By 1952, Hollywood’s serious pirate picture, the kind Errol Flynn had spent the previous decade perfecting, was starting to look expensive and a little tired next to the rise of television. Warner Bros.’ The Crimson Pirate, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, answered by not taking the genre seriously at all. Contemporary critics noticed immediately: reviewing it for The New York Times, A.H. Weiler called it “a slam-bang, action-filled Technicolored lampoon,” closer in spirit to the swashbucklers of silent-era star Douglas Fairbanks than to Flynn’s romantic heroics.
A Circus Act, Not a Matinee Idol
The joke worked because Lancaster was not primarily an actor playing an acrobat. Before Hollywood, he and his childhood friend Nick Cravat had been a professional acrobatic team, performing in circuses and vaudeville houses. The Crimson Pirate was only their second film together, and it leaned hard on what the two of them could actually do: Lancaster, as the pirate captain Vallo, swings between masts, vaults over rigging, and addresses the camera directly in the opening scene, breaking the genre’s usual fourth wall to warn the audience, half in jest, that they are entering “a pirate world” where they should ask no questions. Cravat played Ojo, Vallo’s mute acrobat sidekick, a role built directly around his own real circus background.
Played for Laughs, Not for Honor
Where a Flynn picture asked audiences to take its sword fights and its hero’s code of honor at face value, The Crimson Pirate treats its own plot as a pretext for spectacle. Vallo’s rescue of a captured rebel leader involves a hot air balloon and a working submarine, two inventions with no plausible place in a story nominally set in the late 18th-century Caribbean, and the film does not pretend otherwise. One of Vallo’s own crewmen complains at one point that the gang’s dealings have become too “legitimate,” a small joke at the expense of the whole swashbuckler tradition of pirates with hearts of gold. The film was shot largely at Teddington Studios in England with location work in Italy, and Warner Bros.’ own production notes describe two full-sized ships built at Villefranche, France, and crowds of up to 800 extras for its rebellion scenes, real resources spent in service of a story that never asks to be believed.
A Deliberate Swerve, Not an Accident
The comic tone was a choice, not a byproduct of a troubled production. Lancaster, known up to that point mostly for dramatic roles in black-and-white pictures, was taking a visible risk by headlining a Technicolor adventure-comedy, and he and producer Harold Hecht had organized their own production company, Norma Productions, named for Lancaster’s wife, specifically to make films like it. The original screenplay by Waldo Salt was rejected by nervous producers over Salt’s political history during the Hollywood blacklist era, though some of its themes survived into the final film. None of that production backstory was about accident; the comedic, acrobatic pirate was the point from the start.
What It Changed
Within a few years, Hollywood pirate films would more often be comedies, spoofs, or hybrid adventures than straight-faced romances, and Lancaster himself tried for decades afterward to get a sequel made, hiring novelist George MacDonald Fraser and later Jon Cleary to write scripts that were never filmed. The Crimson Pirate did not invent the idea of pirates as figures of fun; chapbooks and stage burlesques had done that long before film existed. What it did was prove, with real box-office success, that a major studio could spend real money on a pirate picture and let the whole thing be a joke rather than a romance, performed by a man who could actually do the stunts himself.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s entry on The Crimson Pirate; the American Film Institute Catalog; ReMIND Magazine’s retrospective on Burt Lancaster and the film.
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