The Pirate remains a great favorite of mine, the sophisticated musical Judy Garland had desperately wanted to make for so long and the perfect Garland movie for those people Aljean Harmetz interviewed outside the Castro Theatre in San Francisco who said they loved everything about The Wizard of Oz except the “There’s no place like home!” theme. In The Pirate, Judy plays a young woman who’s desperate to get out of the Caribbean village of Calvados (while the Spanish were still in charge in the early 19th century) and is in love with her fantasy image of Macoco the Pirate, little knowing that the fat old town mayor her aunt (Gladys Cooper) wants her to marry (Walter Slezak) is Macoco, retired but still with a price on his head. The love interest is supplied by Serafin (Gene Kelly), actor, director, hypnotist, acrobat and all-around dashing romantic figure, who impersonates Macoco the Pirate (after finding out who Macoco really is!) to try to seduce Our Heroine. Judy was in particularly parlous shape when she was filming The Pirate — after a development process that began as early as 1943, shooting in fact started in 1946, a rough cut was made and shelved in 1947 and she actually made a whole other film, Easter Parade, before retakes on The Pirate were made and the film actually got finished and released in 1948 — and I’ve always felt the reason she was particularly difficult to work with (and visibly strung out through much of the footage) is that The Pirate strongly mirrored her own plight at the time, with her own Calvados being MGM; the character of her aunt being her mother in real life; the Walter Slezak character being Minnelli (or perhaps Louis B. Mayer — Judy’s therapist actually insisted Minnelli give up the job of directing Easter Parade because in her mind he had become the personification of MGM and their work together was no longer bolstering their marriage, but threatening it); and the Gene Kelly character being the dream man she hoped would come along and take her away from all this, who finally (life imitating art) turned out to be her third husband, Sid Luft.
As it stands, The Pirate is a magnificent movie: vividly staged, photographed (Harry Stradling’s cinematography is an all-out exploitation of the vividness and garishness of three-strip Technicolor), directed (Minnelli’s penchant for artsiness and stylization exactly fit the story, for once), written (by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who also wrote the Thin Man films and It’s a Wonderful Life) and acted (notably by Garland, Kelly, Cooper, Slezak and George Zucco, playing the viceroy and getting one of his rare chances to act in a big-budget movie). It’s one of those rare musicals, like Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight 16 years earlier, that actually revels in the artificiality of the form and plays with it. It’s also a surprisingly dark movie, full of meditations on repression and fantasy, with a good deal more depth than your typical musical of the period — I can see why Minnelli, looking back on it 20 years later, said “the marketing of the film was bad”; the trailer, which Turner Classic Movies showed ahead of the film, made it seem like just another nice, emptily entertaining Judy Garland musical, sort of like The Harvey Girls with a Spanish accent, and gave no impression of what the movie really was like. — 3/8/98
•••••
TCM is doing pirate movies every
Friday this month and last night they concentrated for at least part of the
evening on pirate spoofs — and I got to re-watch most of the magnificent 1948
MGM release The Pirate, starring Judy Garland
and Gene Kelly in a vivid and brilliant musical directed by Garland’s
then-husband, Vincente Minnelli, from a script that had gone through various
incarnations. It was originally a German play called Der Seeraüber by Ludwig Fulda, about a sheltered rich girl on a
Caribbean island who has romantic dreams about a legendary pirate. S. N.
Behrman bought the American rights and wrote a whole new script around the
central premise, which was produced on Broadway in 1942 as a vehicle for the
husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne. MGM bought the
movie rights, intending to make it as Behrman had written it — a non-musical
comedy — with Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson in the leads. But the project
stalled, and so in 1946 MGM’s ace musical producer, Arthur Freed, asked Louis
B. Mayer for permission to develop it as a musical. Once he got the green
light, Freed assigned Judy Garland and Gene Kelly for the leads and hired Cole
Porter to do the songs. Porter had just come off a colossal Broadway flop,
Orson Welles’ production of Around the World in 80 Days, and reports were that he had lost his mojo. Freed believed
them and rejected Porter’s first four songs, but eventually got a score that
more or less satisfied him. He also spent over $140,000 of MGM’s money on a
fabulous wardrobe for Garland, designed by Tom Keogh and executed by Barbara
Karinska, who had worked on ballets with Picasso. Freed also assigned Anita
Loos and Joseph Than to adapt Behrman’s play into a script, then rejected their
work after he found that they’d flipped the central premise of the plot —
they’d changed the male lead from an actor impersonating a pirate to a pirate
impersonating an actor. So he brought a new screenwriting team, the married
couple Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (just coming off It’s a Wonderful
Life), to whip out a script that stuck to
Behrman’s (and Fulda’s) original concept.
He also assigned Minnelli to direct —
his third and last film with Garland, whose psychiatrist advised her that if
she wanted to keep her marriage together, she could no longer have him as her
boss at work as well because then he would come to personify MGM, which by then
she had come to regard as a gilded prison. Garland went to pieces almost as
soon as she started work on The Pirate,
making pre-recordings of Porter’s songs “Love of My Life” and “Mack the Black”
(the theme song of the famous pirate Macoco). According to Freed’s biographer
Hugh Fordin, Jr., “The songs needed the intense, exultant delivery for which
she was famous. That day it simply wasn’t there.” Freed had the Hacketts fatten
Kelly’s part in case Garland proved too weak to carry the film on her own, and
Kelly enjoyed that because he was interested in broadening his range; he wanted
to become an action hero in the mold of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (right after The
Pirate he’d remake one of Fairbanks’ most
famous roles, D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, and like Fairbanks he’d do all his own stunts) and saw in
the mountebank character of traveling actor Serafin a chance to break free of
his image as just another song-and-dance man. Throughout 1947 production on The
Pirate progressed sporadically as Garland
repeatedly broke down, unable to work, and when she did show up she embarrassed herself, her co-stars and her
crew — many of whom had known and worked with her since she was a child star —
by pathetically going up to each of them and demanding drugs. Eventually a
rough cut was previewed and met with audience hostility, so The Pirate was shelved and its stars were reassigned to other films —
Kelly to a comedy called In a Great Big Way and Garland to Easter Parade, on which, playing a far simpler character in a less
sophisticated film for a director she wasn’t married to, she had a much easier
time and worked efficiently and effectively. But with so much of the studio’s
money and prestige invested in The Pirate,
neither Mayer nor Freed was going to scrap it completely, so they brought back
Garland and Kelly for retakes and finally pieced together a version that was released
in 1948, whereupon it was a resounding commercial flop.
“The diary of The
Pirate does not present a pretty picture,
and the accusing finger points at Judy Garland,” Hugh Fordin, Jr. wrote. “But
Judy was not temperamental; she was not a spoiled star, as those with only a
superficial view propound with malice in their hearts. Judy was at war with
herself. She was very bright and very sensitive and constantly aware of her
shortcomings. Paired with her physical frailty, this produced extreme highs and
extreme lows. The well of nervous energy on which she fed was dry. It needed
replenishing.” After previous viewings of The Pirate I’ve formed the theory that the film’s plot was,
unwittingly, a strikingly exact parallel of Judy Garland’s actual life when she
made it. Her character, Manuela, lives as a virtual prisoner on the island of
Calvados, dominated by her aunt (Gladys Cooper) who’s raised her as a single
parent, as the real Judy was dominated by a mother she couldn’t stand and who’d
raised her as a single parent after the death of her dad when Judy was 12. The
aunt has promised Manuela in marriage to the town’s mayor, Don Pedro Vargas
(Walter Slezak), a repulsive middle-aged man she can’t stand but feels trapped
with — in my reading, Calvados represents MGM and Don Pedro is Judy’s ultimate
boss, Louis B. Mayer, who wasn’t interested in her physically but did have her trapped in a contract from which she longed to be
free. And Serafin represents a character whom Judy hadn’t encountered yet in
real life — the person who would break her out of MGM and free her to be a live
entertainer, free to work or not work depending on how much she wanted to and
how capable she felt instead of having her act turned into a nine-to-five day
job as the studio system did with everyone it signed — but who came later (or at least she thought he had until that relationship soured, too) in the person of her third
husband, producer and entrepreneur Sid Luft. What’s more, I think Judy Garland
was aware of the parallels between the plot of The Pirate and the psychodrama of her actual life when she made the
film, and it was that which sent her
off the rails and made her even more troublesome and difficult to work with
than she usually was by 1946-48. The edgy tension between The Pirate’s plot, as silly as it is in synopsis, and what Judy was
really going through bursts through on the screen; as Gary Carey described her
in his book on MGM, in The Pirate
“she’s visibly strung out, barely in control of her voice and movements, almost
anorexic in appearance.” (Charles caught on to the anorexia when he watched The
Pirate with me; he said the film made him
wish he could walk into the screen, take her aside and say, “Judy — eat
something!”)
And yet it becomes a great
film precisely because Judy’s real-life traumas add depth and power to her
characterization; Manuela becomes, not a cardboard character in a farce, but a
desperate woman, visibly trapped among
powerful people controlling her and trying to keep her trapped in a life she
can’t stand, and expressing her rage even at the man who can free her from it
all. As Fordin noted, the fight between Judy’s and Kelly’s characters that
precedes the song “You Can Do No Wrong” “was intended to be played in a
tongue-in-cheek rage, in the mood of a farce. Instead it became a frantic,
hysterical outburst, making Judy’s condition painfully apparent.” Frankly, I
think it works better that way; Judy’s rages are all too real — and so is
Kelly’s shock at seeing this woman who had helped sponsor his career (she had
insisted on him as the male lead in his first film, For Me and My Gal) turn so vicious and almost uncontrollable. The Pirate is a surprisingly dark film, transcending its farce plot
and touching on deep issues of class, social position, image (the film’s big
switcheroo is that the seemingly respectable mayor Manuela is being forced to
marry is in fact the pirate Macoco she’s been dreaming of) and the whole
impossible situation people are placed in when others try to dictate what’s
best for them and how they should live their lives. It’s also a film I have an
affection for because the viceroy who’s summoned at the end to preside over the
trial of Serafin for being the pirate Macoco (which he isn’t, and Serafin — who
narrowly escaped one of Macoco’s massacres — knows who Macoco really is before
anyone else in the film does) is played by George Zucco, making a welcome
reappearance in a big production with “A”-list stars a few years after his
career seemed to be stuck playing mad-scientist leads in movies like The Mad
Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Flying
Serpent at PRC. I regard The Pirate as one of Judy Garland’s greatest films — along with The
Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, A Star Is Born and her final film, the underrated I Could Go On Singing — all of which turned Judy Garland’s real emotions into
powerful, indelible screen portrayals and broke the frame between life and art
in ways that would become common only after other, similarly tortured stars —
Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe in particular — dared to show their
real-life vulnerabilities on screen. — 6/14/14
