Piratas de Tortuga

Sea captain Bart Paxton has a thankless task from the King of England. Henry Morgan, erstwhile ally of the crown, has set up a kingdom on Tortuga, whose buccaneers are robbing English ships at will and strangling the island of Jamaica. The Royal Navy can't attack Tortuga without igniting a new war with Spain, so the King is sending Paxton as a secret privateer to put an end to Morgan's depredations. And Meg, the young hellion who has stowed away on Paxton's ship, isn't making his job any easier.

Unlike its predecessor The Black Swan or its contemporary Morgan the Pirate, Pirates of Tortuga casts Henry Morgan as a villain, the correct and natural role for that treacherous, rapacious, and brilliant man. The one difficulty is that the historical Captain Morgan died rich, contented, and even respectable, a most unsatisfying end for a movie villain. The movie deals with this problem straightforwardly, by constructing a sort of alternate history that shows what might have happened if Morgan had not chosen to answer King Charles's summons to England after his raid on Panama in 1671, with its very real attendant risk of imprisonment and execution, but instead had followed the course many of his fellow buccaneers did by raiding and looting indiscriminately. It would have been well within Morgan's power to set up the "buccaneer kingdom" on Tortuga that the movie shows.

The plot is bare-bones, but serviceable: Paxton finds Morgan, Paxton poses as partner of Morgan to spy out Morgan's fortress, Meg flirts with the governor of Jamaica, but ultimately decides her heart truly lies with Paxton, Paxton defeats Morgan. But the denouement is a major disappointment: unimaginative, perfunctory, and implausible at once, and moreover, it fails to tie up Morgan's end of the story.

Bart Paxton's part is well-written, a potentially dashing commander with real brains and imagination, but Ken Scott is unable to bring anything to the role but heroic blandness. Letitia Roman is certainly fetching as Meg, especially in her sailor's togs, and her bare-legged wriggling in Paxton's bed is a clear sign of the sexual revolution's tsunami roaring toward the beach of the Hayes Code. But looking beyond her physical charms, Meg's personality really has nothing to recommend her: she's not smart, brave, loyal, honest, or even charming.

Robert Stephens' Henry Morgan is interesting, but ultimately ineffective. Stephens plays Morgan as a full-blown alcoholic, complete with the shakes. His Morgan is greedy (his eyes almost bug out when Paxton presents him with a chest full of guineas) and cruel, but credulous and unintelligent. He is fun to hate, as a good villain should be, but he lacks the frisson of menace that emanated from Rathbone's Levasseur or Newton's and Heston's Long John Silver.

The supporting cast comes to the rescue, particularly Dave King as PeeWee and Stanley Adams as Montbars. King is appealing, dashing, and sometimes very funny, while Adams' Montbars is pure, unbridled appetite, fat and greedy and bullying, a perfect pirate.

Visually, the movie is outstanding. The shots of the sailing ships are sublime, the colors are sumptuous, and the islands and cliffs are magnificent. The movie is fun to watch, and while it won't stay with you long, it avoids the gratuitous absurdity of many pirate movies.

Rating: ** ½ out of ****.

Recommendation: Worth a rental after it leaves the new release shelves.

Pirates Of Tortuga has Captain Ken Scott who is a privateer on a special mission from the Admiralty. He's been told that Henry Morgan the pirate king with whom they had a deal with when Great Britain was at war with Spain has gone rogue again and set himself in grand style living on Tortuga Island as a pirate king. His living of course is the commerce of the merchant fleet of the West Indies. He's been so good at it that Jamaica is close to starvation.

Scott's mission is relieve Jamaica first then get Morgan. Not so easy, but with his picked crew of buccaneers he's confident that they'll get the job done.

Going along for the ride is stowaway Leticia Roman, a cut purse from London who Scott feels sorry for. She's trouble at first, but proves her worth.

Olympic track star Rafer Johnson has a small part in Pirates Of Tortuga and Robert Stephens plays a dastardly Morgan.

Pirates Of Tortuga was done on the cheap with ample stock footage from such 20th Century Fox classics as the Black Swan and Anne Of The Indies.

Pleasant afternoon viewing for action/adventure fans.

This film essentially begins with an English navy vessel just pulling into port with cargo they wish to sell. It's then that the captain of the ship, "Ken Scott" (Bart Paxton) is immediately summoned for a meeting with his navy superiors and is told that, after selling his merchandise, he is to set sail once again-this time for the island of Tortuga where a pirate by the name of "Captain Henry Morgan" (Robert Stephens) has established as his home base and is strangling all commerce that ventures into that area. To that effect, his plan is to masquerade as a pirate himself in order to infiltrate Henry Morgan's operation. What he doesn't know, however, is that a young woman by the name of "Meg" (Leticia Roman) has secretly snuck aboard his ship and--upon being detected--becomes a big distraction during the entire voyage there. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I was a bit disappointed with this movie because it lacked the grandeur and excitement often found in films of this type. Likewise, although the acting wasn't bad necessarily, I think the film would have certainly benefited from a better cast as well. In any case, while viewers looking for a grade-B pirate movie could probably do worse, I wasn't really impressed with it and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

It has been a long time since I've seen this film, over 20 yrs in fact, but there were bits of detail that made it stick in my mind this long. For instance, the character named PeeWee had a distinctive style of sword fighting: he had the rapier or saber in the right hand but he wore a black glove on his left. After some research, I found the glove was used to bat away the blade and acted as a main gouche. Those types of details kept me watching the screen and firmly seated it in my memory. It was a typical pirate movie with the usual stereotypical roles, but it was fun to watch and little bits of the unusual peeked out here and there. I wish I had a chance to watch it again.

One of the myriad cheapies churned out by independent film producers (here Sam Katzman) under the aegis of a major Hollywood studio (20th Century Fox) and which revolves around the exploits of a notorious pirate figure (Sir Henry Morgan). Despite being fully aware of the film’s non-reputation even among others of its type, I was still taken in by the relatively decent cast (Robert Stephens, Leticia Roman and John Richardson) and the promise of colorful entertainment (brought on by my recent spate of similar superior outings).

Unfortunately, PIRATES OF TORTUGA falls far short of earlier movies about Morgan – THE BLACK SWAN (1942) or even the contemporaneous MORGAN, THE PIRATE (1961) – and proves to be a lackluster affair with a poverty of imagination on display that is quite dispiriting. To start with, Morgan (an over-the-top Stephens) himself only appears half-way through with the result that we are left largely in the company of a truly overbearing gypsy of a leading lady (Roman), a listless hero (Ken Jones) and his puerile cronies (Richardson and Dave King). Add to that the intermittent usage of action stock footage lifted from earlier Fox seafaring productions, the uncharacteristic popping up of modern slang in the dialogue and the sheer predictability of the whole venture and it’s small wonder that very little time has elapsed before the film starts to sink…right out of one’s memory!

For the record, director Robert D. Webb had much earlier won an Oscar as an assistant director (in one of the few times these awards where handed out) on IN OLD CHICAGO (1937) and had also guided Elvis Presley through his first film LOVE ME TENDER (1956); incidentally, I might get to check out six(!) of his other directorial chores in the future: not just two notable Westerns WHITE FEATHER (1955; with Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Wagner, which I have in my DVD collection) and THE PROUD ONES (1956; with Robert Ryan and Jeffrey Hunter again, which I intend to acquire) but also a few more available at local DVD rental outlets: BENEATH THE 12-MILE REEF (1953; which I haven’t watched in ages), the aforementioned LOVE ME TENDER, THE CAPE TOWN AFFAIR (1967; a remake of Samuel Fuller’s PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET [1953]) and THE JACKALS (1967; featuring Vincent Price and a remake of William A. Wellman’s YELLOW SKY [1948], which I own and intend to watch presently as part of my ongoing Richard Widmark tribute).