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A History of Pirate Movies

A History of Pirate Movies
© Mania/Robert Trate

 With the astonishing success of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, it’s hard to believe that pirates were once considered box office poison. For decades, cinemas remained free of peg legs, buried treasure and even the barest hints of “arrs” or “thar bes.”  Johnny Depp’s accomplishment with Jack Sparrow is extraordinary in part because it single-handedly resurrected a genre that lay at death’s door since the 1950s. Considering the character’s outsized personality, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. A short look at the history of pirate movies can tell us why.

Silent Films

The early days of filmmaking contained a lot of experimentation, but filmmakers soon realized the medium’s capacity for action and spectacle. Pirates were a natural fit:  romantic and dashing, with an air of the scoundrel to them, which appealed to America’s fascination with the outlaw. The genre found an early champion in Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whose raw charisma and physical skills made him one of cinema’s earliest stars. He cemented his reputation with films like The Black Pirate and The Three Musketeers, quickly establishing buckled swashes as one of Hollywood’s genres of choice.  Though he ruled the silent era, however, Fairbanks ultimately couldn’t make the transition to talking pictures and quit movies a few years later. Fortunately, a ready successor was waiting in the wings.

Enter Flynn

Errol Flynn picked up almost exactly where Fairbanks left off, sporting the same square jaw and larger-than-life onscreen personality. His breakout hit, Captain Blood, came one year after Fairbanks’ curtain call, The Private Life of Don Juan, and signaled an official passing of the torch. Flynn’s pirate films made for huge box office, and the grand spectacle they entailed worked very well amid the musicals and epics of the 1930s. People were looking for an escape during the Great Depression, and signing on with Flynn’s crew looked like a great way to do it. Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk quickly became genre classics, inspiring similar fare such as Captain Kidd with Charles Laughton, The Buccaneer with Fedric March and The Black Swan with Tyrone Power. Flynn’s reign was undisputed, however, and continued into the 1950s with titles like Against All Flags and Crossed Swords.

The Slow Fade

As popular as such fare was, however, decline inevitably set in. Part of the blame lies with typical Hollywood overkill. Pirate movies of the era relied too much on formula, which was hackneyed long before the advent of movies and led to a considerable amount of narrative flab. Satire and parody began to take the steam out of the genre too, as films like The Princess and the Pirate with Bob Hope upstaged its more straightforward peers. Bugs Bunny and the Three Stooges got their licks in during the same period, and while Disney’s hit Peter Pan provided a little respite, it also further cemented the notion that pirate stories couldn’t appeal to adults.

Then there was the issue of Flynn, an offscreen hellraiser and raging alcoholic who became increasingly difficult to work with. His death of a heart attack at the age of fifty revealed a glaring weakness in the formula of pirate pictures: they often relied on personality to carry the day. Flynn, Fairbanks and their ilk could overcome the clichés with their charisma and passion, but without such a flag-bearer, the stories themselves couldn’t keep up.  

It may have been the Hays Code, however, that ultimately sank the notion of pirate films. Hollywood’s system of self-censorship dictated that bad guys had to ultimately pay for their crimes, and that good must always triumph. That eliminated a great deal of the moral gray area in which pirates thrived; after all, they’re supposed to steal gold, sink ships and make their victims walk the plank. But with filmmakers minding their Ps and Qs about what they could and could not show, capturing that elusive Boys’ Own joy became all but impossible. By the time Kennedy was elected, pirate movies had become bygone relics of an earlier era.

The Dark Days

A few efforts were made to keep the genre alive throughout the next forty years, mostly with the occasional revamp of Treasure Island and contemporary updates like The Island and The Goonies. Disney actually played a fairly strong hand during this period, offering up such fare as Blackbeard’s Ghost and The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (which played on The Wonderful World of Color and – like the best of its predecessors – benefitted from a compelling central performance from Patrick McGoohan). But Disney had problems of its own during this period – Walt died, leaving the company rudderless until its renaissance in the late 1980s – and its brand name still saddled the genre with “strictly for the kiddies” status.

Beyond them, pirates only emerged in parodies or satires… which didn’t do much to convince anyone that a straightforward pirate film would fly. Graham Chapman took a bite out of the genre with Yellowbeard and Kevin Kline headed up a well-regarded adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance. The Princess Bride established a cult following with its not-quite-a-parody (though admittedly it focused more on fairy tales than pirates), and the Muppets delivered a clever riff on Treasure Island in the mid-1990s. None of them generated much interest, however (the success of The Princess Bride came on home video), even as parodies.

Their struggles paled in comparison to the unmitigated disasters that befell serious pirate tales in the 1980s and 1990s. Roman Polanski tried his hand with 1986’s Pirates – starring Walter Matthau of all people – which cost $40 million to make and made back less than $2 million. Steven Spielberg followed him a few years later with Hook, an update of Peter Pan that turned the boy who wouldn’t grow up into a creepy forty-something lawyer.  It did reasonably well at the box office, thanks to the star power in front of and behind the camera, but has subsequently aged like a wet turd. Disney’s animated feature Treasure Planet earned considerably more critical accolades in 2002, but failed to catch fire at the box office: cementing the sense in Hollywood that no one wanted to see pirate pictures.

And then there was Cutthroat Island, an attempt to capitalize on Geena Davis’s then-high-octane power by casting her as a pirate queen. The Guinness Book of World Records list as it as the biggest movie bomb of all time, with a budget of $115 million of which it recouped a little more than $10 million. The debacle sank Carolco Pictures, and ended Davis’s reign as an above-the-credits star.

In addition to their other issues, all four of those films suffered from what might called an excess of production values: elaborate costumes, overly gilded set decoration and sometimes the construction of entire ships in pursuit of their vision. The resulted bombast weighed down the stories and required considerable audience goodwill to make their nut back. None of them found it, leaving red ink and redder faces in their wake. So might it have remained in perpetuity had a little bird not drastically changed the equation.

Or, more precisely, a little Sparrow.

The Unlikeliest Icon

Supposedly, Johnny Depp didn’t reveal his take on Jack Sparrow until the first read-through for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The character was originally supposed to be the comic relief, with Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner serving as the true hero of the story. That changed with Depp’s lilting Keith Richards impersonation: stealing the show out from under everyone’s noses.  His status as ostensible support gave the filmmakers some cover in case audiences didn’t buy it, and the film’s basis in a popular Disneyland ride hedged the bets a little further.  Even so, there was a lot of second-guessing in the front office; Disney CEO Michael Eisner actually thought that Depp was ruining the film.

As it turns out, he likely saved it. We’ll never know what Pirates would have done had Depp played it safe, but I’d bet real money they wouldn’t have revamped the Disneyland ride to include him. Jack Sparrow turned the film into a monstrous hit, eclipsing the other characters (though Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa continues to make him fight for every inch) and rocketing him to the status of cinematic icon. The originality on display, coupled with Depp’s immense charisma, finally recaptured the spirit that Flynn and Fairbanks embodied all those years ago. And with the Hays Code out of the way, he could remain an amoral rascal: endearing, but untrustworthy and never entirely clear about whose side he was on. He turned the Pirates franchise into one of the most profitable and enduring of the 21^st century.

The Future

And yet, his success hasn’t encouraged the development of any pirate films beyond his own.  So swiftly did he rise and so great is his shadow – even during the worst moments of the less-than-stellar Pirates sequels – that the notion of putting some competing swashbuckler onscreen seems almost sacrilegious. Take away the four Pirates movies and Hollywood has produced nothing in the genre save a little-seen version of Peter Pan in 2003. No one looks to challenge that hegemony any time soon. Sparrow didn’t so much revitalize the genre as swallow it whole, and there’s no question who now owns it lock, stock and barrel. His status in the cinematic landscape is unquestioned, and you have to go back fifty years to find any other pirate movies to even begin competing with his. But when Depp finally hangs up that scraggly goatee, one has to wonder whether anyone will follow… or whether the genre he now defines will sail off into the sunset with him.