Very disappointed :(

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

In this mediocre at best 1951 film, Jean Peters has an absolute field day playing the commanding female pirate aboard her ship with anger against the British who had killed her half-brother.Peters handles herself well with sword and acts just like we expect a pirate to act.Louis Jourdan plays the supposed French pirate who she meets and who will ultimately lead to her downfall.Both supposedly team up to find a lost treasure. When Blackbeard, the Pirate, recognizes the Jourdan character from a previous experience, out of love for Louis, she breaks with Blackbeard and this in itself will cause her ultimate downfall with Blackbeard crying out for revenge against her.Debra Paget emerges as the wife of Jourdan who is kidnapped by Peters when she realizes that Jourdan has fooled her all along.

This is the sort of thing that the studios were experts in grinding out in the 40s and 50s. The opening credits are flung across the screen in huge crimson letters. The musical score, by Franz Waxman, resembles on a lower plane the exquisite bombast of Eric Wolfgang Korngold, who was referred to by one of his detractors as Wolfgang von Korngold.That fact is only worth mentioning in passing but so is this entire movie. I liked it, especially when I saw it as a child in the Mayfair Theater in Hillside, New Jersey. I thrilled at the boom of the cannon, shivered when a protagonist was threatened with death by cutlass, chuckled when Thomas Gomez as Blackbeard swilled wine and overturned wooden tables, and stirred in my seat when the pale, prim, innocent Debra Paget was thrown into Captain Paradise's cabin with her dress half torn off.That particular incident went nowhere because the captain was Anne of the Indies, Jean Peters. As the stern, scowling pirate captain, Peters, I think all of us must admit, was a little butch but she was heterosexual. She proved that when she made chaste love to her prisoner, played by the handsome, suave, organically grown Frenchman, Louis Jourdan. That lovemaking wouldn't be so pure in one of today's movies. And I'm not so sure that Debra Paget would have remained unscathed.The plot. Some nonsense about rivalries and possessions and revenge involving Peters, Gomez, and Jourdan. Peters, having discovered that Jourdan and Paget are married, is convulsed with rage and jealousy. She maroons the two of them on one of those desert islands with nothing but sand and she sneers as she describes the horrible deaths they will suffer because they have no food or water. Actually, I think if they dug deep enough they'd find a fresh water lens. I don't know about the food situation. The best they could hope for would be crude versions of moules mariniere or zarzuela de mariscos.Jean Peters plays the role of the unlettered Pirate Queen in a blunt and one-dimensional fashion. She was really good in Sam Fuller's "Pickup On South Street." Louis Jourdan is too debonair for me. I suspect he wins a lot of good-looking women just because of his French accent. Fine for him, but what about the rest of us? Thomas Gomez is fine as the blustering, uninhibited, proudful Blackbeard. He looks as if he's wearing a fat suit. I met him in a now defunct San Francisco night club called Finnochio's. Debra Paget has very little to do except look distressed.

I saw this movie when I was very young living in Houston, Texas. I really enjoyed this movie, and I wrote to Jean Peters in Hollywood, and I told her how much I enjoyed seeing her in this movie. She sent me an autographed photo. This movie was directed by Jacques Tourneur, and besides Jean Peters in the starring role. It also stars Louis Jourdan, Debra Paget, and Herbert Marshall. It was released in 1951 in color and is 81 minutes long. Jean Peters was married to Howard Hughes. She also starred in "Viva Zapata" with Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, who won an Oscar for playing the role Zapata's brother (Marlon Brando starred as Zapata) (1952). And she also starred in "Captain from Castile" (1947) with Tyron Power. Since then I've been trying to find a place where it is available, but so far I have not been successful. Does anybody have any suggestions about where I can find and purchase this movie? It this comment contains spoilers, I am unaware of it.

I like the film, it´s the best pirate-movie I watched hitherto (forget silly Errol-Flynn-stuff and Pirates of the Caribbean). This movie is wonderful melancholic. I compare it with "Johnny Guitar" at the sea-side (but 3 years earlier), two women fighting for a man, where mad love might lead one.The character of the female (anti-) heroine, Anne Providence, is superb, acting without compromise like a child, lost alone on her search for a own female identity in a real man´s world. She´s a quite strange movie-hero, not a funny pirate, as most of her companions in this genre, not making jokes all the time, fighting for the poor and good and only killing the stupid spanish or british soldiers or - better - sly governors, but she´s murdering all the poor prisoners of war, after she captured a ship (look careful at this at the start of the movie), she´s primitive (she can´t even read), she is desperated and she get´s an alcoholic, she looses all her friends as consequence of her obstinacy and she´s wearing rags most of the film. This film shows a pirate "hero" a little (!) bit as he (or in this case "she", but there has been a female "Anne" buccaneer, Anne Boney) might have been in brutal reality.The film is quite short and the story is told in a breathtaking manner. Certainly, a film from the 1950s has no exciting special effects for present time viewers (the ships swim very obvious in a bath tube), but this real drama about love (that kills), trust, betrayal, revenge, hatred and sacrifice drives one crazy. Maybe, Anne is even supposed to be Judas Iskarioth and Jesus from Nazareth in one person, being betrayed by her friend (the french LaRochelle) as Jesus; after being disappointed by the friend, delivering him to a death penalty (as Judas); than getting remorse about this (like Judas, who commits suicide according to the gospel of Matthew); and in the end sacrificing herself for the rescue of the beloved enemy (as Jesus). But, even if you are not interested in this philosophical questions of guilt and atonement, the film brings a lot of (cheap) action as sword fights and burning (plastic) ships for a very short one and a half hour.