Django6924

The previous poster is mistaken if she remembers seeing Hayward in glorious color--this is a black and white movie---and a less glorious B&W than that supplied Warner Brothers' Captain Blood by Ernest Haller and Hal Mohr. In fact, Fortunes often looks like a TV production--and not just because of the poor model work. What isn't typical of a TV movie is the surprising amount of violence--Blood's crew is bludgeoned mercilessly when they are captured, whipped by the Marquis and his overseers, and forced to listen to Alfonso Bedoya's idiosyncratic line readings.

I remember seeing Louis Hayward in The Black Arrow when I was about 10, and thinking that movie a great swashbuckler. Yet when I read the posts about it on IMDb, I wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me as well. Watching a bit of Fortunes on TCM, I rather suspect it is--this movie is pretty tepid, with the chief excellence being Hayward's performance, even though he gets no help from the script or director.

I haven't seen it since the original release, but I remember thinking at the time it was a storybook adventure in the same league as Jason and the Argonauts. I remember the flying horse to have been a major improvement on the one in the Sabu version of this story, using Disney-type animation for the flying scenes instead of a pair of prop wings that just flopped around, and some of the sequences, like the encounter with the Sirens, were memorably terrifying.

If it really is as good as I remember, it's a crime it hasn't been given a proper release on DVD, and doesn't appear on TV more often. Reeves was a major movie icon of the 50s, but except for this film, and to a lesser degree, the first Hercules, he was never given the kind of material that would make the best use of his limited, but likable talent.