The Princess and the Pirate (1944)
In 1944 wit Bob Hope was at the meridian of his game. Decades away from his cue card-driven TV specials and hopelessly elsewhere of manner movies like Boy, Did I Annoy a Terrible Compute! (1966) and Eliminate My Reservation (1972), Bob Hope’s pictures then were close on and funny. Along with be and frequent co-star Bing Crosby, Prospect was in the midst of a dozen years run on Quigley’s annual Top Ten list of Box Employment Champions. The Princess and the Pirate (1944), a specific of Hope’s finest comedies, is a meditating of that popularity, and a film that’s still great production seeing that the whole family.
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A spoof of swashbucklers that had seen a major revival since Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood (1935), The Princess and the Pirate stars Hope as Sylvester Crosby (yep, Crosby), a quick-change artist billing himself as “Sylvester the Great - The Man of Seven Faces.” As with nearly every Hope comedy, his character is an inept and unpopular entertainer, outrageously cowardly and lecherous. Aboard the The Mary Ann en route to the New World (”My act is known all over Europe! That’s why I’m going to America”), Sylvester rehearses in his cabin, across the hall from Miss Warbrook (Virginia Mayo), actually the Princess Margaret who, having run out on an arranged marriage, is traveling incognito.
The Mary Ann is attacked and burned by pirates, led by treacherous Captain Barrett (Victor McLaglen), known throughout the seven seas as The Hook. Disguising himself as an old gypsy, Sylvester is spared walking the plank after one of Hook’s men, goony and toothless sailor Featherhead (Walter Brennan) expresses an interest in the wench. Actually, Featherhead is after Hook’s buried treasure, and conspires with Sylvester to deliver the map to Casarouge. That night, Sylvester and Princess Margaret escape with Featherhead’s aid, and the two make their way to Casarouge.
Dismissing Margaret’s claim to be “of royal blood,” Sylvester lands a job for them both at the Bucket of Blood, a hilariously intimidating joint. Sylvester is nearly shot dead on stage, but beautiful, sexy Margaret is a big hit with the tough crowd of thugs and murderers. However, that very night Margaret is kidnapped by corrupt Governor La Roche (Walter Slezak), and Sylvester, by now madly in lust with her, conspires to rescue the princess.
The Princess and the Pirate was a Samuel Goldwyn production originally released through RKO. The picture cost $2.985 million according to RKO’s records, extremely lavish for a comedy in 1944. Shot in Technicolor, the film was made with the kind of money and obvious care most comedians of the era could only dream of. By contrast, Abbott and Costello, also in Quigley’s Top Ten, made In Society at Universal that same year for $660,000, about average. The result is a picture with high production values and colorful to the point that it closely resembles Disneyland’s archetypal Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movie) or something straight out of the pages of Treasure Island. The film has an inviting air of unreality, with most of the exteriors shot on soundstage sets with painted sky cycloramas (whose wrinkles are occasionally visible). The film offers extraordinarily good miniature work, as good as anything in The Sea Hawk. It’s also populated with tough- and mean-looking mugs, from Mike Mazurki to Harry Wilson, with even the infamous Rondo Hatton putting in a fleeting appearance, glimpsed menacing a young lass through an upstairs window. Brennan is a real treat uncharacteristically cast as a grinning, cackling half-wit, very amusing. Marc Lawrence, better known for his gangster roles, is in fine form as The Hook’s first mate, while Hugo Haas, the Czech actor who later directed a string of sleazy low-budget features, is quite funny as the Bucket of Blood’s proprietor.
In the film’s funniest sequence, Sylvester and Princess Margaret arrive in Casarouge, a port so tough its citizens are robbed and murdered in broad daylight. When Sylvester demands the local constable take action against two such murderers, the lawman petulantly replies, “They have a permit.” After checking into an inn run by a crafty, pyromaniac of a landlady (Maude Eburne), Sylvester auditions for Haas’ cafe owner, who forces Sylvester to drink ludicrously huge draughts of beer, one after another, or get his throat slit.
This being a Bob Hope movie, there are a lot of topical references (to Sinatra, Gypsy Rose Lee, Southern Democrats), anachronistic slang, scenes where Hope looks straight into the camera and addresses the audience (firing a gag pistol that reads “Bang!” Hope exclaims, “Wrong pistol! That’s for silent pictures!”), and endless flirting (”Have you no backbone?” Margaret asks. “Yeah,” Sylvester replies, “But it’s nothing like yours!”). But The Princess and the Pirate’s period setting make it seem less dated than most of Hope’s contemporary comedies, and it holds up well today. Kids will enjoy the wild slapstick, but adults will either love or become bored with Hope’s rapid-fire joke machine style.
Virginia Mayo, in her first starring part, is quite beautiful and isn’t lost amid all of Hope’s wisecracks. Slezak wisely underplays his scenes with Hope, making an effective villain, while McLaglen, who would have made a great Long John Silver, is close to perfection.
One curious slip-up in the film’s scripting or its execution: a major character is shot dead in the back, only to wake up later with no gunshot wound but a bump on the head. How’d they miss that one?
Uncategorized | Comment (0)The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)
Aptly described by its creator as “more of a remix… than a remake,” David Lee Fisher’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” exerts fascination mostly as a digitized what’s-its-name. The endow with-winning vidgame designer scanned a restored type of Robert Wiene’s 1920 original, then used it as the backdrop over the extent of actors shot on blue-screen. Issue: An undeniably quick-witted commingling of a new cast (and spoken dialogue) with a silent classic. But pic fails to retain faithfully on its own terms, and begins to sea-coast on novelty value around the midway place emphasis on. After attracting curiosity-seekers through a smattering of theatrical bookings, pic could transform into a staple on what’s left of the midnight movie circuit.
Admirers of Wiene’s masterwork may be amused to see how closely Fisher adheres to the original scenario by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer (with contributions from an uncredited Fritz Lang).
Once again, the plot appears to focus on the heroic efforts by an increasingly agitated young man (Judson Pearce Morgan) to protect his radiantly pale sweetie (Lauren Birkell) from Dr. Caligari (Daamen Krall), a sideshow charlatan, and Cesare (Doug Jones), a homicidal somnambulist. “Appears,” that is, because, as in the original, the “surprise ending” reveals the nominal hero really is a patient in an insane asylum, and his narrative nothing more than a paranoid fantasy.
The new “Caligari” is best appreciated as a visually intriguing mix of images influenced by German Expressionism, shadow-streaked film noir and, occasionally, David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” (As a police inspector, Randy Mulkey looks like he could be the younger brother of the latter pic’s title character.) Seamless editing and crisp B&W HD-video lensing greatly enhance the illusion that contemporary actors have somehow inserted themselves into a classic pic.
Fisher’s “Caligari” is most striking when it showcases razor-sharp restorations of backdrops and production designs from Wiene’s original. Characters appear adrift in a phantasmagorical fantasyland of distorted perspectives, asymmetrical doorways, crooked windows, sloping chimneys — and streaks of light and shadow painted across tilted walls. It’s a mondo-bizarro world where officious bureaucrats sit atop enormously high stools, frowning down upon fawning supplicants, and sleepwalkers stagger across impossibly slanting rooftops, then race through forebodingly twisted forests.
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Although Fisher makes an admirable effort to avoid campy excess, the actors are all over the map. As Francis, the delusional protagonist, Morgan pitches his performance at a level somewhere between stylization and self-parody. Birkell conveys a hint of ripe sensuality as Jane, Francis’ fiancee, but she never gets a firm grip on her character. Krall fares best with shrewdly muted B-movie theatrics.
It’s worth noting that the presence of Doug Jones in the cast could ensure brisk DVD sales to fantasy and sci-fi geeks, since the actor has been signed to play The Silver Surfer in the upcoming “Fantastic Four” sequel, and plays Pan in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”