensation for a weak film.  Son of Monte Cristo is reviewed in the Dueling Double Feature elsewhere on this site, in a better sound and picture copy from Marengo, though it is not brilliant.  It is the best of the three films here by default.

 

Long John Silver’s Return To Treasure Island is the oddest of the three, produced in Australia to capitalize on CinemaScope and is NOT letter boxed here.  It was distributed by the long-defunct D.C.A. Pictures, who would only issue two other scope films after in 1957 (The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, Scandal in Sorrento starring Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren).  They also issued Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, and censored the U.S. release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953), so you get the idea.

 

Needless to say, the picture and sound is really bad, barely above VHS, and the transfer material is bad.  The Dolby is 2.0 Mono.  The color on Long John is a wreck, something the monochrome films need not worry about.  You get a few bios and filmographies, as well as brief text on other real-life pirates.

 

This is only for the extremely curious who feel losing a few bucks is not a problem.

 

 

-  Nicholas Sheffo