KAIZOKU BAHANSEN ("The Pirates," 1960)

The director Tadashi Sawashima, who died last January at age 91, specialized in samurai and yakuza films. I suppose a pirate film would occupy a middle ground between those two categories, depending on whom the English title refers to. Depending on what you read -- I recommend an essay by the scholar Bernard Scheid in the anthology The Sea and the Sacred in Japan -- "Kaizoku Bahansen" is something of a redundancy, since both words have been translated as "pirate." Kaizoku seems to be the more unambiguous word, while bahansen, in the film's historical context, has more to do with illicit trade. During the mid 16th century CE, Japan's Sengoku or civil war period, China forbade maritime trade, but Chinese traders maintained clandestine relations with their Japanese counterparts. The argument of Sawashima's film is that the bahansen in general were peaceful traders, but acquired a bad name because a few bad apples raided and plundered coastal China, Korea, and other places. Thus, in the film, Kamon (Hashizo Okawa) is initially outraged to discover that, though raised a merchant's son, he's actually the son of a renowned bahansen. He discovers this when his natural father's old cronies press him, for all intents and purposes, into the service, though a younger leader (Eiji Okada) wants nothing to do with the landlubber. Kamon begins to change his mind when he's told that his father and mother were murdered by outright pirate Uemondayu, who's been ravaging the seas under the bahansen banner. Having some pretty girls with the fleet also helps win him over to the cause. Fortunately, he proves a natural with some innate cunning, winning a mast-climbing contest by distracting his competitor with the sight of one of those women. With his sea cred thus established it's on to high adventure on the high seas.

Toei spent some money on this film, which deploys several full-scale ships on open water, though they resort to more predictable model work on occasion and many night scenes on board are understandably shot on soundstage interiors. All in all, there's less of a ship-in-a-bottle feel here than in contemporary pirate programmers from the U.S. Sawashima directs energetically, cross cutting and moving his camera closer and closer to the principals to build up momentum for the film's sea battles and keeping his climactic shipboard fight moving at an urgent clip. If anything, his direction is most frantic and over the top in the scenes where the good bahansens return to and depart from their home port. The home folks go nuts for their seafaring heroes, their enthusiasm illustrated by insistently repetitive shots of celebration, from sailors throwing themselves into the water to meet welcoming rowboats to shots of cheering females. The director's galloping camera gives these festive scenes more of an epic feel than anything else in the picture.

In the end it's a simple story of good and evil, but its goodness of purpose is marred by a trip to a primitive island previously ravaged by Uemondayu, populated by badly blackfaced Japanese extras who give the good guys exactly the treatment you might expect from the most racist American movie, short of throwing our heroes into the proverbial stewpot. If you took offense at the Faro Island scenes from King Kong vs. Godzilla, you'd better steer clear of this picture.  But if you think you can stomach some unenlightened moments, you'll find Kaizoku Bahansen a pleasant enough adventure film that gets more entertaining as it goes along.

THE PIRATES (2014)

The idea was probably more like The Good, The Bad, The Weird at sea than Pirates of the Caribbean Korean style but whatever the motive the results were fun. Lee Seok-Hoon has made a good old-fashioned adventure flick with modern effects and an Asian attitude toward human prowess that would make Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn gape with envy at the antics of these Korean pirates and bandits. I think they'd recognize the film's spirit as kin to their own, however.

Two parallel storylines eventually converge as we follow a 14th century hero and heroine who become treasure-hunting rivals and, inevitably, partners and lovers. Jang Sa-jung (Kim Nam-gil) is an army officer who doesn't go along when his general supports a coup d'etat. Jang fights his way out of immediate peril to become a forest bandit, the Crazy Tiger, complete with a comedy-relief monk with a big appetite. Yeo-wol (Son Ye-jin) is a pirate princess who leads an uprising against her mentor Captain Soma (Lee Geung-young) when he conspires with officials to save his own ass by selling out loyal crewmates.

 

The bad guys (above) and the good guys (below)

 

The coup being successful, the new regime receives legitimacy from "Ming," aka China. Legitimacy comes with a new country name, Joeson, and a new royal seal. The latter gets lost at sea and swallowed by a whale. The new ruler offers a huge reward for the recovery of the great seal, attracting both pirate Yeo-wol and bandit Crazy Tiger to the treasure hunt. Crazy Tiger is a total lubber but he has the expertise of ex-pirate Cheol-bong (Yoo Hae-jin), who quit Soma's crew due to chronic seasickness but often falls landsick as well. He proves helpful to the bandits even though he has a hard time making them understand just how big a whale is. Yeo-wol has a competitive advantage not just because she's a pirate but because she has an affinity with whales going back to her childhood. But she finds herself fighting with Crazy Tiger over equipment, most importantly over imported European explosives. Meanwhile -- wouldn't you know? -- the vengeful Soma and Crazy Tiger's old commander have joined forces to catch the whale and take the treasure for themselves.

 

That's the framework for some oldschool swashbuckling with a wuxia edge as well as FX setpieces more reminiscent of the Caribbean movies. The main such event comes fairly early: an urban chase scene with Yeo-wol pursuing Crazy Tiger, using an aqueduct as a flume ride until Tiger wrecks it with an antique rocket, setting an attached giant water wheel rolling through town, in and out of the heroes' path. I'm not sure of the physical logic of the wheel's wanderings but it's an amusing spectacle. There's good comic chemistry between the leads, too, who go through a lot of adventure tropes together, from Defiant Ones style shackling to mutual seduction through boastful comparison of battle scars. The comic relief is solid throughout, especially the award-winning Yoo Hae-jin as the cantankerous misfit who bridges the pirate-bandit divide, but the monk is cool as well. There's also some presumably veiled political satire, with the usurping Joeson regime an analogue for North Korea, though the usurper is offered redemption with advice to shun the influence of Ming that seems directed at modern China. For foreigners, the film doesn't suffer if you don't get any of that. The spirit of high adventure that prevails translates pretty well into any language.

Too Much TV: BLACK SAILS (2014-present)

The title sequence is an allegory of the pirate's race with death. We see an elaborate faux-ivory figurehead detailed with scenes of seamanship, love, violence and skeletons. The sequence closes with a skeleton army charging a pirate army while a skeleton races a pirate up a mast to seize a flag. This skeleton business is Black Sails' sole concession to the Pirates of the Caribbean audience, while the show itself proves decisively that a pirate tale doesn't need those films' fantastic trappings to hold an audience.

Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine and bankrolled by Michael Bay in a way that redeems a lot in his past, Black Sails combines two dominant pop-culture tropes: the revisionist fairy tale and the prequel. Robert Louis Stevenson might object to his novel Treasure Island being called a fairy tale, but as a canonical "children's story" it's just about that. Stevenson's Long John Silver was the archetypal pirate for generations; as interpreted on film by Wallace Beery and Robert Newton, he's arrrrrh image and voice of piracy to this day. Black Sails' initial hook is its promise of an "origin" story for Silver. Its Silver (Luke Arnold) is a handsome, healthy, clever and charismatic young schemer, at least a generation younger than the one-legged 50 year old Long John of the novel. If the payoff of other prequel shows presumably is a hero putting on his costume or simply beginning his career, the presumed payoff of Black Sails was Silver losing his leg, and it came last weekend during the finale for the second season, with a third already in production. I read through Treasure Island last week to prepare for this review, however, and the story of Silver's amputation on TV differs from what the character tells Jim Hawkins in the novel. In the book Long John says he lost the leg to a broadside during a sea battle. On TV the leg is amputated after it was broken during torture as Silver resists condemning most of his shipmates to death. This is not poor memory or scholarship on the writers' part but their further establishing that Black Sails is really an alternate reality from that of Stevenson's story.

The genius of the show is its mashup of Stevenson's characters, historical pirates, and original characters. Along with Silver, the first group includes Billy Bones (Tom Hopper), later the drunken, dying seaman of Treasure Island's opening chapters and, most importantly, the infamous Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), the show's real main character, who is long dead by the time the novel begins. The historical characters include the pirate captains Charles Vane (Zach McGowan) and Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) and Rackham's more famous protege Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). The original characters include Eleanor Guthrie (Hannah New), who controls trade (i.e. fencing) in the pirate stronghold of Nassau; her former lover Max (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a favored prostitute turned rival; and Miranda Barlow (Louise Barnes), an upper-class woman whose influence over Flint is a first-season mystery resolved through flashbacks during the second season. Of this last group, Max may cross into another category; because she's a "woman of color," many Treasure Island readers expect that she'll end up as the novel's unseen, business-savvy wife of John Silver the Bristol tavern keeper. Another theory is that she may end up in the historical category; currently involved in a menage-a-trois with Rackham and Bonny, she might take up the role of their real-life cross-dressing cohort Mary Read. This volatility is part of the fun of the show. The mix of real, canonical and original characters means that Black Sails needn't be bound by history or literature.

That being said, the main storyline for the first two seasons has been the pursuit of what we presume to be the treasure of the novel's island. On the show it's the gold of the Spanish treasure galleon Urca de Lima, the shipwreck of which is based loosely on real events. While the race for the loot occasionally returns to the forefront, it's often little more than a MacGuffin in the background of the main action: the threeway rivalry, to put it at a minimum, of Flint, Vane and Guthrie for dominance in Nassau, and the shared struggle to keep Nassau effectively independent of British control. Each of the three main players, meanwhile, must struggle to keep his or her own house in order. As Stevenson knew, the pirate world was a kind of democracy, and often a messy kind that required leaders to be both forceful and flexible to maintain the loyalty of their crews. Much of the first season was taken up with the negotiation of a personal alliance of Flint and Silver (Flint's quartermaster in the novel's backstory) on which Flint's continued captaincy depended. By now Vane has fallen and risen again a few times over, while Eleanor Guthrie has been toppled from her perch, with only a third-season promo clip as proof that she'll even remain on the show, creating a vacuum for Max to take over. Guthrie has taken Flint's or Vane's side as it's suited her interests, and the two captains have gone from fighting to the death to Vane rescuing Flint from execution in last weekend's episode, after Vane's men had seized Flint's ship by force and clapped Flint's crew in irons. Alliances shift like the winds on this show, and while not every shift is equally convincing, the adaptability required of the pirates and their facilitators is plausible enough.

Black Sails works on several levels at once. It's one of the best action shows on TV, with the last episode's escape of Flint and Vane from a Charleston deathtrap and the pirates' destruction of the Carolina city the latest proof. It'll also satisfy anyone's appetite for intrigue, as almost all the characters, even the most barbaric like Vane, maneuver with pragmatic intelligence. It passes another crucial test for modern TV by being one of the shows that Goes There, and being a premium-cable show, it can go further out than broadcast of basic-cable shows. If there's a CW stereotype, there's also a Starz stereotype (established by the channel's Spartacus series) of nudity, extreme violence and f-bombs in ancient settings (see also Da Vinci's Demons). Black Sails transcends the stereotype with a tragic sensibility. Flint, the monster of legend in Treasure Island, here has a utopian dream of Nassau as a truly free country whose outcast citizenry can pursue their dreams without answering to King or Parliament. By the end of the second season that dream has been dashed several times over, apparently setting the stage for Flint's devolution to legendary evil (if not also the legendary dissipation described in the novel). There's a broader romantic utopianism to modern perceptions of the pirate age that idealizes not only the democracy of crews but also a more liberal sexuality and a most-likely overrated blurring of gender roles. Black Sails caters to this in its several storylines of female empowerment, from Eleanor's struggles to shrug off her father's influence to Max's rise from the lowest levels of prostitution to Anne Bonny's fight to define herself as something more than a vicious appendage to Jack Rackham. It's probably no accident that all three characters are bisexual, but it's more daring of the show to make Flint bi as well, even if Da Vinci's Demons had been there already. Even in Stevenson's time, for all that he portrays all pirates but Silver as hopeless drunks, the fantasy of piracy was a dream of freedom, but even as Black Sails indulges that dream it's ever mindful of the inexorable shadow of empire lengthening toward Nassau, while foreknowledge of Treasure Island only enhances the sense that everything we see is doomed.

A rich ensemble of actors puts it all over. The nearest thing to a weak link is Hannah New as Guthrie, if only because the writers often try to hard to make a badass out of her with cuss words when she can't be a warrior badass like Anne. When you're not tempted to start a drinking game around her f-bombs New is actually pretty good. As Silver, Luke Arnold lives up to the Treasure Island pirates' memory of the young Long John as an articulate, charismatic mastermind. As Flint, Toby Stephens retains an air of mystery (along with the tragedy) over the course of a slow burn, though most of the why of the captain's reputed career of atrocity has been established by now. For me, the most impressive cast member is Zach McGowan, who manages with his eyes and gestures and sheer animal physicality a near-miraculous feat of investing Charles Vane with compelling personality despite an almost totally inexpressive face and voice. I was stunned to learn that Vane had never been a character in a pirate movie before, while Blackbeard and Kidd and Morgan had been done time and time again. This histories I've been reading while watching the show give Vane, Rackham et al an epic quality that Black Sails more than lives up to. The visuals live up to the acting, with the latest episode hitting a new peak with a panoramic climax: a dying villain watches helplessly, as if witnessing the wrath of God, as his dream falls to pieces all around him, while his violated victim, a corpse abused by a mob, appears to look on damningly. That's the best thing I've seen on TV so far this season, and for now Black Sails is the best show I watch.

A HIJACKING (Kapringen, 2012)

Somali pirates are a great movie subject because, well, they're pirates. In the past two years global moviegoers have seen two distinct portrayals of their depredations. Americans are more familiar with Paul Greengrass's Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips, but Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm (whose previous film was the prison flick R.) got to the topic first. Greengrass is admired for his semidocumentary style, but Lindholm's movie has more of a documentary look if only because his film, compared to a Hollywood project, shares most documentaries' budgetary constraints. Also, Greengrass is as much an action specialist as a stylist, and Kapringen is nothing like an action movie; it's intimate rather than spectacular. The two films can share the general subject because of the stark difference in each director's approach.

In Captain Phillips the pirates' boarding of the Maersk Alabama is arguably the year's most thrilling action sequence; in Kapringen the pirates' boarding of the MV Rozen is presented as a fait accompli. Captain Phillips aspires to short-term suspense as the captain and the pirates play a cat-and-mouse game during what feels like a very brief takeover of the Alabama, while the real subject of Kapringen is the slow-motion terror of tedium in captivity. In Phillips the pirate leader tries to entice the captain into compliance with the promise of quick negotiations, a quick payday for the pirates and a quick release for the captive crew, but Kapringen suggests that such a promise is false, or at least overly optimistic. The pirates in Phillips simply want to do business, and Kapringen shows us what that means. The pirates make a ransom demand ($15,000,000) and the ship's owners, only occasionally listening to the advice of their hired negotiation specialist, try to talk the number down beneath a mere million. The final figure of $3,800,000 is reached after months of captivity for the Rozen crew. We endure this mostly from the viewpoint of the ship's Danish cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), who has a wife and kid at home looking for answers from the employers who fancy themselves hardball negotiators, who can tell the family that Mikkel is OK after a nightmare negotiation out of Ron Howard's Ransom, with the CEO's "Don't fuck with me!" raving answered with the sound of gunshots on the ship. The potential heartlessness of the people who have to pay ransoms is a subject Captain Phillips, for all its other virtues and its stated concern with the rat race forced on everybody, seems happy to avoid.

But Kapringen isn't primarily a jeremiad against corporations. Lindholm is as much interested in the exhausted camaraderie, somewhat sort of Stockholm Syndrome, that develops between captives and pirates, and in the cycles of frustration and plain boredom that sometimes drive casual cruelty. At one moment pirates may point rifles at the back of Mikkel's head; in another they'll join in a chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" in honor of Mikkel's daughter.

The results are nearly as suspenseful as in Captain Phillips, each picture earning its suspense in different ways. Because of the duration of the Rozen's ordeal, Kapringen is more horrific in a suffocatingly intimate way, while Mikkel's realistic helplessness raises the stakes (and our frustration with the suits) during the negotiation scenes. Lindholm's low-key direction can't compete with Greengrass's spectacular intensity in pure-cinema terms, but Kapringen and Captain Phillips prove to be quite complementary movies that could co-exist nicely as a double feature without either seeming redundant. Piracy off the Horn of Africa is a subject that may yet be far from exhausted.

On the Big Screen: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013)

Do children still dream of being pirates? Their teachers do sometimes, if you judge by books that idealize the egalitarian, multicultural or otherwise transgressive pirate republics of yore. You can't do that for the best-known pirates of our own time, the raiders from Somalia who capture ships for ransom off the Horn of Africa. Paul Greengrass's film about the 2009 pirate attack on the Mersk Alabama probably would preempt any fantasies of 21st century piracy, for Captain Phillips makes clear that for Somalis, piracy is little more than a job of work. Greengrass practically drives the point down the viewer's throat by drawing obvious parallels between the life of pirate Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) and that of his destined antagonist, Alabama skipper Rich Phillips (Tom Hanks). Both men live in an increasingly competitive and demanding world. Muse is under pressure from his elders to earn more money by capturing more ships, and there's intense competition merely for places on a pirate crew. Phillips worries that his kids will face a tougher world than he does, but he already observes that there's intense competition for commands, even on ships bound for dangerous waters -- ships that inexplicably provide no weapons for their crews. At its heart the true story of Phillips and Muse has been the stuff of pulp adventure for generations, yet Greengrass underscores the extent to which both men are really working stiffs. At the same time, he manages to make Muse's assault on the Alabama the most thrilling action sequence I've seen this year. Muse is the picture's villain, no matter how much Greengrass and writer Billy Ray humanize him and his cohorts, yet you'll probably feel a temptation to root for him as he pursues the gigantic cargo ship in his skiff like a rowboat chasing a whale. The Alabama has no weapons but enjoys every other technological advantage, while Muse has no benefit of surprise. Phillips has anticipated pirates and has many means to repel boarders, from high-powered hoses ringing the hull to the high-powered maneuverability that lets the Alabama try to shrug off the boarders and their ladders like gnats. You can't help feeling that Muse's capture of the ship is a triumph of skill, tenacity and pure nothing-to-lose courage. You retain enough of that admiration to agree when Phillips says later that someone like Muse should have more options in life than fishing and piracy. And you may remember enough of the opening scenes to suspect, when Muse answers "Maybe in America" that neither he nor Phillips fully understands how the world is changing.

Greengrass is one of the active directors who's changed the way movies look. His pseudo-verite approach, dating back to his breakthrough film Bloody Sunday, anticipates the artificial immediacy of "found footage" movies while his work on the second and third Jason Bourne movies has given action films a more raw, frantic feel that leaves many spectators disoriented or merely annoyed by their inability to see things clearly. By comaprison, Captain Phillips achieves a kind of epic clarity as Greengrass focuses on the spectacle of the tiny skiff hunting the giant Alabama on the open water, the waves bucking Muse's ship like a bronco. The chase scenes have the spirit of high adventure that the rest of the film is at pains to deny, and the picture is never quite as great once the chase is over. For a while it's like The Enemy Below meets Die Hard as Phillips, his crew and Muse's men play a three-way cat and mouse game, the idea being to keep the Somalis from taking more hostages, until the crew turns the tables on Muse and forces the pirates to quit the Alabama. The film slackens further in its third act, after the pirates have departed on a motorized lifeboat with Phillips as their sole hostage. It grows overblown as Greengrass feels it necessary to show us the U.S. gathering its forces for an assault on the pirates, while the tense exchanges between Phillips and the Somalis (about half of whom speak English) become repetitive. The director stretches the suspense out a little too long for comfort, especially after Muse is taken off the board, tricked into going on board a Navy vessel to join his elders in negotiating Philips's ransom. The other actors playing pirates are good enough to establish themselves as distinctive personalities, but don't have Abdi's paradoxical dead-eyed charisma. All that's left is the Tom Hanks show, as the star goes through phases of pain, terror and shock while enduring one of the most horrific rescues you'll ever see. Hanks gives a solid performance as the flinty captain (complete with "Yankee Irish" accent) but whether he's working the accent or conveying the character's almost-paralyzing trauma post-rescue, someting technical about his acting sometimes comes through to remind you that this is Acting, while Abdi benefits from the illusion of a newcomer's naturalism -- his fine acting may not be recognized as Acting the way Hanks's is. Captain Phillips is sometimes overblown, and Henry Jackman's score nearly always is, but at its best its a very good film that anchors the action and adventure with a disquieting message. The confrontation of Phillips and Muse shows that the rat race has gone global.

PIRATES OF THE XXTH CENTURY (Piraty XX veka, 1979)

Among the stuff you'll find when you look for free feature films online is a trove of English-subtitled Russian films from the Soviet era and beyond. Mosfilm has its own YouTube channel, while the "PyccoTypucmo" (pronounced "RussoTurismo") channel has even more titles, including Boris Durov's action hit for the Gorky Film Studio (watch it here), a rugged adventure film that compares respectably with grindhouse movies from the capitalist world. Apart from a certain flatness of characters, there's little to mark this as a Communist film, and I'm sure it wasn't made with any propaganda purpose in mind. Brezhnev-era Bolsheviks believed in entertaining folks, and Soviet Man appears to have been entertained by the same stuff that pleased his bourgeois counterparts: violence towards men and women, violence by gun, knife, foot, fist and grappling hook -- the faster paced, the better.

At a few seconds short of 80 minutes, Pirates of the XXth century practices truth in advertsing by showing us modern-day pirates in action. But we start with a Soviet freighter, the Nezhin, picking up a boatload of medicinal opium, bound for Vladivostok and distribution to hospitals. The opening credits promise martial-arts action, as we see a crewmember practicing with his "numbchuks" and breaking boards to entertain his mates. This energetic routine is interrupted when the crew discovers a man adrift in the water. The rescued man, Saleh, speaks no Russian, but some of the crew speak English, and they learn that he jumped a ship whose cargo of cotton caught fire. Next, the Nezhin discovers a disabled ship, the Mercury. Its distress is a deception, as was Saleh's. As he creates havoc on the Nezhin, destroying its radio, pirates from the Mercury -- a crew of terrorists and mercenaries -- storm the ship, slaughter most of the crew, steal the opium and set the vessel ablaze. As the pirates zoom off, a handful of survivors, including two female crewmembers barely saved from drowning, pile into a lifeboat in search of safety.

Fortunately, the survivors find land before long. Unfortunately, they've stumbled upon the Mercury's base of operations. But that actually gives them a chance to recover the opium and bring the pirates to justice. With help from a native girl, the Russians capture weapons and manage to take over the Mercury. But the pirates have mined the bay to deter pursuers, and the Russians can't get out. Worse, their two hapless women -- if anything, the "progressive" Commies were retrograde, on this film's evidence, in their portrayal of women -- have been captured and subject to torture. Happily, the pirates are willing to negotiate and let the Russians leave with their skins intact, though without the opium. The sailors don't trust the offer, since they could obviously lead a navy back to the pirates' lair, but they go along in order to give heroic first mate Sergei (Nikolai Yeryomenko) a chance to take the villains down single-handedly and shirtlessly....

This is undemanding mayhem, impressively staged on locations and on the open sea with real ships. The action is often quite brutal, and the violence against the helpless females is just about as exploitative as anything you might have seen from the "free world," without the compensatory, quasi-empowering revenge. Again, if you think of the USSR as part of a generic global "left," you might expect more female empowerment here, but Pirates is very much an unapologetic "Men's Adventure" type of film, from the modern-piracy theme to the exotic backdrop for torture. It's also indelibly a Seventies film, as the disco-esque score will tell you right away. Wikipedia claims that this was the most popular film of 1980 in the USSR, and I imagine it must be an iconic movie for Russia's Seventies fetishists. It was a great find for me, if not a great film, because I'm always intrigued by what true pop cinema, as opposed to arthouse cinema, looks like in different countries. Pirates of the XXth Century probably isn't the face Soviet cinema meant to show the world, the cinematic commisars probably having something more refined in mind. But it shows us that, even at a low point in the Cold War, the years of the invasion of Afghanistan and the Olympic boycott, moviegoers in the communist and capitalist blocs -- or some of them, at least, spoke a common language.

CAPTAIN CLEGG (1962)

Peter Graham Scott's blood-and-thunder adventure can be found in Universal's Hammer Horror Collection DVD set, but that's as deceptive as the film's American title, Night Creatures. Apart from an early sequence involving the scaring to death of an arguably deserving old man, Hammer isn't out to frighten folks this time. This adaptation of Russell Thorndike's "Dr. Syn" series of novels (adapted simultaneously by Disney, with Patrick McGoohan as The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh) is more in line with Hammer's swashbucklers like The Pirates of Black River or The Devil-Ship Pirates, only with Peter Cushing starring instead of Christopher Lee. But that scene of flourescently-painted skeletoid night riders, who return to rescue Oliver Reed later in the picture, is worthy of some sort of ass-kicking horror at the drive-ins of yore.

Cushing plays Rev. Blyss (his name changed from Syn to avoid legal hassles with Disney), the benign vicar of an English village that's home to an extensive smuggling racket for contraband liquor from Europe. You're immediately supposed to suspect him of being Captain Clegg, the cruel pirate skipper who is shown from behind in a prologue condemning a sailor who slept with Clegg's wife to have his tongue cut out before abandonment on a deserted island. Clegg is supposed to have been hanged, and is supposed to be buried in Blyss's churchyard, while Blyss is supposed to be the chaplain who ministered to Clegg before his execution.

Not being familiar with the Clegg/Syn/Scarecrow story, I saw Cushing as the sort of benign character who turns out to be a vicious criminal in stories like these. And for a while I was uncertain of who would be the heroes and villains of the movie. That frightening to death of the old man made the smugglers (presuming them to be the night riders) to be rough customers and dirty dealers. But the naval detachment that comes to town looking for contraband is shown as a bunch of boors and bullies, and viewers more familiar with the Thorndike stories or English history might more readily recognize them as agents of an oppressive government. Blyss/Clegg himself is a stern leader but insists on no violence against the sailors, and is later shown to be a genuinely benevolent man in his new life, concerned for the well being of poor villagers and his own daughter, who believes herself adopted by Blyss. These are mixed signals for whether to root for him or not, but the authorities are clearly no heroes, if not villains either. The nearest thing to an unambiguous hero is Harry Cobtree (Reed), the local squire's "freethinker" son, a rival for the hand of Blyss's daughter, and more besides. It's he and his love who'll have a happy ending here, if anyone does.

As a period adventure film, Captain Clegg is fast-paced and amiable enough, with a dynamic dual-identity performance from Cushing. It has some decent, unpretentious art direction, though it's undercut a bit by some hopeless day-for-night photography. Two things stand out to distinguish the show for genre fans. The skeleton riders I've already mentioned. The other bonus is the prominent performance by Britain's answer to Tor Johnson, Milton Reid, as "The Mulatto," the unlikely pirate who scored with Mrs. Clegg and suffered for it. He survived to be found by and become the pet and bloodhound of the naval captain who investigates the smugglers.

Reid's the nearest thing to a monster in this alleged horror film -- he even fears fire more than normal folk, for some reason. He recognizes Blyss as Clegg but can't tell anyone, being presumably illiterate; his idea of revealing the truth is to tear apart Clegg's grave to prove it empty, but people finding the empty plot simply assume that the mulatto stole Clegg's body. He ends up stalking Blyss and other enemies with a harpoon, getting into a furious brawl with Cushing's stuntman in a burning house at one point. Reid remains a wild card throughout the movie, and for all I know this was the burly and often-mute actor's biggest role. He makes the most of it and adds a lot to this film's entertainment value.

Hammer downplays the scarecrow angle in its version of the Romney Marsh story, perhaps because Disney would play it up, but the straw man does put in a few dramatic appearances.

The subject matter may make Captain Clegg too obscure or just not scary enough to be part of the essential Hammer canon for many American viewers, but I enjoyed seeing more proof of the great studio's genre diversity. The repeated reminders via DVD in recent years that Hammer did much more than horror have been great news for movie fans, and the good news in this case is that Captain Clegg is eighty minutes of easygoing fun.

Universal really plays up the terror elements for all they're worth, and more, in this trailer uploaded to YouTube by justjoined.

SANDOKAN, PIRATE OF MALAYSIA (I Pirati de Malesia,1964)

The year of Blood and Black Lace and A Fistful of Dollars finds Umberto Lenzi in Singapore filming a follow-up to a Steve Reeves vehicle. Reeves is near the end of his run in Europe; he'll make just one more movie, a spaghetti western four years later. At the brink of the obsolescence of his specialty peplum genre, Reeves is moving away from flaunting his body, opting for more conventional adventure stories. This is his second outing as a character who is hugely popular in Italy, and presumably elsewhere in the world, but is nearly unknown in the United States.

Sandokan is the creation of Emilio Salgari, who seems to have been Italy's answer to Jules Verne, Karl May and H. Rider Haggard. Salgari wrote eleven Sandokan novels, along with many others, before killing himself at the age of 48 in 1911. Sandokan is a heroic Malaysian pirate who thwarts the imperial ambitions of Europe in the South Seas. He has a Portuguese sidekick, Yanez, whose primary characteristic, as far as Pirate of Malaysia will tell you, is his cigarette addiction. Their arch-enemy is a historical figure, James Brooke, known as the White Rajah of Sarawak. From Wikipedia's survey of Brooke's career, Pirate of Malaysia appears to be set around 1851, when a royal commission was appointed to investigate his activities on the island. If so, there has been a telescoping of events, since Brooke is said to have only recently overthrown the rightful ruler, when in fact he had been named Rajah back in 1842. In history, Brooke died in bed, still in power, and succeeded by a nephew. In the Lenzi movie he fares less well.

Pirate of Malaysia presumes some familiarity with the characters, or at least with the preceeding movie, which was released in the U.S. as Sandokan the Great. There's little in the way of introduction. Sandokan, looking pretty swanky and well-fed for a pirate, saves someone adrift on the sea who proves to be a friend of his from the earlier film. This man, Tremal-Naik, is played by Mimmo Palmara, who often plays subordinate strongmen in the genre. He reports the conquest of Sarawak by the infamous Brooke and the flight of the island's princess, a person of interest to Sandokan. We see her trying to make good her escape with the aid of a faithful servant.

Sandokan heads to Sarawak to initiate guerilla warfare, demonstrated by Lenzi on the cheap with much offscreen mayhem and sound effects. It's too bad that he had to scrimp here, since the film benefits so much from the location shooting in Singapore and other exotic sites. Our hero learns that Brooke is sending a gold shipment to India with which to buy guns to suppress the insurgency. He decides to take the ship by subterfuge, hiring on as a humble cabin boy. In the meantime, Tremal-Naik is arrested during a botched rendezvous, while Sandokan fights his way out. Reeves doesn't have to be superhuman here, and his stiff roundhouse punches look pretty convincing just due to the size of his arms.

On the ship, the Young India (Lenzi uses a real ship to good effect) Sandokan is told, unsurprisingly, that he looks more like a pirate than a cabin boy. I suppose Reeves could pass for a cabin boy on some cruises, but that's a question for another time. For now, Sandokan wins the good will of the British commanding officer, who isn't too happy having Brooke's minions, headed by main underling Lt. Clintock, prowling around the ship. As it happens, the princess Hada is also on board. Sandokan conducts some sabotage to make the ship easier for his men to attack by swimming en masse with a rowboat of weapons in tow. In the struggle, Lt. Clintock is knocked overboard.

The first Sandokan novel first appeared in serial form, and it wouldn't surprise me if others did as well, since Pirate of Malaysia has a very episodic structure. For his next trick, Sandokan will pretend to be a shipwrecked prince in order to receive Brooke's hospitality, learn more about his schemes, and find a way to free Tremal-Naik, who's a prisoner there. This guy's a rebellious prisoner, and Sandokan is invited to witness his death by alligator. "I find that the thirst for liberty is best cured by salt water," Brooke remarks. Sandokan saves the day by grabbing a gun and shooting the animal, and excuses himself for failing to suppress his hunting impulse. He sneaks his friends some drugs so he can feign death. Sandokan then arranges for him to be buried in the local cemetery, since Tremal-Naik's people allegedly abhor burial at sea. That way Sandokan's minions can dig him up and free him. The ruse works well until Lt. Clintock reappears and rats out Sandokan. He and his men fight their way free, only to be captured quite easily in the next sequence, in which they're sentenced to slave in the mines. Sandokan promptly marks his territory by beating up a Chinese bully, and then it's on to further exploits leading to a climactic battle at a fortress on a high plateau....

I must confess to dozing off at moments during Pirate of Malaysia. Apart from the nice location work, Lenzi's direction is uninspired here. I was also not seeing it at its best, since this is the DVD from Mill Creek Entertainment's Warriors collection. It is incorrectly letterboxed, as is sadly illustrated by a scene where Sandokan and Brooke sit at opposite ends of a long dinner table and chat, but we see neither of them. On top of that, the image is cropped at top and bottom so that some of the opening credits are unreadable. Thanks to the location work (which strikes me as a preview of Lenzi's cannibal epics to come), the film has a visual quality that can't be denied even in this truncated form. The more serious problem is the acting (or voice acting). It renders this English version of the film pretty lifeless. I also felt handicapped by my unfamiliarity with the characters. This is the sort of film where familiar characters don't really need to be developed, but for a stranger that means little effort is made to make them interesting, apart from the oddity of Yanez's perpetual nicotine fit.

Just for the sake of its visuals, I'd recommend Pirate of Malaysia for a proper remastered DVD release in the correct aspect ratio. I'm unlikely ever to see it on Region 1, however, because of the lack of interest in the Sandokan character and the general disdain for the peplum genre. The peplum is the idiot stepchild of Italian genres, with less prestige even than the crazy uncle of the cannibal genre or the crazier uncle of Nazi porn. Why is that? Most likely because peplums seem childish, which is perhaps a handicap of the time they were made. They lack that certain edginess that emerges in every other Italo genre. The TV theme song probably sums up the problem: "These men of steel could never feel the curse of a coward's fears." Peplum heroes -- Hercules and all his sons, Maciste, Ursus, etc., are too good, too flawless, for their own good, compared to spaghetti western, giallo or police thriller protagonists. They ought to have a more honored place in the history of movie fantasy, but in the wild world of cinema they seem all too tame. Pirate of Malaysia barely qualifies as a peplum, and literally wouldn't due to its period, but Steve Reeves's presence probably makes it easier for people to dismiss a film that at least deserves a better first look than we get today, if not necessarily a second.

There doesn't seem to be any video footage from Pirate of Malaysia available online, so here's another poster.