Dad's Movies: "The Black Swan" and "The Buccaneer"

Double header!

Next up:  2 "historical" Hollywood entertainments.

The Black Swan (1942) is another Tyrone Power film (hmm, they all seem to be at the beginning of the alphabet!) and was apparently very successful in its day. The movie is fine, as far as it goes, but seems to be trying to outdo the classic film The Sea Hawk (1940) in the pirates and swashbuckling game. The main issue is that Power just doesn't quite have the charm of Errol Flynn and that makes it harder to buy Power's character inspiring loyalty from his fellow privateers or being able to win over Maureen O'Hara. It doesn't help that the first scene between them has overtones or threats of rape - yeah, that goes over well with the ladies!

On the other hand, there are times when Power's character verges on an anti-hero mode which is occasionally interesting but isn't always right for the rest of the film. The rough character mode works better when the scenes are including the boss, Captain Morgan (played by Laird Cregar, one of the standouts in the cast) and fellow pirate, Captain Leech who is played by Fox regular George Sanders, wearing a thick red beard.

The photography is rich and the action scenes are decent for an old film that is mostly shot on sets using water tanks and model ships. The sword fights aren't amazing though, and seem to rely on under-cranking the cameras to get the action to move "faster".

The musical score is really over-the-top and also seems to be trying to imitate the classic score from The Sea Hawk.

The other film is The Buccaneer (1958).

This creaky "epic" probably seemed old-fashioned in 1958; it's a remake of an older DeMille movie and despite being directed by his son in-law, Anthony Quinn has DeMille's trademark stuffiness all over it (complete with an "introduction" by CB himself that makes the film seem like a movie suitable for teaching American History). Yul Brynner does his best as the world's most boring pirate but looks silly wearing a toupee.

Charlton Heston is especially stiff as Andrew Jackson who looks like a spitting image of the $20 bill. He mostly wanders around giving speeches and is stalked by a Daniel Boone look-alike who seems very concerned that Jackson hasn't drank his milk. Seriously, he mentions it in every scene the two have together.

Oh yeah, and Lorne Greene gets a couple of opportunities to do some uncharacteristic overacting.

The other aspect of the film that bothers me is that even though the film was shot in VistaVision and color, the whole thing looks cheap as it's almost entirely shot on stages made to look like the bayous of Louisiana. This was a normal practice ten years earlier but by the late 1950s, at least some location work was being done, especially on large budget movies. The sharp picture really makes this stand out (and the Blu Ray is very well done).

This is one of those movies I wish I could ask Dad about - why did he buy it? Maybe there was something he remembered liking about it back then but who knows...