The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952)

Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat in The Crimson Pirate

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat, Eva Bartok, Torin Thatcher, James Hayter, Leslie Bradley, Margot Grahame, Noel Purcell, Frederick Lester, Eliot Makeham, Frank Pettingell, Dana Wynter, Christopher Lee. Screenplay: Roland Kibbee. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: William Alwyn.

All flashing blue eyes and white teeth, Burt Lancaster swashbuckles in The Crimson Pirate like no one since the elder Douglas Fairbanks -- some of whose acrobatic gags were borrowed by the movie. It's one of those kids'  movies for all ages, with only just enough mushy stuff between Lancaster and Eva Bartok to hold adult interests. Actually, the real romance here is between Lancaster's Captain Vallo and Nick Cravat's Ojo, the latter a mute lieutenant to the dashing pirate captain. Some of the funniest sequences involve the movements in sync of the six-foot-one Lancaster and the five-foot-four Cravat -- the two once had a circus act together. There's perhaps more plot than the movie absolutely needs, involving the pirates coming to the aid of the anti-monarchical rebels on the mythical Caribbean island of Cobra. There Vallo, aka The Crimson Pirate, meets Consuelo (Bartok), the daughter of the rebel leader El Libre (Frederick Lester). Meanwhile, mutiny brews aboard Vallo's ship, fueled by his first mate, Humble Bellows (Torin Tatcher), disgruntled by the fact that Vallo's involvement in politics has got in the way of their routine piratical pursuits of treasure. Eventually, with the aid of a scientist, Prof. Elihu Prudence (James Hayter, Vallo and Ojo vanquish both the mutineers and the forces of the king, led by Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley), by using the professor's scientific innovations, such as a hot-air balloon and nitroglycerin, as well as the theory that a capsized boat might hold enough air to be used as a kind of submarine. (That last gag was borrowed for the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. It was later proved unfeasible on the Mythbusters TV show.) The Crimson Pirate was the kind of hit it deserved to be.

Madeleine (David Lean, 1950)

Ivan Desny and Ann Todd in Madeleine

Madeleine Smith: Ann Todd
William Minnoch: Norman Wooland
Emile L'Anglier: Ivan Desny
Mr. Smith: Leslie Banks
Mrs. Smith: Barbara Everest
Bessie Smith: Patricia Raine
Janet Smith: Susan Stranks
Christina Hackett: Elizabeth Sellars
Thuau: Eugene Deckers
Defending Counsel: André Morell
Prosecuting Counsel: Barry Jones
Dr. Thompson: Edward Chapman
Mrs. Jenkins: Jean Cadell

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps
Cinematography: Guy Green
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Clive Donner, Geoffrey Foot
Music: William Alwyn

I wanted Madeleine to have the emotional depth of Brief Encounter (1945) or the imaginative finesse of Oliver Twist (1948), just to sustain my argument that David Lean was a greater director before he aimed for the epic scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). But even Lean would later admit that Madeleine is something of a dud. The story of an "unproven" murder -- the verdict the Glasgow jury returned at the trial of the real Madeleine Smith -- the film needs to generate a Hitchcockian tension that Lean never quite masters. One reason, I think, is that it stars the rather pallid Ann Todd, Lean's wife, who had played Madeleine Smith in a stage version of the story, when it needs a more accomplished and charismatic actress, a Deborah Kerr or a Jean Simmons, to bring out the ambiguities in the character. Todd rises to the role only in the final scene, when Madeleine rides away a free woman, a mysterious smile flickering across her face as the voiceover narrator questions whether she was guilty or not guilty. Otherwise, she generates little heat in her love scenes with Ivan Desny as L'Anglier* and the scene in which she throws him over for her father's choice as a fiancé, William Minnoch, comes as an abrupt about-face. Lean seems to be trying to do something with the character of the lover, including much business with his brandishing a phallic walking stick, but it doesn't come off. On the plus side, there are good performances by Leslie Banks as Madeleine's father, the quintessential tyrannical Victorian paterfamilias, and André Morell gives a rousing argument for the defense in the trial scene. Guy Green's chiaroscuro cinematography creates the proper mood, as do John Bryan's sometimes oppressive interiors.

*The spelling in the credits. The historical figure was called L'Angelier, which is also the way André Morell, playing the defense counsel, pronounces it.

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)

James Mason and Kathleen Ryan in Odd Man Out

Johnny McQueen: James Mason
Kathleen Sullivan: Kathleen Ryan
Lukey: Robert Newton
Pat: Cyril Cusack
Shell: F.J. McCormick
Fencie: William Hartnell
Rosie: Fay Compton
Inspector: Denis O'Dea
Father Tom: W.G. Fay
Theresa O'Brien: Maureen Delaney
Dennis: Robert Beatty
Nolan: Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: F.L. Green, R.C. Sheriff
Based on a novel by F.L. Green
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Film editing: Fergus McDonell
Music: William Alwyn

The collaboration of director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker on Odd Man Out is perhaps not as celebrated as the one on The Third Man (1949), but in some ways it's more impressive. The Third Man has a tighter screenplay and a location, postwar Vienna, that lent itself more readily to the kind of expressionistic atmosphere Krasker's images of it supply. Odd Man Out is a looser, more episodic story. As its title almost suggests, it's a kind of reworking of the Odyssey, the archetypal perilous-journey narrative. Reed made a decision at some point to treat the first part of the film, the planning and commission of the heist, in a conventionally realistic fashion and then gradually to shift into something more expressionistic, something that reveals the disintegrating state of the dying Johnny McQueen's mind. He needed an actor like James Mason, who could give Johnny the necessary charisma while still suggesting from the outset the character's damaged state of mind. But he also needed Krasker's ability to present actuality and then to transform it into something stranger than reality, to suggest the menace lurking in the mundane streets of Belfast and then to work with the baroquely sinister sets designed by Ralph W. Brinton that include the ornate Four Winds Saloon (based on an actual Belfast pub but created in the studio) and the decaying Victorian residence of Shell and the mad painter Lukey. We first begin to see the transition when Johnny experiences vertigo while riding through the streets of the city, but from the moment when the wounded Johnny takes cover in an abandoned air-raid shelter, where reality becomes indistinguishable from Johnny's fevered prison memories and other hallucinations, the film increasingly steps away from realism. Even the weather plays a role in subverting realism: The semi-conscious Johnny is left by Shell in an old bathtub in a lot filled with junk, including a statue of an angel whose nose seems to run after the rain starts to fall. Later, when rain has turned to snow, an icicle hangs from the drippy nose. The encounters with Belfast street kids are like meeting the children of Pandemonium. The cast, much of it recruited from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, is superb, including Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, Dan O'Herlihy, and Denis O'Dea. Robert Newton received pre-title second billing with Mason, which is certainly out of keeping with the size of his role, and there are those who find Newton's Lukey out of key with the less showy performances of the other actors: Pauline Kael calls it "a badly misconceived performance in a badly misconceived role." But for me it brings the ferment of the manhunt and the increasingly bizarre handing-about of Johnny to a kind of necessary climax before Johnny's reunion with Kathleen and the inevitable outcome.