Judy Garland @ 100: "The Pirate"
Monday, June 6, 2022 at 5:10PM Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Baby Clyde on her most infamous picture...
Get Judy and Gene at the peak of their movie star appeal, allow Vincente Minnelli to go as ‘Vincente Minelli’ as he pleases, hire the world’s greatest songwriter to provide the tunes, script by the same team behind The Thin Man and It’s A Wonderful Life, sets by Cedric Gibbons, costumes by Irene, all presided over by the fabled Freed Unit. What could possibly go wrong?
The Pirate, that’s what. A great big glorious, Technicolor mess. And I love it...
The Minnellis (VIncente, Liza, and Judy) on the set of "The Pirate"
The infamous 1948 MGM musical spectacular has all the pedigree that money could buy and yet almost nothing works. It all looks so promising on paper. Adapted from a hit Broadway play starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it tells the tale of an orphan girl (Judy Garland), betrothed to the mayor (Walter Slezak) of her town. She dreams of an adventurous life with the notorious pirate Mack "the Black" Macoco. When a travelling theatre troupe comes to town she falls in love with their leader (Gene Kelly), mistaking him for the legendary pirate king, much to the ire of her fiancé who has some secrets of his own.
Suggested to MGM’s premier musical producer Arthur Freed as a good basis for a musical, it was deemed perfect for the studios biggest singing star Judy Garland, who was eager to move away from the wholesome all-American parts for which she was known. it took years for an acceptable script to finally be approved, which didn’t happen until the married writing team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich came on board. The obvious choice to direct was Garland’s husband, Vincente Minelli who’d helmed her biggest hit and was new father to the recently born Liza. Good friend and former co-star Gene Kelly was tapped for the male lead and renowned composer Cole Porter brought in to provide the songs.
It was a troubled shoot from the start with problems over sets, scripts, musical arrangements, and Judy. After a decade of drug assisted overwork and probable postnatal depression following the birth of Liza, Garland suffered her first nervous breakdown during filming. She was eventually hospitalised for a period.
And yet the film faults do not lie with its movie stars. The multimillion dollar budget is clearly on display but the one thing that it’s impossible to buy is taste and this film has none. This is clear from the opening scene.
Set on an unnamed and ill-defined Caribbean Island during and unclear and ill-defined period of history, the film starts with Judy playing a young Spanish (?) girl Manuela, who is regaling a group of slumbering friends about her yearning for adventure. She’s dressed in a yellow polka dotted, mutton sleeved Ra dress and sporting a tartan Tam O’Shanter and an apron. Her girl gang made up of sophisticated looking white women are all tarted up in Tudor style dresses and elaborate turbans. Every single one of them looks ridiculous. Then enters the very English Gladys Cooper wearing sequinned widow’s weeds, a top hat and carrying a cane. Confusingly her husband is alive and well. This style sets the scene for the rest of the film. With no one interested in reigning it in, the sets compete with the costumes which compete with the hairstyles and the makeup. Part Arabian Knight, part Three Musketeers, part Spanish Armada. Minnelli is not known for his subtlety but here seemingly given a free hand to do whatever he pleased (And going ½ million over budget), what should be ravishing is simply over the top and garish. As a surreal fantasy it could be argued that none of it needs to make sense, but it definitely shouldn’t be this ugly.
The one person who it can safely be said did not go over the top is Cole Porter. The sublime writer of such classics and "Night and Day" and "You’re The Top" completely phones this one in. The film is barely a musical. There are five songs in total. None of them amongst his best. The opening number consists of Kelly serenading the local ladies by explaining that he can’t be bothered to learn any of their names so will call them all Niña.
Porter, surely sat around his pool, Martini in one, hand rhyming dictionary in the other, came up with this corker...
Cole Porter... hard at work?
Niña, till the moment you hit my heart
Niña, I was doin' just fine
But since I've seen yuh
Niña, Niña, Niña
I'll be having neurasthenia
Till I make yuh mine!
A worthless check, a total wreck, a flop – Indeed!!!
Judy has two dreary ballads and a wildly repetitive, pacier number where she explains her obsession which the pirate Mack The Black whilst hypnotised or something. In three and half minutes the title is sung a total of 17 times.
The plot is questionable to say the least, involving arranged marriages, sexual assault and gaslighting, alongside numerous inconsistencies and improbabilities. This, of course, is par for the course in a 40’s musical but The Pirate manages to be both simplistic and confusing.
You'd never guess Judy was having trouble given her excellent lively performance
And yet somehow, it's charming. This almost entirely down to the irresistible star power of its two leading actors. This is a great role for Garland showing a previously unseen feistiness and flair for quickfire repartee. There is no hint of any troubles she may have been experiencing at the time. She’s in fine voice even if the songs don’t deserve her and dances up a storm in her big production number. In fact, I'd call this one of her all-time best performances.
It’s a shame then in the context of the centenary that we’re here to celebrate that this is the Gene Kelly Show. It’s very seldom that Judy Garland gets upstaged but here there can be no doubt this is the case. Virtually everything truly memorable (In a good way) about this film is due to Gene Kelly doing his best swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Senior impression. The character may be a complete dick, but his exuberance and obvious enjoyment is contagious.
He invents pole dancing, makes Judo look sexy, sword fights with a donkey, and wears hot pants whilst performing a ‘Pirate Ballet’ which proves that his thighs are one of the great wonders of Golden Age cinema. They fight off an entire ship of marauding buccaneers by themselves. Gene Kelly’s thighs in The Pirate deserve their own billing.
Gene Kelly's Thighs in "The Pirate"
They also contribute mightily towards the other highlight and Porter’s single positive offering to the enterprise; the barnstorming "Be A Clown" number where he is joined by the sensational Nicholas Brothers in a startling display of dance and athleticism that leaves you breathless just watching. Even this triumph is marred by the hideous Pagliacci costumes each dancer is lumbered with. It will surprise no one that this highlight was edited out for Southern audiences, so as not to offend racists upset that two Black men were paired on an equal footing with a white one. Ironically, Gene’s brownface makeup means they are all more or less the same colour. The song was straight up stolen for Donald O’Connor’s "Make Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain. Cole Porter didn’t sue, presumably happy with the $100,000 he’d pocketed for his previous subpar work.
The Pirate wasn’t a flop per se. In fact it did decent business but because of its extravagant budget failed to make a profit (a similar fate befell The Wizard of Oz albeit only in its initial release). Critics thought it too artistic for a mass audience. It’s been reappraised in recent years but is still something of a curio in Judy’s filmography. Later in the year she reverted to a more traditional musical setting for the smash hit and perennial fave Easter Parade. I much prefer The Pirate, a must see for any fans of Judy Garland, directorial blank cheques, and Gene Kelly’s thighs.
More for Judy's Centennial here at The Film Experience
• The Wizard of Oz (1939)
• Babes on Broadway (1942)
• Meet Me in St Louis (1944)
• The Clock (1945)
• The Pirate (1948)
• Easter Parade (1948)
Tomorrow: Summer Stock (1950)
Reader Comments (4)
Oh my god, I am a fan of Judy Garland, directorial blank cheques, AND Gene Kelly's thighs! HOLY SHIT I CAN'T WAIT.
Oh my god, I am a fan of Judy Garland, directorial blank cheques, AND Gene Kelly's thighs! HOLY SHIT I CAN'T WAIT.
Wow! I need to re-see this. Those 2 dance numbers (Pirate, Clown) are amazing. The only dance that I recall from watching it a long while ago was Gene dancing along the roof edge of buildings (?).
I never realized until now that the dance scene with explosions in The Bandwagon was a satire of the Pirate Ballet.
This is a rococo mess that's true but it does have its charms. If it did nothing else but give us Gene in that remarkable pirate costume its work would be done. You're right the songs are not the best and the clothes and settings swamp just about everyone but it's all ultimately just a piece of escapist whimsy.
Judy gets to show off her comic skill but she's almost painfully thin and she seems very jittery, her hands are in almost constant motion.
Not a bad film but it's Gene and that costume that lingers afterwards.