accessAtlanta

Movies heap tribute on playing pirate

The conventional wisdom said that Jerry Bruckheimer was crazy to make Pirates of the Caribbean. The last couple of pirate movies — Pirates, Cutthroat Island — had lost enough money to float the economy of an Eastern European nation. Pirate movies were just another genre whose time — the '20s through the '40s — had come and gone.

Guess again. Pirates of the Caribbean succeeded in finally making Johnny Depp a commercial movie star by dint of humorously deconstructing the pirate movie, cross-breeding it with a ghost story, and still maintaining its essential narrative — larger-than-life characters, a sense of humor, and some swashbuckling fun. It was, in essence, a musical comedy without songs and it had the inestimable help of being based on a theme park ride that everybody loves.

Buena Vista Pictures Read reviews of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

All those qualities were present at the creation, which took place during the '20s, stimulated mainly by the novels of Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood) and the paintings of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, who were in turn stimulated by the classic adventure of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

The movies could capture all that color and adventure with ease, and they did, in early silents like The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, both of which were remade with Errol Flynn.

But it was Douglas Fairbanks Sr. who made the pirate movie culturally respectable by shooting his 1926 The Black Pirate in early two-color Technicolor. Seen today, The Black Pirate has its share of exhilarating physicality, some early examples of cold-blooded humor — a wise old pirate taps his fingers impatiently while a prisoner is gutted off-camera in order to retrieve a valuable ring.

Fairbanks begat Errol Flynn who begat Tyrone Power and in between these Wallace Beery made a satisfactory, if noticeably softened, Long John Silver in MGM's version of Treasure Island.

By this time, it seemed that practically any leading man who looked good in the pouffy sleeves Seinfeld would later have so much fun with could do a pirate movie. Deeply unlikely pirates such as Paul Henried (The Spanish Main) and Louis Hayward (Son of Captain Blood) did it with some success, and the strenuous help of the stuntmen that Fairbanks Sr. had laughed away. It was only a question of time until to-the-manor-born Fairbanks Jr. (The Corsican Brothers) asserted his birthright.

And all these men begat Charles Laughton. Charles Laughton? Yes. Because right around the mid-'40s, the pirate movie, which was almost invariably about the captured innocent rebelling and seizing the pirate ship for himself, had reached a dead end. You could tell it had reached a dead end when Bob Hope made The Princess and the Pirate, a parody of a conventional pirate picture, and a pretty good one. So Hollywood flipped the plot and made the main character the pirate king himself. Laughton played Captain Kidd a couple of times, once in a movie entitled Captain Kidd, once, God help us, with Abbott and Costello.

By 1948, when Gene Kelly and Judy Garland made The Pirate, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for the title character to actually be a self-enchanted ham actor who was only playing at being a pirate. And in due time Laughton promptly begat Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in Disney's adaptation of Treasure Island, then followed it up with a succeeding movie called Long John Silver, and then beat it into the ground further with a TV series.

That tore it. Practically every actor since has imitated Newton's ragged appearance, rolling eyeballs and gargling vocal mannerisms ("Aaaaarrrrrggghhh, me hearties... ") up to and including Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The '60s brought a gradual end to pirate movies; a new generation of actors was largely reacting against the tradition of showbiz derring-do, and they were above such child's play, although child's play is, at bottom, the point of a pirate movie.

Also, most of these actors didn't have the requisite light touch, as Dustin Hoffman would prove in his remarkably humorless Captain Hook in the remarkably humorless Hook. Modern filmmakers couldn't quite figure out a way to bring the pirate movie into the modern age, as people like Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, for instance, did with the western. Roman Polanski's Pirates never even figures out whether or not it's a spoof.

But the disreputable Captain Jack Sparrow brought a sense of woozy fun back to the pirate movie, thereby proving that child's play is nothing to be sneezed at.