‘Blackbeard the Pirate’ or — The Curse of the Incomprehensible Pirate?
What is it with pirate movies and incomprehensibility? I don’t mean all the “yarr-ing” and “yo-ho-ing” but the stories and plots that always seem to tie themselves up in knots so convoluted that not even the most experienced sailor could untangle them. The last few ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies were perfect examples of this and god knows whatever the hell Roman Polanski and Walter Matthau were up to in ‘Pirates’ (1986). But rest assured that this is not a recent phenomenon but one as old as Davy Jones’ locker itself because pirate movies have always been incomprehensible and this is no better illustrated by the incomprehensible mess that is Raoul Walsh’s ‘Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), a movie so awful it should be locked in a chest and buried on a remote island.
The plot to ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’ is… um… er… I don’t really know what it is to be honest. The most accurate description I could give would be for you to imagine one of those frantic short comedy plays the presenters of the kid’s TV show ‘Crackerjack!’ would put on at the end of every episode but stretched out into a feature length film. Essentially its people rush about manically, seemingly making up the story as they go along, double-crossing each other, burying gold, digging it up again, and burying it again and so on.
There are several attempts at swashbuckling but everybody’s swashes have been so irreparably buckled that it simply descends into chaotic clanking as pirates swing their swords about willy-nilly in random directions meaning it’s an almost terminal shock when you realise this was all directed by the same guy who made the incredible ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ (1924).
The cast are even more incongruous. Keith Andes as “hero” Robert Maynard is so wooden that people should be walking him instead of using the plank whilst wonderful Linda Darnell, a fantastic actress, tries her best but involuntarily exudes so much inherent Big City sass that she should be drinking martinis in a Manhattan apartment penthouse as opposed to riding the high seas with these idiots.
Then there’s Robert Newton as Blackbeard himself who gives the performance of an actor who holds the word “restraint” with absolute contempt. It’s quite something to behold because I never realised anyone could start off at peak-pirate and then see that as simply the base-line jumping off point for the rest of their performance because they’re going to ramp up the pirate levels to hitherto unimaginable heights. It’s not quite an acting performance we’re seeing Newton engage in here but something else, something possibly… indescribable?
Yet what’s most bizarre is that I ended up becoming strangely transfixed by it all and I’ve got no idea why. I didn’t enjoy myself as such, as I was so bemused by it for that to happen, so it was more like seeing a cat tangled up in a slinky in that I just sat there looking at it and thinking “what the hell are you doing?”
Anyway, so if that appeals to you at all in the slightest or if you’re crazy about pirates then you might get a kick out of ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’. Otherwise you might want to hoist the mainsail as quickly as possible before this film jolly rogers you.
