Film Review: The Crimson Pirate (1952)

If you want to see an actor at the prime of his physical and artistic abilities, in a role he was born to play, you might look no further than Burt Lancaster as the protagonist of The Crimson Pirate, a 1952 period adventure comedy directed by Robert Siodmak.

The plot is set in the late‑18th‑century Caribbean, where a pirate ship commanded by Captain Vallo (played by Lancaster) uses outrageous but ultimately effective trickery to take a much larger military ship as a prize. One of the passengers is Baron Jose Gruda (played by Leslie Bradley), the King’s envoy sent to quash a rebellion on the island of Cobra, while the pirates also discover a large cargo of weapons and ammunition. Vallo decides to sell the weapons to the rebels and their mysterious leader El Libre, while simultaneously striking a bargain with Gruda to betray the rebels and deliver their mysterious and charismatic leader El Libre (played by Frederick Leister) to the authorities. Vallo’s scheme gets complicated when he meets and falls in love with El Libre’s beautiful daughter Consuelo (played by Eva Bartok) and, once having El Libre in his custody, decides to let him go. For some members of his crew, led by Humble Bellows (played by Torrin Thatcher), this goes against the pirates’ code of honour, so they stage a mutiny, only to be betrayed by Gruda themselves. Vallo, however, has the good fortune to meet the brilliant and eccentric scientist Professor Prudence (played by James Hayter), whose revolutionary weapons and gadgets help him to stage an uprising against Gruda and set Consuelo and his crew free.

The Crimson Pirate is Lancaster’s film in more than one sense of the word. It was produced by Norma Productions, a studio founded by Lancaster and his agent Harold Hecht, and appears tailor‑made for Lancaster’s physique, charisma and athletic abilities. This becomes clear in the brief prologue, when a bare‑chested Lancaster with a huge grin on his face displays the skills he had learned as an acrobat and, while breaking the fourth wall, tells viewers exactly what kind of film they are about to see. Although obviously inspired by Douglas Fairbanks’ silent classic The Black Pirate, the film was supposed to be something completely different. The original script by Waldo Salt was inspired by the author’s Communist beliefs, and the motive of a revolution of colonial peasants against the aristocracy was treated in a straight way, while the title itself was a subtle dig at the Red Scare and anti‑Communist scaremongering led by the likes of Senator McCarthy, whom Lancaster and Hecht, as left‑wingers, detested. However, when Robert Siodmak took over directing, he quickly realised that the film would work better as a comedy. According to Christopher Lee, the famous British actor who appears in one of his early roles as Baron Gruda’s lieutenant, the script by Roland Kibbee was reworked in a matter of two days. This intervention proved to be just what the doctor ordered.

The Crimson Pirate had a high budget that went overboard during production, and this can be seen in the use of actual sailing ships, bright colours, interesting period costumes, props and hundreds of extras, many of them engaged in complicated and breathtaking action scenes; the film even offers something of fan service through a brief scene of dancing girls. But it is the comedy that works best, especially in the scenes where Lancaster is paired with his old friend Nick Cravat, repeating the same “buddy‑buddy” chemistry that had served them so well in their previous film The Flame and the Arrow. Cravat, whose character of Vallo’s lieutenant Ojo remains mute because of a heavy Brooklyn accent, excels in physical comedy, and the dynamic duo is wonderful in elaborate but very funny slapstick scenes during which they take out a large number of soldiers who behave like Keystone Kops. An atmosphere of general silliness is maintained until the end, which features surreal scenes of small‑island building and anachronistically advanced weapons like balloons, mini‑submarines, nitroglycerine, armoured vehicles and Gatling guns; and to make things even more irreverent, the characters of Vallo, Cravat and Professor Prudence even briefly appear in drag. Lancaster and Cravat, who apparently had the time of their lives during production, were joined by a solid cast, although Eva Bartok as the romantic interest and Leslie Bradley as the main villain aren’t as effective as Hayter in the role of the eccentric scientist and Torrin Thatcher as the morally challenged pirate who ultimately sees the error of his ways.

The Crimson Pirate proved to be a great success, achieving box‑office results that no other pirate film would match until Pirates of the Caribbean half a century later. It represents one of the best films in the career of Burt Lancaster, and also one of the best works of early‑1950s Hollywood.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)

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