“Seas ablaze… with black villainy, with fiery romance, with breathless deeds of daring… in the roaring era of love, gold and adventure!”
That tagline for “The Black Swan” (1942) just about sums it up. The allure of the pirate genre.
September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we hoist the Jolly Roger for an hour of music for movies about buccaneers, sea rovers, and freebooters.
Of course, these men, and sometimes women, are seldom REALLY pirates – violent, ruthless criminals – but rather pirates by circumstance. Kindly rogues pushed into lawlessness by tyrannical powers greater than themselves (at least for the time being), fighting back, through subversive means, sometimes out of revenge, perhaps, but it is a revenge driven by motives of duty, conscience and/or patriotism, certainly tempered with moral righteousness.
In “Anne of the Indies” (1951), Jean Peters plays Captain Anne Providence, a protégée of Blackbeard the Pirate. The story is based on the real-life exploits of Anne Bonny, though obviously given the Hollywood treatment, so that the final product bears little resemblance to the historical figure that inspired it. Franz Waxman wrote the stirring music.
“The Buccaneer” (1958) stars Yul Brynner as Jean Lafitte and Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson (!). The film, again based upon a true episode, is heavily fictionalized, though the pirate Lafitte did assist the United States against the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
This was the second telling of the tale by Cecile B. De Mille, who directed an earlier version, with Frederic March, in 1938. The remake came very late in DeMille’s career, and in fact his health was such that he was unable to oversee the film’s actual direction, assigning the duty instead to his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn. It would be the only film Quinn ever directed.
The music is by Elmer Bernstein, who had previously written the score for DeMille’s perennial favorite “The Ten Commandments.” Twenty years later, Bernstein would go on to score a series of comedies for Ivan Reitman and John Landis, beginning with “Animal House,” in 1978. There is a scene toward the end of “Animal House,” in which John Belushi appears in the guise of a pirate, scales a building, and then swings down a banner. His antics are underscored with a near quotation from “The Buccaneer.”
In “The Crimson Pirate” (1951), Burt Lancaster is joined by his lifelong friend, Nick Cravat, born Nicholas Cuccia. He and Lancaster had partnered in a trapeze act before breaking into the movies. They costarred in nine films all together, with Cravat, as often as not, playing a mute, on account of his thick Brooklyn accent. The music for “The Crimson Pirate” is by William Alwyn, also a respected concert composer.
For “The Black Swan,” the cast includes Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, and Laird Cregar as Henry Morgan. Also, if you ever wanted to see George Sanders in a red beard, then this is the movie for you! The score is by Alfred Newman, 20th Century Fox music director, who provided the music for all of Power’s historical adventures. We’ll hear the composer conduct, from the film’s original elements.
Finally, Errol Flynn attained superstardom in the 1935 pirate opus “Captain Blood.” Within five years, he had become cinema’s quintessential swashbuckler. “The Sea Hawk” (1940), with Flynn playing a privateer in the service of England and Elizabeth, sports arguably the greatest pirate score ever written, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. We’ll hear a couple of suites, played back-to-back, from two albums in the celebrated Classic Film Scores series, originally issued back in the 1970s on the RCA label. Charles Gerhardt conducts National Philharmonic Orchestra and Ambrosian Singers.
As with the western, the epic, and the space opera, the pirate genre tends to draw forth some very colorful contributions. Lock up your daughters and join me for “Swords at Sea,” on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX the radio station of the University of Oregon!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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