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writers gone
wild!
Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting our
companion blog, Bright
Lights After Dark.
Gene and Judy Go Wild!
Thoughts on Minnelli's The Pirate
It seems a shame that Judy Garland and Gene Kelly were afforded only three opportunities to make a film
together (musical buffs know that the pair were meant to
appear together in Easter Parade before Kelly broke
an ankle during the film's rehearsal stages and was replaced
by Fred Astaire). Worse still, they never really managed to
make that perfect, definitive Garland-Kelly picture. The
wartime musical melodrama For Me and My Gal was their
first film, and for all that makes it movie musical canon
— the title number and Garland's solo of "After You've
Gone," for instance — the film is hobbled by its
descent into unpalatable propaganda when Kelly's WWI-era
hoofer finds he must repent for dodging the draft. Their
last film, 1950's Summer Stock, includes Garland's
legendary "Get Happy" number and Kelly's inspired soft-shoe
with a newspaper, but its "let's put on show" plot (the show
is in Garland's barn, no less) is terribly quaint. Aside
from that, it's hard to get wholly swept away in the
escapist fun when noticing Garland's fluctuating weight
throughout the picture and becoming preoccupied with her
offscreen troubles.
That leaves only the film that Kelly and Garland made in
between, 1948's The Pirate, alternately hailed as an
underappreciated gem or written off as a dismal financial
and artistic failure for its stars and for director Vincente
Minnelli. Like the other Garland-Kelly pictures, this one's
far from perfect. Garland was suffering through a difficult
time during the making of this film as well, and more often
than not, she was absent from the set. This shows in some of
The Pirate's choppier moments, particularly in the
strangely truncated climax and jarringly abrupt transition
to the big finale, a reprise of its most famous song, Cole
Porter's "Be a Clown" (that song would be pretty much
plagiarized wholesale only four years later with Singin'
in the Rain's "Make ‘Em Laugh," but I digress). Another
possible distraction comes from the fact that Minnelli's
vision of the Caribbean in the film is so insistent in its
artificiality, an element that is doubtlessly intentional
but nevertheless takes a bit of getting used to. The MGM
soundstage wouldn't make itself so obvious again until
Minnelli's indoor romp through the Scottish highlands with
Brigadoon. Yet there's something about The
Pirate. It's an oddly addicting charmer, perhaps the
most lovable of all the films Garland and Kelly made
together.
Kelly stars as one of his most memorable characters, an irrepressible actor named Serafin who poses as the infamous pirate Macoco in the hopes of winning the heart of Garland's pirate-infatuated maiden Manuela. Kelly pays winking tribute to silent star Douglas Fairbanks with his athletic performance, and alternately plays Serafin as swashbuckling rogue, Pal Joey-like lothario, and earnest romantic. Each of these roles suits the grandiose Kelly just fine, and he plays Serafin to the hilt, infusing the character with the sort of gleeful, self-aware sardonicism of his famous "Dignity" monologue in Singin' in the Rain. The film gets a tremendous charge from his unflagging energy.
Along with the amusing, Pepe Le Pew-like
solo number "Nina," Kelly is afforded the sort of fantasy
sequence that both he and Minnelli gravitated towards
throughout their time at MGM. In this case it's the gravity
-defying "Pirate Ballet," which features Serafin surrounded
by an absurdly over-the-top amount of fire and smoke (the
scene would be parodied later in Minnelli's classic The
Band Wagon). Best of all, Kelly performs an acrobatic
dance routine with Harold and Fayard Nicholas when first
introducing "Be a Clown." The Nicholas Brothers were a great
African American tap-dancing duo relegated to being a "
specialty act" in most all of their movies, their numbers
strategically positioned so that they might be deleted from
prints shipped to the American South without disrupting a
given film's continuity. The duo's greatest cinematic
triumph may be their heart-stopping contribution to the
finale of Twentieth Century-Fox's all-black musical Stormy Weather, but their desegregated appearance in
The Pirate — a climactic moment not designed for
excision — is a different kind of triumph. Kelly
reportedly requested the Nicholas Brothers for the film and
battled with the studio to get them cast. That he dared to
speak out in favor of the duo is admirable. That he dared to
dance with them without fear of being shown up is awfully
gutsy.
Garland, meanwhile, is given a rare opportunity with Manuela. She gets to play a woman who ultimately bucks tradition and repression to assert her own desires. One her best moments in this film, and in any film period, is the lusty number "Mack the Black," in which a hypnotized Manuela sings about her love for the dread Macoco. As Garland belts out the song, she is whirled about the set by a bevy of males, her long red hair trailing behind her like wildfire. Porter's lyrics here are a riot: "Throughout the Caribbean and vicinity/Macoco leaves a flaming trail of masculinity," Manuela informs us. It's a great bit of unleashed ardor that might have freed Garland from playing the good girl once and for all, had anyone actually seen it. Unlike Meet Me in St. Louis or The Wizard of Oz, which found Garland playing a chaste girl innocently seeking happiness in her own backyard, The Pirate allows her to seize passion and adulthood. Manuela will never be content staying home.
Garland serenades Kelly twice, first with "
You Can Do No Wrong" (which has the kind of lyric you only
get from Porter, "When you gaze in my direction/Life is
caviar") and then with "Love of My Life." The latter finds
the two nuzzling one another at their steamiest, or at least
the steamiest they were allowed to get in front of a camera
without Louis B. Mayer ordering the print be burned,
reportedly the fate of the deleted and destroyed number "
Voodoo." The romantic chemistry is there, and they also make
great comic foils for one another, both of them overplaying
The Pirate's most famous non-musical set piece, in
which a furious Manuela attacks Serafin with everything in
the room that isn't bolted down (and also slaps his derriere
with a sword, if you're into that).
That scene offers a glimpse of The Pirate at its broadest and most stagy. But as broad and stagy as the film surely is, it's so smart and self- reflexive that it becomes a delight for those who get the joke (that won't necessarily be everyone, which is why the film has so consistently divided critics and audiences). There's no denying that this is a weird movie, one that comes by its status as a cult classic honestly. It's loopy, knowingly campy, brightly colored, ambitious, and absolutely unique. Unlike For Me and My Gal and Summer Stock, The Pirate is a risky piece of work perfect for those who prefer the strange and daring over the formulaic.
May 2006 | Issue
52
Copyright © 2006 by Victoria Large
Victoria Large is a Massachusetts-based writer and student. When not watching movies from all genres and eras, she finds the time to write about them.
ACCESS: The Pirate is not available on DVD at this writing, though various online gray markets (ebay, e.g .) may have it.
ALSO: More reviews
