Pirate Party on Catalina Isle (MGM, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 4) at 9:15 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies to watch a 1936 MGM short called Pirate Party on Catalina Isle and the 1938 feature The Adventures of Marco Polo. Pirate Party on Catalina Isle – which I briefly had confused with La Fiesta de Santa Barbara, the stunning three-strip Technicolor short which featured Judy Garland’s MGM debut as one of the Garland Sisters, nèe the Gumm Sisters (as all Garlandmaniacs probably know by now, the name she was born with was “Frances Gumm”) – was a three-strip Technicolor two-reeler shot in and around Catalina Island and featuring glimpses of real-life movie stars, including Cary Grant and Randolph Scott sitting at an outdoor restaurant table and looking for all the world like a Gay couple. (Grant and Scott lived together for many years and there were always the inevitable rumors about the true nature of their relationship; the modern consensus seems to be that they were a Gay couple but they had an arrangement by which either could break off the relationship temporarily if they wanted to date a woman.) The plot, such as it is, features Chester Morris as a pirate captain whose ship, the Cabrillo, invades Catalina and hijacks the tourist vessel Avalon (and yes, the movie’s theme is the old “Avalon” song by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer based on the orchestral introduction to the aria “È lucevan le stelle” from Puccini’s Tosca, enough so that Puccini’s publisher Ricordi sued the American songwriters for plagiarism and won). The Cabrillo is crewed by a number of hot-pantsed chorus girls who do a lot of dancing on stage to the music of Charles “Buddy” Rogers and his orchestra. Rogers was best known for being Mary Pickford’s third (and longest-lasting) husband and for a stage routine in which he’d pick up several instruments in succession and play O.K. solos on each one. (In John Hammond’s autobiography he recalls seeing Gene Krupa playing with the Rogers band and getting successively more bored as Rogers went through his routine, with one instrument after another. Hammond was there to offer Krupa the job of playing drums for Benny Goodman, and Krupa was overjoyed at the opportunity.)

Naturally, since this film takes place on an island and a lot of boats are involved, there were plenty of opportunities for the filmmakers (the producer was Louis Lewyn, the director was Gene Burdette, and the cinematographer was Ray Rennahan, with the omnipresent Natalie Kalmus there as color supervisor) to show the one color three-strip could do justice to that the earlier two-strip process couldn’t: blue. There was also a quite good dance number by Johnny Downs (the athletic tap dancer Paramount briefly tried to turn into their answer to Fred Astaire) and Betty Burgess (who’s wearing a quite daring outfit for a 1936 film: a vest with straps that go across the front and reveal a surprising amount of cleavage for the time); a nice scene in which various chorines (including an anonymous Lynn Bari) parade across the camera in small sailboats; and nice shots of real celebrities of the time, including Grant, Scott, Robert Armstrong, Errol Flynn (with his first wife, Lili Damita, whose star fell as his rose: A Star Is Born with the genders reversed), Lee Tracy, a surprisingly restrained Mickey Rooney, and Marion Davies, who’s introduced as the “Queen of Hollywood” based on a fan-magazine contest she’d won … in 1922. There’s also a quite nice cameo by banjo star Eddie Peabody (who’s shown as a fisherman pulling a toy banjo from the sea and throwing it back because it’s too small) introducing a banjo ensemble (with one guitar thrown in) led by someone named Rue Tyler that reminded me of the banjo section in James Reese Europe’s pre-World War I band. And there’s a nice bit by Leon Errol as (what else?) a drunk.