The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie Review

Yul Brynner, with hair!

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 6, 2012

Though it sometimes get strangely passed over in examinations of the major studios during the Golden Age of Hollywood, Paramount Pictures had an amazingly deep “bench”. Its star gallery was probably second only to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer’s, and its directing and producing talent was at least the equal, if not the superior, of every other studio. One of Paramount’s most iconic producers and directors was Cecil B. DeMille, who in fact co-directed the very first film to bear the iconic Paramount logo, The Squaw Man, in 1913. DeMille’s career with Paramount was long and varied, in fact long enough that he remade several of his own movies for the studios through the years, with the most famous probably being The Ten Commandments. DeMille wanted to follow up his incredible success with the fifties remake of The Ten Commandments with another remake, this time of his lesser known 1938 film The Buccaneer, but his declining health led him to pull out of all but an advisory role, with the film retaining a “Presented by Cecil B. DeMille” credit, probably for publicity purposes more than anything. DeMille is on hand in a brief prologue, helping to set the historical context, but he seems somewhat frail and it’s notable that he falters for a moment trying to turn a dial to change the image on a large projection screen behind him. When DeMille decided he couldn’t handle the stress of producing and directing the film, two rather interesting stand-bys stepped in to fill his shoes. His longtime collaborator and frequent featured actor Henry Wilcoxon assumed producing duties, and DeMille’s own son-in-law, iconic actor Anthony Quinn, took over directing the film, the only time in his long career that he performed that role.

DeMille’s 1938 version of The Buccaneer is a case study in both Paramount’s roster of stars as well as DeMille’s semi-private repertory company, whom he would hire to stock the supporting roles. Frederic March was rather strangely cast as pirate Jean Lafitte, and DeMille’s latest “find”, Hungarian chanteuse Franciska Gaal, played Gretchen, one third of a romantic triangle that included March and Margot Grahame as “nice girl” Annette. Paramount’s “colorful” character actor Akim Tamiroff, a former denizen of the Moscow Art Theater, did one of his patented hyperbolic turns as Dominique You, one of Lafitte’s assistants. (Tamiroff’s career at Paramount is a fascinating example of just how wide ranging Paramount was in terms of developing star talent—even if Tamiroff never quite caught the brass ring. Once Tamiroff was on board as a Paramount player, the studio worked overtime developing different projects for him, playing up his ability to magically inhabit various characters, almost like Lon Chaney’s vaunted “thousand faces”. The results were mixed, at best. Tamiroff actually often found himself in mediocre potboilers, as in one of his other 1938 Paramount outings, the really strange Ride a Crooked Mile, where he plays an émigré Cossack cattle rustler who has reinvented himself in Kansas, where he attempts to reconnect with his estranged son, a soldier played by Leif Erickson. Erickson’s then-wife, Frances Farmer, is on hand as a Russian cabaret singer. It truly must be seen to be believed, and remains one of the all time weirdest movies from Paramount’s late thirties efforts). Walter Brennan, Ian Keith and—wait for it—Anthony Quinn round out the supporting cast of this 1938 version.

The studio system was heaving its last labored breaths by the late fifties, and so contract players were largely a thing of the past, but the aegis of DeMille (even if he ended up not having much to do with the final product) was enough to attract some major heavyweights for the 1958 remake. In this version, a hirsute Yul Brynner assumes the role of Lafitte, Claire Bloom is the rustic girl, here named Bonnie, while a winsome Inger Stevens is Annette. Charles Boyer takes over the Tamiroff role, and the supporting cast is a crazy wonderful assemblage of everyone from E.G. Marshall to Lorne Greene to none other than DeMille’s Moses himself, Charlton Heston, as Andrew Jackson, a role Heston had essayed years earlier in another film, The President’s Lady. (You Star Trek fans should also keep a sharp eye out for a bit played by Majel Barrett, the future Mrs. Gene Roddenberry and veteran of several Star Trek iterations.)

The story is based—rather loosely, it must be admitted—on the War of 1812, when the British were attempting to take the peninsula of New Orleans, where a short distance away Lafitte had his own swampy “territory” called Barataria. (There’s a National Historical Park and Preserve there to this day which is a major tourist attraction.) Jackson initially thinks he’ll simply conquer Lafitte and his colorful band of pirates in order to take over strategic control of the area, but of course what actually happens is that Lafitte ends up allying with Jackson and the vastly outnumbered American troops to fight back the British. There’s really little historical accuracy in any but the broadest details here, for the real emphasis is on the mad bunch of Lafitte followers, as well as the kind of turgid soap operatic love triangle that develops around Lafitte.

The Buccaneer is a rather stilted affair, even by the somewhat iconically fake standards of a lot of DeMille films. That faux ambience is on display from the very first scene in the film, a deserted battlefield with weird auburn colored skies and (for some reason) what appears to be a matte painting of a tree in the foreground that looks like it was ported over from an unused Disney feature. The performance styles are cartoonish for the most part, which is not to say they’re unenjoyable. It’s fun to see Brynner hamming it up like the King of Barataria (as opposed to Siam), even if it’s patently odd to see him with a long mane of hair on his head. Bloom struts and pouts like a pirate girl Calamity Jane, and Boyer is perhaps too suave to be believable as a scheming pirate aide. Quinn does stage a couple of battle scenes fairly effectively, but the entire film has a weird, distant quality where the actors may share the frame but rarely seem to be in touch with each other.

The Buccaneer is probably best approached as an interesting, if failed, curio, a weird footnote to the long and glorious career of Cecil B. DeMille. This has a lot of the hallmarks of a DeMille epic, and yet there's some intangible magic missing, obviously attributable to the touch DeMille brought to both his producing and directing duties (tyrant though he was alleged to be). The cast is game, but are ill served by a clunky screenplay and a probably unsure director. You'll get more fireworks from another iconic 1812- centric piece of Art about another fierce battle that took place that year, Tchaikovsky's famous Overture sonically documenting Russia's conflict with England.

The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Buccaneer is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is another somewhat disappointing transfer, especially considering this was a VIstaVision release (it should be stated that Paramount provides the HD masters to Olive, which Olive simply licenses for release). I'm assuming this comes from some fairly badly faded elements, as colors (aside from some bright reds and purples) are not everything they should be, and flesh tones are especially anemic. Some of the film is rather brown, though flesh tones can drift over into a ruddy pink side of things quite a bit of the time. The entire presentation is fuzzy and soft, without the crystal clarity that has attended other, superior VistaVision high definition transfers. Close-ups finally reveal at least acceptable levels of fine detail, but nothing here really pops the way it should, and in fact it almost looks like the entire film was shot with soft focus lenses.

The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While there's nothing horrible about The Buccaneers lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mix, the truth is there's also little bombast here, despite the prevalence of booming cannons and gunfire and one of Elmer Bernstein's best action oriented scores. Everything sounds fine, if awfully flat and unnuanced, though there's no real damage of any kind. Dialogue is always crisp and well presented, but this track cries out for more depth, especially in the low frequencies which seem curiously ill served even in this lossless format.

The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As is usual with these Olive Films releases, no supplements of any kind are included.

The Buccaneer Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Would The Buccaneer have been a better film had DeMille been able to complete it? Probably. But it still might not have been great. It's a lumbering piece that spends too much time on a romantic subplot and not enough time on the colorful exploits of Lafitte in cahoots with Jackson. DeMille's films were never exactly paragons of historical accuracy, and The Buccaneer at the very least shares that trait with the legendary producer-director's own completed pieces, but something is missing from this outing that can only be attributed to Mr. DeMille not being there, attending to those who were ready for their close-ups.