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| Images courtesy of The Film Detective |
In 1934, American film writer-director Lloyd Corrigan
changed the face of the film world forever with his Academy Award winning short
film La Cucaracha i.e. the first three-strip Technicolor film that didn’t
consist of hand drawn animation. Akin to
a short feature with a startling budget at the time, some $65K against the
usual $15K price tag, La Cucharacha though only running twenty minutes
proved to be successful enough for its leading actress Steffi Duna as the café singer
of the short film’s title track to reunite with director Corrigan for what
became the third film shot in the “Process No. 4” technique and the first fully
fledged Technicolor musical: the lighthearted 1936 Oscar nominated romp Dancing
Pirate.
In the 1820s, Boston after young dance instructor Jonathan
Pride (Charles Collins) is duped into joining a pirate ship crew, the man
narrowly escapes his captors only to find himself being outfitted for a noose by
the California residents led by Mayor Don Emilio Perena (Frank Morgan doing a
dress rehearsal for The Wizard of Oz).
However, he gets a break when the Mayor’s daughter Serafina (Steffi Duna
back from La Cucharacha) learns he knows how to dance the waltz. Still, the plot thickens when Serafina’s
suitor Don Balthazar (Victor Varconi) shows up with intention to overthrow the
town and do away with the dance instructor, something he’s not about to let
happen without a fight.
A screwball comedy, a musical, a swashbuckler and above all
things a tech demo, Dancing Pirate is more or less an extended version
of the far more engaging and vibrant La Cucharacha with Steffi Duna as
the sassy mayor’s daughter and hero’s eventual love interest and Frank Morgan making
up most of the film’s Technicolor energies.
For one thing its shot beautifully by William V. Skall who would later
go on to do such legendary fare as winning an Oscar for Joan of Arc who
in his career received a total of nine Oscar nominations. The soundtrack by Alfred Newman of All
About Eve and How the West was Won in conjunction with original
songs by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers is mostly good though considerably
lacking when compared to what these three composers would do later in their
careers.
The main problem with the Merian C. Cooper RKO production (the
same man who brought King Kong into the world) is Charles Collins who is
a good singer and actor on Broadway often working in the musical comedy
field. Despite his obvious talents as a
dancer and performer, the actor never really comes across onscreen as confident
or larger than life. In a film where the
spectacle of the dancing and the screen presence of its central actor is key, Dancing
Pirate finds its tapdancing hero a bit lacking in terms of identifiable
personality or character. Not
necessarily bad but far from what one should expect from the leading man in
your musical escapist fantasy.
Still, The Film Detective has given this often overlooked
entry in musical film history a mostly good digital restoration though some of
the Technicolor elements look a bit faded in some scenes. Including an audio-commentary by Jennifer
Churchill and two short documentaries about the Technicolor process as well as
a brief memoir on the film itself, the blu-ray disc release of Dancing Pirate
will satisfy film historians keen on seeing where many of our favorite
musicals found their origins. However, of
that era, in the pantheon of escapist colorful musical fantasies onscreen including
but not limited to comparisons to the still electric La Cucharacha, Dancing
Pirate is kind of flat. Glad to see a
key component precluding The Wizard of Oz onscreen but overall sadly it
is a mediocrity.
--Andrew Kotwicki
