After all those months of being cooped up at home, the prospect of getting some sea air seems irresistible. So, set sail with Cinema Paradiso for the first in a two-part voyage across a cinematic ocean.
Boats come in all shapes and sizes and everything from coracles to supertankers have featured in films over the last 125 years. No one can match Cinema Paradiso's boast to have the biggest movie marina, with berths for craft as different as the biblical ark in Darren Aronofsky's Noah (2014) and the theme park riverboat in Jaume Collet-Sera's Jungle Cruise (2020). Whatever floats your boat, therefore, you're bound to find it among the 100,000 titles in the UK's biggest DVD, Blu-ray and 4K rental catalogue.
Anchors Aweigh!
Such is the cinematic association with the life aquatic that one of the most significant moments in screen history took place aboard a boat. Cartoon icon Mickey Mouse spoke for the first time in Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks's Steamboat Willie (1928), which also has the distinction of being the first animation with synchronised sound. Uncle Walt provided all the voices for this monochrome miniature, which can be found on the Vintage Mickey selection. And Disney would come up with another maritime gem in introducing a plucky tug named 'Little Toot' in Clyde Geronomi's contribution to the musical anthology, Melody Time (1948).
Buster Keaton had been the silent master of floating fun, as he had followed getting a sinking feeling aboard 'The Damfino' in The Boat (1921) by joining father Ernest Torrance in a riverboat feud with Tom McGuire and his daughter Marion Byron in Charles Reisner's Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). As Peter Bogdanovich reveals in The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018), this proved to be the last independent comedy the Great Stone Face would ever make, as his career took a downward turn in the sound era.
By contrast, talkies proved the making of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who followed such silent shorts as Fred Guiol's Why Girls Love a Sailor (1927) and James Parrott's Two Tars (1928) with two-reel titles like Lewis R. Foster's Men o' War (1929) and James W. Horne's Any Old Port (1932). These timeless slapstick classics can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on Laurel and Hardy's Maritime Mishaps.
There's also a nautical flavour to Harry Lachman's Our Relations (1936), Gordon Douglas's Saps At Sea (1940), which can be found on Laurel & Hardy, Volume 11, and Leo Joannon's Atoll K (1951). But Stan and Ollie are at their funniest in George Marshall's Towed in the Hole (1932), when they hit upon the idea of buying a boat and going into the fish business. Typically, however, after much mayhem, they fail even to get the craft launched before disaster strikes.
The tunes of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in James Whale's Show Boat (1936) have proved much more enduring, however, with Paul Robeson's rendition of 'Ol' Man River' still being capable of sending shivers. Even Frank Sinatra falls short in the version contained in Richard Whorf's Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), which appeared the year after Bud Abbott and Lou Costello performed their celebrated 'Who's On First' sketch aboard another riverboat in Jean Yarbrough's The Naughty Nineties (1945).
One of Rudyard Kipling's lesser-known novels deals with life afloat. Victor Fleming's adaptation of Captains Courageous (1937) sees Portuguese-American fisherman Manuel Fidello (Spencer Tracy) and the crew of the fishing schooner, 'We're Here'. rescue 10 year-old Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) after he falls overboard from a transatlantic steamer. There's no such melodrama in Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948), however, which charts the everyday activities of Sicilian fisher families in a documentary-like detail that made this one of the key works of Italian neo-realism.
Cinema Paradiso has already examined the war at sea in the article, WWII Films: Beaches, Oceans and Camps. But we'll draw your attention to Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), as it forms part of a compelling 'adrift' trilogy with Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012) and Angelina Jolie's Unbroken (2014). Like Hitch's underrated thriller, the latter takes place during the Second World War and features a fine performance by Jack O'Connell as Louis Zamperini, the Olympic athlete who survived 47 days at sea in a rubber dinghy. He had two members of a bomber crew for company, but Pi (Suraj Sharma) is joined in his lifeboat by a Bengal tiger in a visually resplendent adaptation of Yann Martel's masterly novel.
Another unlikely couple take on the perils of the jungle, as well as the might of the Kaiser's navy, as missionary Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) and hard-drinking skipper Charlie Allnut (the Oscar-winning Humphrey Bogart) learn to rub along on a clapped-out steam launch in John Huston's rightly revered take on C.S. Forester's The African Queen (1951). Three years later, Sidney James fares less well when dabbling on deck in Ken Hughes's The House Across the Lake (1954), after grasping wife Hillary Brooke persuades pulp novelist Alex Nicol to toss hubby overboard so that she can inherit his wealth.
The exploits of Jacques-Yves Cousteau made the RV Calypso one of the best-known boats in the world in the 1950s. The French oceanographer won the Academy Award for Best Documentary with Louis Malle for The Silent World (1956) and Cousteau won again in his own right with World Without Sun (1964). Cinema Paradiso offers users the chance to see the final part of this enthralling trilogy, Voyage to the Edge of the World (1976), which was co-directed by Philippe Cousteau, whose is played by Pierre Niney opposite Lambert Wilson in Jérôme Salle's father-son study, The Odyssey (2016).
Cut from the same macho cloth was author Ernest Hemingway, who is profiled in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's imposing documentary series, Hemingway (2021). Two of Papa's nautical novels are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. Spencer Tracy gives an Oscar-nominated performance as Santiago, the Cuban fisherman trying to reel in a giant marlin. in John Sturges's adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea (1958), which earned Dimitri Tiomkin an Academy Award for his glorious score. But don't underestimate Anthony Quinn's muscular turn in Jud Taylor's The Old Man and the Sea (1990). And George C. Scott is also on fine form as sculptor Thomas Hudson, as he struggles with his exile on the Bahamas with war looming in Franklin J. Schaffner's Islands in the Stream (1977).
British cinema in the late 1950s latched on to the notion that all the nice girls love a sailor, even if they're duffers like Lieutenant Humphrey Fairweather (David Tomlinson), who finds himself in command of HMS Berkeley, which is mothballed off the Suffolk coast in Val Guest's Up the Creek (1958) and Further Up the Creek (1958). Also released in 1958, Gilbert Gunn's Girls At Sea teamed Guy Rolfe and Ronald Shiner aboard HMS Scotia in a remake of Thomas Bentley's 1939 take on Ian Hay's hit play, The Middle Watch, which starred Jack Buchanan as the skipper dealing with a surfeit of female stowaways on board HMS Falcon.
Kenneth More proves even more resourceful as his raw recruits consistently land themselves in hot water in Wendy Toye's We Joined the Navy (1962). But that year saw teenagers predominantly flock to the flicks to see Elvis Presley in a pair of nautical frolics directed by Norman Taurog. The King clearly enjoyed bobbing on the briny, as following Blue Hawaii and Girls! Girls! Girls! (both 1962), he took the helm again in Richard Thorpe's Fun in Acapulco (1963), Frederick De Cordova's Frankie and Johnny (1966), John Rich's Easy Come, Easy Go, and Arthur H. Nadel's Clambake (1967).
Elvis never had need of a bigger boat, but that's the issue facing police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint the shark hunter (Robert Shaw) when 'The Orca' proves inadequate in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster. Jaws (1975). Size is also an issue in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982), although the absence of water also proves problematic for the eccentric Irish rubber baron (Klaus Kinski) who hires a land crew to haul the 320-ton steamship 'Molly Aida' over an Andean mountain.
The aquatic terrain can be every bit as treacherous, as Meryl Streep discovers while hoping that a white water rafting trip will prove to be a family bonding exercise in Curtis Hanson's The River Wild (1994). Twelve year-old Jesse (Jason James Richter) has been abandoned by his mother and forms a connection with a captured orca in Simon Wincer's Free Willy (1993). Whalers are among the different vessels on view in this feel-good family adventure, while an oil tanker and motorboat named 'Little Dipper' crop up in Dwight Little's Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995). And they are joined by a research ship called 'The Noah' and a whaler named 'The Botany Bay' in Sam Pillsbury's Free Willy 3: The Rescue (1997).
Bill Murray stars as the eccentric oceanographer out for revenge against the jaguar shark that had devoured his partner in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004). But the ageing 'Belafonte' can't keep up with the souped-up hydroplane named 'Miss Madison', which is piloted by Jim Caviezel in William Brindley's fact-based saga, Madison (2001).
As all fans of Pixar animation will know, a trawler has a key role to play in Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo (2003), while a shipwreck looms large in Finding Dory (2016). Disney devotees will also know all about the camakau that results in the Polynesian heroine of Ron Clements and John Musker's Moana (2016) being washed up on an island during her bid to return the heart of Te Fiti. The smallest craft in our survey is the model of 'The Unicorn' that leads crime reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his dog, Snowy, to the SS Karaboudjan, where they make the acquaintance of Captain Archibald Haddock (Andy Serkis) in Steven Spielberg's take on Belgian illustrator Hergé's graphic novel, The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
The mildest form of piracy ever to combine sea waves and airwaves is commemorated in Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked (2009), a droll homage to the pirate radio stations that did so much to make the 1960s swing. However, saving souls is the name of the game for the members of the Cromer lifeboat crew in Tony Britten's music-hall tribute, In Love With Alma Cogan (2012), while the fate of the 1950s oil tanker SS Pendleton depends upon the courage of the Coast Guard crew rowing CG 363500 through treacherous seas off Cape Cod in Craig Gillespie's rousing historical adventure, The Finest Hours (2016).
Sea Voyage Films; Full steam Ahead
Having taken a tour of the smaller craft that have traversed the screen over the last century, we head back in time to the days of sail and recall how film-makers have presented some of history's most famous ships. Vessels like 'The Argo', which carried the deposed prince of Thessaly and his acolytes from the Aegean to the Black Sea in Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts (1963). In the title role, Todd Armstrong battled the stop-motion creatures designed by Ray Harryhausen before passing on his sword and buckler so that Jason London could go in search of the Golden Fleece in Nick Willing's Jason and the Argonauts (2000).
The epic voyage of the 'Nina', 'Pinta' and 'Santa Maria' are recreated with Gérard Depardieu at the wheel as Christopher Columbus in Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise. The retelling of the accidental discovery of the New World was markedly less reverential in Gerald Thomas's Carry On Columbus (both 1992), as Jim Dale assumed the mantle of the Genoese explorer. While Columbus went in search of new lands, Michiel de Ruyter (Frank Lammers) sought to defend the United Provinces against the marauding fleet of Charles II (Charles Dance) in Roel Reiné's Admiral (2015).
Defending the homeland famously cost Horatio Nelson his life, as J. Searle Dawley recalled in his ambitious, but sadly lost film, The Battle of Trafalgar (1911). Laurence Olivier played the North Anglian admiral in Alexander Korda's wartime flagwaver, That Hamilton Woman (1941), which co-starred Vivien Leigh. The romance between Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, wasn't quite so tempestuous. But another off-screen couple, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, deliver fine performances in Jon Amiel's Creation (2009).
While the survey barque HMS Beagle got to sail in the warm waters around the Galapagos Islands, RRS Discovery and 'The Endurance' had to contend with frozen polar seas, as can be seen in two gripping films about Robert Falcon Scott - Frank Hurley's South (1919) and Charles Frend's Scott of the Antarctic (1948) - and two more about Ernest Shackleton: Charles Sturridge's Shackleton (2002) and George Butler's The Endurance (2000).
Voyaging into fictional currents, Hughie Green, the future host of the ITV talent show, Opportunity Knocks (1956-78), takes the title role in Carol Reed's adaptation of Captain Frederick Marryat's Napoleonic adventure, Midshipman Easy (1935), Cinema Paradiso users can find this on Volume Two of Ealing Rarities, along with Edmond T. Gréville's Brief Ecstasy (1937), Walter Forde's The Four Just Men (1939) and Charles Frend's The Big Blockade (1942), a propaganda piece produced by Michael Balcon about the need to hamper the economy of Nazi Germany. Members can also enjoy the adventures of Ioan Gruffudd in the title role of Hornblower (1998-2003), ITV's adaptation of C.S. Forester's much-thumbed books.
One of the unluckiest sailors in the annals of literature, Lemuel Gulliver managed to wash up on the shore of Lilliput after being shipwrecked and later found himself in Brobdingnag after being cut adrift by his own crewmates. In Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire, Gulliver is also rescued from pirates by the flying island of Laputa (the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky, 1986) and winds up in the land of the Houyhnhnms after his crew mutinies.
Dave Fleischer made screen history with his 1939 adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, which was the first American animated feature produced by someone other than Walt Disney. Why not compare it with Hanna-Barbera's 1979 cartoon version because Cinema Paradiso has both! The Fleischer feature was a very loose interpretation of Swift's text and director Jack Sher takes plenty of liberties of his own, as Kerwin Matthews sets off in search of his fortune in The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), whose special effects were photographed in a new process called Superdynamation.
Ted Danson took the title role in Charles Sturridge's mini-series, Gulliver's Travels (1996), which not only included boasted an all-star cast and the expertise of Jim Henson Productions, but it also included all four voyages. Fidelity is less the watchword, in the case of Rob Letterman's Gulliver's Travels (2010), however, which sees New York post-room drone Jack Black find his way to Lilliput after venturing into the Bermuda Triangle.
Three years after Austrian Géza von Cziffra had released his silent version of Gulliver's Travels (1924), British actor-director M.A. Wetherell produced the first feature version of Daniel Defoe's 1719 masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe. Inspired by the castaway life of Alexander Selkirk, this story about a slaver who is washed up on a desert island has been sanitised down the years, even by Soviet film-maker Aleksandr Andreievsky in his pioneering 1947 retelling, which was made in glasses-free 3-D.
Naturally, Luis Buñuel found much to satirise, as Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy headlines his 1954 excursion, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Poet Adrian Mitchell was much more scathing in the play that Jack Gold adapted as Man Friday (1975), a study in racial politics that stars Richard Roundtree and Peter O'Toole. After Aiden Quinn had taken the title role in Caleb Deschanel's Crusoe (1977), Piers Brosnan survives in the company of William Takaku in Rod Hardy and George T. Miller's Robinson Crusoe (1997). Philip Winchester is the most recent actor to play the shipwreck vicim in a live-action picture, as Michael Robison's Crusoe (2010) also reflects upon his life and ties before he went to sea.
Readers of a certain vintage will have nothing but fond memories of Frenchman Jean Sacha's 1964 tele-adaptation, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which starred Robert Hoffman and enchanted BBC audiences for over a decade with its haunting theme music by Robert Mellin and Gian-Piero Reverberi. Younger viewers, however, will be more familiar with Vincent Kesteloot and Ben Stassen's Robinson Crusoe (2016), a Franco-Belgian animation that includes a parrot named Tuesday and is available from Cinema Paradiso in Blu-ray 3-D.
Despite having studied in Berlin in the 1930s, Thor Heyerdahl fought with the Free Norwegian Forces prior to striving to prove an ancient connection between South America and Polynesia by sailing across the world on a balsa wood pae-pae raft. Heyerdahl's own film, Kon-Tiki (1950), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, while Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's reconstruction of the epic voyage, Kon-Tiki (2012), was nominated for both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.
Whaling has become one of the most contentious ways to make a living from the sea. But the obsessional nature of the pursuit inspired two Hollywood films available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. Veteran Lionel Barrymore takes grandson Dean Stockwell to the South Atlantic to learn the family trade in Henry Hathaway's Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), while Gregory Peck's Captain Ahab weighs anchor from Nantucket in 'The Pequod' in search of the eponymous great white whale in John Huston's epic adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1956).
The role passed to Barry Bostwick in Trey Stokes's updating, Moby Dick (2000), which was released in the same year as Charles Sturridge's mini-series, Longitude, which has its imposing moments under canvas in chronicling how retired naval officer and horologist Rupert Gould (Jeremy Irons) restored the chronometers produced in the 18th century by John Harrison (Michael Gambon).
A Norwegian training ship was the subject of Louis de Rochemont III and Bill Colerran's documentary, Windjammer (1958), which was the only film shot in Cinerama's Cinemiracle process. You'd need a pretty enormous screen to do full justice to the sailing sequences, so it's perhaps understandable that this is not currently available on disc. But Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy two thrilling accounts of life about a sailing vessel.
So, why not join teacher Jeff Bridges and 13 of his students as they battle through a maelstrom in Ridley Scott's White Squall (1996). Or perhaps you can stow away, as Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey vows vengeance on the French privateer, 'Acheron', after HMS Surprise is attacked in Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). This epic adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's Napoleonic Wars novel was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for its cinematography and sound editing.
Films Set At Sea: Mutineers & Smugglers
Throughout history, the seven seas have been a lawless wilderness, with shipping forever being at the mercy of pirates, privateers and hijackers. In some cases, vessels weren't safe from their own crews, as was the case with HMS Bounty, when Fletcher Christian led a revolt against the tyrannical captaincy of William Bligh in 1789.
Australia produced the first two films about this infamous incident, with Raymond Longford's The Mutiny on the Bounty (1916) being followed by Charles Chauvel's In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), which saw Errol Flynn make his screen debut as Fletcher Christian. Two years later, Clark Gable challenged the authority of Charles Laughton in Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Sequels planned for Laughton and Gable were never made. So, MGM decided to remake the story in Technicolor, with Carol Reed's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) pairing Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. The picture's box-office failure didn't deter David Lean from spending decades trying to raise the funds for his own account of the mutiny.
It can't have been entirely a coincidence that a couple of other mutiny movies sought to cash in on the publicity generated by Marlon Brando's on-set romance with Terita Teriipaia. There was a pronounced gravitas about Lewis Gilbert's HMS Defiant (aka Damn the Defiant!, 1962), which retold the story of the 1797 Spithead mutiny led by Lieutenant Scott-Padgett (Dirk Bogarde) against Captain Crawford (Alec Guinness) during the French Revolutionary Wars. But it was lampoon all the way in Gerald Thomas's Carry On Jack (1963), as Albert Poop-Decker (Bernard Cribbins) and the disguised Sally the serving maid (Juliet Mills) are turfed off the good ship 'Venus' along with Captain Fearless (Kenneth Williams) and press-ganged cesspit cleaner, Walter Sweetly (Charles Hawtrey).
The smell of the weevil-infested rations helped whip up the resentment of the crew docked at Odessa in 1905 in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), the silent masterpiece whose revolutionary montage editing technique influenced film-makers worldwide, including documentarist John Grierson, whose 1929 short, Drifters, is teamed with Potemkin in a BFI double bill.
The judgement of the captain prompts executive officer Stephen Maryk (Van Johnson) to seize control of a US Navy destroyer from Lieutenant Commander Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) in Edward Dmytryk's gripping adaptation of Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1954), which earned Bogie an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
A Leon Uris bestseller provided the impetus for Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), which sees the 611 Holocaust survivors who had been smuggled on to a cargo ship by Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) stage a hunger strike in order to force the British authorities on Cyprus to allow them safe passage to Palestine. A century earlier, Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounou) had led a mutiny of the Africans aboard a ship heading from Spanish Cuba to the United States and the ensuing legal battle between the slave owners and the abolitionists is recreated in Steven Spielberg's occasionally historically fanciful, Amistad (1997).
The rocky inclines of the English coastline have long posed problems for movie smugglers. We head to Kent for Roy William Neill's Doctor Syn (1937), which brought down the curtain on the glittering career of Britain's first acting Oscar winner, George Arliss. But the character created by Russell Thorndike has twice resurfaced, as Parson Blyss (Peter Cushing) in Peter Graham Scott's Captain Clegg (1962), and as the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (Patrick McGoohan) in James Neilson's Disney rendition, Doctor Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963). Amusingly, Gerald Thomas's Carry On Dick (1974) borrowed the idea of a disguised cleric so that Sid James could transform from the Reverend Flasher into Big Dick Turpin.
The coves of Devon and Cornwall have also captured the imagination of writers like Daphne Du Maurier, whose Jamaica Inn was brought to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938 and to television by Philippa Lowthorpe in 2014. Bafflingly, Fritz Lang's 1955 adaptation of Moonfleet is currently unavailable. But Cinema Paradiso users can rent Andy De Emmony's 2013 TV take on John Meade Falkner's classic, which stars Ray Winstone as smuggler, Elzevir Block.
Smuggling and wrecking were also common in the Cornish novels of Winston Graham, which have consistently been a hit with BBC audiences, whether they are rooting for Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees as Ross and Demelza in Poldark (1975-77) or Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson in Poldark (2015-19). And don't forget that John Bowe and Mel Martin also headlined Richard Laxton's feature version, Poldark (1996).
Eighteenth-century Cornish magistrate Squire Trevelyan (Peter Cushing) seeks to stop Black John (Bernard Lee) from luring ships on to the rocks in John Gilling's Fury At Smuggler's Bay (1961). But the more whimsical side of beating the excise men bubbles to the surface in Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! (1949) and Gillies MacKinnon's 2016 remake of the same name, as the residents of the Outer Hebridean island of Todday seek to bypass wartime rationing by liberating the cargo of Scotch aboard the stricken freighter, SS Cabinet Minister.
A greater sense of desperation pervades the action, as the demobbed wartime crew purchase motor gun boat 'The 1087' in order to smuggle wine and cigarettes from the continent. However, the stakes are raised when they fail to resist the temptation to run more lucrative cargoes of guns and currency in Basil Dearden and Michael Relph's adaptation of Nicholas Monsarrat's bestseller, The Ship That Died of Shame (1955).
Pirates & Hijackers on Film
The scene shifts to the Admiral Benbow Inn on the Bristol Channel for the opening scenes of Robert Louis Stevenson's much-filmed Treasure Island, which follows the crew of the schooner 'Hispaniola' in its search for pirate Captain Flint's buried gold. The story reached the screen for the first time in J. Searle Dawley's 1912 adaptation. Sadly, Maurice Tourneur's 1920 take, with Lon Chaney doubling up as Blind Pew and Merry, seems to have been lost forever, which is an additional shame as it also featured actress Shirley Mason as cabin boy Jim Hawkins. It's also not currently possible to see Wallace Beery as cook Long John Silver in Victor Fleming's Treasure Island (1934), which was the first incarnation of the sound era.
However, Cinema Paradiso members can revel in the timber-shivering turn of Robert Newton as Long John Silver in Byron Haskin's Disney retelling, Treasure Island (1950). Indeed, the Cornish-raised Newton so enjoyed the experience that he not only signed up to reprise the role in the same director's Return to Treasure Island (aka Long John Silver, 1954), but he also took the lead in Raoul Walsh's Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), which prompted its own Disney reworking when Peter Ustinov took the title role in Robert Stevenson's Blackbeard's Ghost (1968).
Back in Stevenson country, Orson Welles puts his distinctive spin on Long John's avarice in Andrea Bianchi's Treasure Island (1972), which was released the same year as a fine Soviet version, with Boris Andreyev providing the villainy in Yevgeni Fridman's Treasure Island. Also worth pointing out is Alfred Burke's characterful rendition in Michael E. Briant's tele-serialisation, Treasure Island (1977). We're not currently able to share Charlton Heston's interpretation in son Fraser Heston's Treasure Island (1990), but we can heartily recommend Tim Curry's wonderful display in Brian Henson's Muppet Treasure Island (1996), which also features Kermit as Captain Smollett, Fozzie Bear as Squire Trelawney and Miss Piggy as Benjamina Gunn.
In more recent times, the role of Long John Silver has been played by Jack Palance in Peter Rowe's Treasure Island (1999), Lance Henricksen in Leigh Scott's Pirates of Treasure Island (2006), and Eddie Izzard in Steve Barron's Treasure Island (2012). But we still await the big screen's first Long Jane Silver, after a puppet version appeared in a 1990 episode of Sesame Street and Hetty Baines played the character as a piratical Marilyn Monroe in Ken Russell's Channel Four teleplay, Treasure Island (1995).
Not every screen pirate had a thing about bottles of rum and dead men's chests and Cinema Paradiso has a right rogues' gallery for users to pick out their usual suspects. Few proved more influential in the swashbuckling stakes than Douglas Fairbanks and his dashing display as the Duke of Arnoldo in Albert Parker's The Black Pirate (1926) is all the more memorable as it was only the third feature to be filmed in two-colour Technicolor.
The Fairbanks factor informed the derring-do of Errol Flynn at the height of his Warner Bros fame. He teamed twice with director Michael Curtiz on pirate pictures, firstly as Irish doctor Peter Blood in Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood (1935) and then as 'Albatross' skipper Geoffrey Thorpe squaring up to the Spanish Armada in the same author's The Sea Hawk (1940). And Sabatini aficionados will also know that he provided the source material for Henry King's The Black Swan (1942), which chronicles the clash in the seas around Jamaica between pirate-turned-governor Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar) and Captain Jamie Waring (Tyrone Power).
Maureen O'Hara gives as good as she gets as Lady Margaret Denby and Paulette Goddard's Loxi Claiborne is similarly anything but a decorative sidekick to Captain Jack Stuart (John Wayne) when they take on wrecker King Cutler (Raymond Massey) in Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942). O'Hara had the breeze in her red hair again in Frank Borzage's The Spanish Main (1945), as Francisca Alvarado agrees a marriage contract with the governor of Cartagena (Walter Slezak), only to fall for Laurent Van Horn aboard 'The Barracuda'.
It's hard to know who Charles Laughton can trust aboard 'The Adventure Galley' as it escorts a ship filled with Indian treasure in Rowland V. Lee's Captain Kidd (1945), which had the dubious distinction of being one of Joseph Stalin's favourite films. Laughton reprised the role in Charles Lamont's Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), which is one of the few Bud and Lou comedies missing from Cinema Paradiso's unrivalled catalogue.
Users can, however, splice the mainbrace in the respective company of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Philip Law, Patrick Wayne and Kerwin Matthews in Richard Wallace's Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Gordon Hessler's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Sam Wanamaker's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and Nathan Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The latter is made all the more thrilling by the peerless stop-animation sequences devised by Ray Harryhausen, whose career is celebrated in Gilles Penso's documentary, Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011).
A Cole Porter score and the second of Gene Kelly's three teamings with Judy Garland ensure a good time will be had by all as Serafin tries to convince Manuela in the Caribbean village of Calvados that he is Mack 'the Black' Macoco in Vincente Minnelli's classic MGM musical, The Pirate (1948). There's more roister-doistering on the neighbouring islands of San Pero and Cobra, as Captain Vello (Burt Lancaster) debates whether to side with King's envoy Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley) or rebel leader, El Libre (Frederick Leister) in Robert Siodmak's Technicolor swashbuckler, The Crimson Pirate (1952).
Having been filmed with Betty Bronson in the title role by Herbert Brenon in 1924, J.M. Barrie's beloved children's tale got the Disney treatment in Clyde Geronomi's Peter Pan (1953). This was eventually followed by Robin Budd's long-awaited sequel, Peter Pan: Return to Neverland (2002). Two years later, Johnny Depp played Barrie in Marc Forster's biopic, Finding Neverland (2004), which appeared in the midst of a run of live-action variations on Peter Pan's showdown with Captain Hook that included Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan (2003) and Joe Wright's Pan (2015). But we have a sneaky affection for Dewi Humphreys's Peter Pan Goes Wrong (2016), in which the award-winning Mischief Theatre are guaranteed to leave you helpless with laughter (as they would do again with Richard Boden's A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, 2017).
Those with longer memories will recall Robert Shaw as reformed smuggler-cum-privateer Captain Dan Tempest in The Buccaneers (1956-57), which was set on the Caribbean island of New Providence at the height of a war against Spain. But it was Italy that fell in love with the pirate picture in the 1950s, although few are available on disc, as the swashbuckling 'cappa e spada' genre never caught on in quite the same way as the Peplum or 'sword and sandal' saga, the Spaghetti Western, the giallo horror, the Polizieschi crime film. or the commedia all'italiana.
Walt Disney also liked pirates and veteran actor Sessue Hayakawa menaces John Mills and Dorothy Malone's castaway brood in Ken Annakin's lively adaptation of Johann David Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (1960), which is also available from Cinema Paradiso as one of three animations, the pick of which is Leif Gram's Swiss Family Robinson (1973).
Hammer was renowned for its horror movies. But it also dabbled in cutthroat adventures like John Gilling's The Pirates of Blood River (1962) and Don Sharp's The Devil Ship Pirates (1964), which respectively saw Christopher Lee having a fine old time playing pitiless pirate captains LaRoche and Robeles. By contrast, Captain Chavez (Anthony Quinn) and first mate Zac (James Coburn) indulge in a little accidental abduction in Alexander Mackendrick's spirited version of Richard Hughes's novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (1965).
Having dressed up to sing 'The Pirate Song' on the 1975 Christmas edition of Eric Idle's Rutland Weekend Television (now there's a series that should be on disc, someone!), former Beatle George Harrison mortgaged his office building to allow another member of the Monty Python troupe, Terry Gilliam, to make Time Bandits (1981). This not only includes six dwarf pirates, but also a flying visit to the RMS Titanic. Gilliam must also have a thing about pirates, as his 1983 short, The Crimson Permanent Assurance, follows the employees of a London financial firm after they turn their office building into a pirate ship in order to rebel against the Very Big Corporation of America.
This delightfully dotty odyssey can be found on the DVD for Terry Jones's Monty Python's Meaning of Life (both 1983). The same year also saw yet another Python, Graham Chapman, pop up in the title role of Mel Damski's Yellowbeard, which sees the eponymous pirate jailed for 20 years for tax evasion. Eric Idle and John Cleese can also be found in an ensemble that also includes Peter Cook, Marty Feldman and Spike Milligan.
Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, adapted his own bestseller for Michael Ritchie's The Island (1980), which sees journalist Michael Caine stumble across the pirates who have spent centuries attacking shipping in the Bermuda Triangle. But it's the Savoy Opera of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan - whose partnership has been celebrated in Sidney Gilliat's The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953) and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy (1999) - that provides the inspiration for both Ken Annakin's The Pirate Movie (1982) and Wilford Leach's The Pirates of Penzance (1983).
The lost treasure of 17th-century pirate One-Eyed Willy sends five kids from the Goon Docks area of Astoria, Oregon on the adventure of a lifetime in Richard Donner's The Goonies (1985), which is available from Cinema Paradiso in high-quality DVD, Blu-ray and 4K. The first two options are also on offer for Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), whose story begins with a Florin farmhand out in the world to seek his fortune falling foul of Dread Pirate Roberts.
Sadly, we can't offer Walter Matthau hamming up a treat in Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986). But atonement comes in the form of Geena Davis's Morgan Adams in Renny Harlin's Cutthroat Island (1995), as she seeks the pieces of a treasure map coveted by her pirate uncle, Dawg Brown (Frank Langella). There's also Enola (Tina Marjorino) who has a map to Dryland tattoo'd on her back, according to The Deacon (Dennis Hopper), the leader of the pirates known as The Smokers in Kevin Reynolds's Waterworld (1995). And, given the quality of his dastardliness in Muppet Treasure Island, who can resist a little more Tim Curry, as Jezebel Jack is projected into the future in John R. Cherry III's Pirates of the Plain (1999)
Few actors underplay in pirate garb. But no one will dispute that Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow is the most laid back cinematic buccaneer, as he has demonstrated to irresistible effect in combining characteristics from Pepé Le Pew and Rolling Stone Keith Richards in essaying one of the nine pirate lords of the Bretheren Court in Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017).
If you fancy a little animated pirateering, why not seek out the message bobbing in a bottle beside Captain Red's ship in Scott Jeralds's Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers (2006) Or perhaps you fancy something more left-field like Peter Lord's The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists! (2012), an Oscar-nominated romp that draws on Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! books for its chronicle of the bid by the incompetent Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) to win the Pirate of the Year Competition? And who can go wrong with the eight episodes crafted by John Ryan on Captain Pugwash: Sticky Moments (2005), as the skipper of 'The Black Pig' locks cutlasses with Cut Throat Jake.
Small screen devotees will also be keen to get their hands on the box sets of the monochrome gem, Sir Francis Drake (1962), with Terence Morgan taking on the Spaniards from the deck of 'The Golden Hind' for the glory of Good Queen Bess (Jean Kent). Those who prefer living colour might want to catch Black Sails (2014-17), a prequel to Treasure Island that is set in the Golden Age of Piracy and centres on the exploits of Captain James Flint (Toby Stephens).
Way back when, in low-budget thrillers like R.G. Springsteen's Cross Channel (1955) and Anthony Squire's Doublecross (1956), boats were commandeered by villains from mostly honest skippers like Wayne Morris and Donald Houston. A shady Frank Sinatra took things up a notch when he planned to rob HMS Queen Mary in Jack Donohoe's Assault on a Queen (1966). But it was John 'Bud' Cardos's Act of Piracy (1988) that launched the modern nautical hijack movie, as mercenary Jack Wilcox (Ray Sharkey) boards 'Barracuda', the 80ft yacht belonging to close-to-the-edge Vietnam veteran, Ted Andrews (Gary Busey).
Busey goes from hero to heel in Andrew Davis's Under Siege (1992), as sociopath Commander Peter Krill conspires to help renegade CIA agent William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones) seize the battleship, USS Missouri. However, the hijackers didn't take into account the resistance of ex-Navy SEAL-turned-cook, Casey Ryback (Steven Segal). He would find the odds equally stacked against him on the Grand Continental train in Geoff Murphy's Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995). But Segal set sail again after his band of mercenaries commandeer a submarine in order to confound the terrorist cell based in Uruguay in Anthony Hickcox's Submerged (2005).
The luxury cruise liner 'Fuji Maru' is boarded by terrorists intent on holding its wealthy passengers for ransom in Wong Jing's City Hunter (1993). However, they haven't factored in the nowtiness of Hong Kong detectives Jackie Chan and Joey Wong in this lively adaptation of a Tsukasa Hojo manga series. On balance, however, small boat skipper Treat Williams and plucky passenger Famke Janssen have much dangerous foes to contend with in Stephen Sommers's Deep Rising (1998), as voracious serpents attack the luxury liner, 'The Argonautica', on its maiden voyage across the South China Sea.
The threat to the Greek linker 'Argo Thetis' comes from a submarine in Jean Pellerin's The Cruel Deep, as fanatical art collector Craig Wasson tries to ram the vessel transporting a priceless antiquarian artefact. Hijackings have also added to the tension in such comic-book blockbusters as Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), Anthony Russo's Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and James Wan's Aquaman (2018). But two pictures about modern piracy stand above the rest.
Abdihakin Asgar and his fellow Somali pirates keep cook Mikkel Hartman (Pilou Asbæk) and engineer Jan Sørensen (Roland Møller) on tenterhooks after they seize the Danish cargo vessel, MV Rozen in Tobias Lindholm's A Hijacking (2012), while CEO Peter C. Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) brings in hostage negotiator Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter) to resolve the crisis without costing him a king's ransom. Skipper Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) faces a similar situation in Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips (2013), as Somali Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) gains control of the MV Maersk Alabama during its voyage from Oman to Kenya. Based on actual events, this compelling confrontation between the captives, the pirates and the crew of the USS Bainbridge received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for first-timer Barkhad Abdi, the Somalia-born refugee who also won a BAFTA after beating over 700 other hopefuls at an open audition.
