Captain Kidd's Treasure (MGM, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Next up on Turner Classic Movies’ scheduled for Sunday, September 15 was a 10-minute MGM “Historical Mystery” short called Captain Kidd’s Treasure, based on the real-life exploits of Captain William Kidd, which depending on what source you read about him was either a despicable pirate or an agent of the British government sent to catch pirates and recover their loot. He was born around 1654 in Dundee, Scotland (sources differ on his birthplace but Dundee was the one Kidd himself acknowledged) and actually settled in New York City (when it and North America in general were still British colonies), from which he operated as a privateer: a free-lance captain who hired out himself, his crew and his ship. The British government credentialed him to protect its interests in North America and the West Indies. In 1695 Kidd received a letter of marque from the British government allowing him to attack ships from countries then at war with Britain, and for the next three years he failed to find much in the way of treasure and had to deal with threats of mutiny from his crew. In 1698 he captured an Armenian or Indian ship (sources differ) called the Quedagh Merchant that had a British captain, and seized its treasure, either to return it to Britain or keep it for himself. The Earl of Bellomont, colonial governor of New York, Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, who had given Kidd his privateers’ commission in 1695, turned against him after the Quedagh Merchant was captured. When Kidd returned to Boston after that, Bellomont had him arrested and he was ultimately executed on May 23, 1701. But, at least according to this film, Kidd sent a letter to British King George I offering to reveal the secret location of the treasure he had buried on an island if the king spared his life. His offer went unheeded and he was put to death anyway, but that sparked numerous efforts by explorers and salvagers over the next three centuries to find and recover it.

Captain Kidd’s Treasure was directed by Leslie Fenton from a script by Herman Boxer and dealt with an attempt by yet another expeditionary crew to get financial backing for a search for Kidd’s missing treasure. Most attempts to find it had centered around the New World because that’s where Kidd was known to have operated, but the explorers in this movie have become convinced that Kidd actually buried his treasure on an island off the coast of Madagascar in southern Africa and intend to launch their search there. Captain Kidd’s Treasure benefits from MGM’s extensive infrastructure, including extensive sets of 1700’s sailing ships I suspect were built for the 1935 Academy Award winner Mutiny on the Bounty, and also from a quirky script that shows Kidd (Stanley Andrews) personally shooting and killing the two crew members who buried the treasure for him so no one else would know where it was. Boxer’s script also toys with the idea of Kidd’s divided loyalties; in one set of scenes he’s shown as an out-and-out pirate, while in another he’s shown as a loyal agent of the British government dealing with a mutinous crew that wants to kill him so they can make off with the treasure themselves. Though the parts of the movie dramatizing Kidd’s life are quite a bit more interesting than the modern-day sequences in which the would-be backers initially sound enthusiastic about underwriting the quest until a skeptic among them talks the others out of it, Captain Kidd’s Treasure was a fun little movie, and though he doesn’t bring the overripe villainy Charles Laughton did to the part in two films (a relatively straightforward Captain Kidd in 1945 and a spoof, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, in 1952).