The Buccaneer (1958)

I was in the mood for some swashbuckling, and thought maybe I would watch The Buccaneer (the 1958 remake of the original Cecil B. DeMille film from twenty years earlier). This movie is a hot mess. In the first place, this movie is (bizarrely) directed by Anthony Quinn, the only film he ever directed. But the reason he did this was because his father-in-law DeMille was too sick to work on this movie.

This is a remake of the 1938 Buccaneer with Fredric March, but it's also clearly of a piece with DeMille's general interests – I recently watched Reap the Wild Wind from 1942, and it's also about pirates and going straight and comparisons between civilization and banditry.

But The Buccaneer might actually be dumber and worse than Reap the Wild Wind (though it certainly repeats most of its plot points). It stars Yul Brynner (who's great) and Charlton Heston (who is ridiculous) and Charles Boyer (who is perfect). Almost everything else is laughable. The screenplay is absurd. Just when you think the movie is done it introduces an entire stupid fourth act. The production design is awful. Every single scene looks like it was filmed on a cheaply made set. The costumes are perhaps the film's only redeeming quality. They're legitimately gorgeous.

Yul Brynner is delightfully shirtless on this movie's poster, but unfortunately appears with a shirt in all of the movie's scenes.

There is a most curious moment in the terrible fourth act that is relevant, perhaps, to theatre history. Jean Lafitte and his fiancée are dancing, and the blonde milquetoast fiancée is congratulated by Andrew Jackson on her dancing and he mentions his wife. What he says is something to the effect of: If my wife were here I'd have her teach you "Possum Up a Gum Tree". Everyone laughs and applauds. It's a really weird moment, mostly because no one today knows that song at all, but it was obviously a reference that many people were supposed to get (in 1958?). "Possum Up a Gum Tree" is a famous song that Charles Mathews used to sing in blackface in his show A Trip to America in the 1820s as a mockery of Black Americans (and Americans in general). Later, the African American actor Ira Aldridge would sing "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in his own act, incorporated into performances of Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock. But The Buccaneer is set in the War of 1812, so the reference here is anachronistic. It's a very strange and gratuitous blackface reference in a film about the history of Louisiana.