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Saturday, June 2, 2018

YELLOWBEARD (1983)

Even more than Westerns and Musicals, Pirate Pics (straight or parody) went down for the count sometime in the ‘70s. And stayed down till those CARIBBEAN lads revived the genre. Death blows from THE PIRATE MOVIE/’82; PIRATES/’86 and CUTTHROAT ISLAND/’95 did enough damage to sink careers as well as the films.* This one, a ‘not quite’ Monty Python take on the genre (a distinction our poster purposefully ignores) has a major-flop rep, though it did better than some, and is something of a mess, but a good-natured, often funny mess. Blame prolific tv director Mel Damski, lost at staging action or comedy, timing a gag or holding a consistent tone for a vast impressive cast (Graham Chapman, Peer Boyle, Cheech & Chong, Peter Cook, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle, Madeline Kahn, James Mason, John Cleese, many more) to play in. Happily, after a disjointed first act, the film sets to sea in search of buried treasure, forcing it to organize the scattershot jokes and splintered narrative to much better effect. And if it never really does come into focus, it does allow a shambling comic spirit to work its way thru.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Roman Polanski’s PIRATES, a financial & critical disaster of HEAVEN’S GATE/’80 proportions, is weirdly compelling once it ramps up its revenge story. A true & valuable film maudit, bleakly dark & funny, as if Samuel Beckett was gag-man on a comic pirate movie.

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