Pluskylang Great Film overall

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

w_think_pink12 hello. i just watched this movie earlier today for the 14th time in 3 days. i am a history teacher that has wayyyyy too much time on my hands. i need a life. i found the movie containing a striking resemblance to broke back mountain. i also found that i look a lot like jean Lafitte if he were white. also, my favorite line in the entire movie was from Mr. Petey--"this baby can shoot a chipmunk's eye from 300 yards!!" oh, and my favorite scene in the movie was when the British were coming in, and the one drummer who was so devoted to his work, and he drummed till the death, as if that drum would end the war altogether....but it wouldn't. well, thats all i would like to say about this movie. OH, one more thing..bonnie brown is an insane physco bipolar mood swinging BEEYOTCH. that is all.

helix2 Taken in the context of the time it was made, I found this a worthwhile movie. While the details may be 'dramatized', the overall history was a nice primer. In addition, I found spotting actors I knew a real pleasure. Who would imagine Ben Cartwright as a dastardly cad? I'll leave the rest of the star spotting to you. As to the secondary casting, this movie (as one would expect from a movie made in the late thirties) has many an enjoyable character actor, but top kudos' to Andrew Jackson's right hand man Peavey. The perfect touch of comedy. Well shot, with beautiful ships, and competent acting throughout out, I recommend this for anyone with a taste for the slightly camp, or an eye for a double-period piece, set at the dawn of America, and made in a period when great names, and top notch character actors, were a real pleasure to enjoy.

bkoganbing This was the last film that Cecil B. DeMille had anything to do with. He originally planned to direct this remake of his 1938 film The Buccaneer, but ill health prevented him from doing so. So apart from a brief prologue and a production credit saying the film was presented by him, DeMille left the producing to good friend Henry Wilcoxon and the directing to his son-in-law Anthony Quinn.This version has the added attractions of great technicolor photography and Paramount's new wide screen Vistavision process. I saw in the theater when I was 11 years old and it is quite an eyeful. Yul Brynner makes as dashing a Jean Lafitte as Fredric March did in the 1938 film. Charlton Heston repeats his Andrew Jackson role from The President's Lady which he made earlier in the Fifties. Heston though was not satisfied because he realized that he was made up to look like the Andrew Jackson we know from the double sawbuck when he was in the White House. At New Orleans he was a bit younger. But like Moses and the circus boss from The Greatest Show on Earth, you follow him to Hades and back.The best role in the film for me though was Charles Boyer as Dominic You, Lafitte's cynical second in command. A former artillery officer in Napoleon's army, he left there and took up piracy out of disillusionment with how the French Revolution turned out. Boyer has some good and wise lines in his counsel to Lafitte even if he's drunk while delivering some of them.After The Ten Commandments, DeMille had plans to make a film about Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts and was in negotiations with David Niven to play Baden-Powell. He got sidetracked with this film and then he died in early 1959. Of course the Boy Scout film never did get made by anyone.Although DeMille eliminated one element of the plot from 1938 the traitorous Senator played by Ian Keith the rest of the film is pretty much the same. This is hardly the real story of Jean Lafitte. When not on the action, the film does drag in spots. Maybe that's why Anthony Quinn never directed another film.This version of The Buccaneer had one additional thing going for it. Country singer Johnny Horton had a mega hit record of The Battle of New Orleans at the same time the film came out. Both must have fed off each other in profit making. I well remember you couldn't go a day without hearing The Battle of New Orleans playing some time on the radio.It's not history, it's DeMille at his gaudiest.

dbdumonteil The most surprising in this average adventure yarn is the actors:Yul Brynner is a not bald -and not bad- buccaneer,Charlton Heston seems to be a fifty-something general(he was hardly 35 at the time) .Claire Bloom and Charles Boyer are cast against type:the former ,a frail ,sensitive and feminine woman becomes a tomboy pirate ,dangerously wielding the knife,the latter ,a refined aristocrat,is turned into some kind of French renegade after Napoleon's downfall.Anthony Quinn's direction (Yul Bryner was to be the director actually) is rather static ,in spite of Cecil B. De Mille's supervision.Probably exhausted by his mammoth film "ten commandments" -and sadly to die in 1959-,his efforts do not amount to much.The screenplay does not show much originality;the comic relief,Peavey,is not funny at all.Something really weird:Inger Stevens' sister dies in the pillage of "the Corinthian" at the beginning of the movie.Then we forget all about her ,never a character alludes to her,neither her sister,nor her father during an hour and a half;the same goes for the ship itself anyway;then in the last minutes one worries about their fate,probably to justify the unhappy end.