15 thoughts on “TBT: Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl (1954)

  1. Happily, Captain Kidd’s bare chest, and Anne Bonney’s pants and poet shirt hotness distracted me from Gabor’s questionable costumes. So, win.

    1. She looks so cool! And though she’s pretty, she’s not the very stylized 1950s style pretty, which makes her look much more authentic than the rest of the female cast.

  2. No the shoulder belts are for the men to buckle their swords on. Otherwise, being men and somewhat lacking in brains – brawn not thoughts – they’d forget them and the cheesy swordbuckler films would go the way of the dodo.

    This one I missed.

  3. That painted on beard and moustache combo is CLASSIC! I adore it! I haven’t laughed so hard in months. It reminds me of when an kid goes to a friends fancy dress party dressed as a pirate and at the last minute their mum attacks them with her eyeliner… to stunning effect!
    I am a tad worried about Eva’s tight lacing habit though. As an actress, squishing her poor diaphragm up so much is hardly a good idea – I hate to think of the state of her rib reserve.

    1. Even in the low-budget theater companies I occasionally perform with, we at least have crèpe hair to make fairly convincing facial fur.

  4. I’m sure I saw this when it came out, but it was quite forgettable. Ar, ar — Robert Newton strikes again. When Newton played Long John Silver in Disney’s “Treasure Island,” he played Silver as a Cockney. “Ar, ar.” Was a verbalised laugh, a la “har, har,” but Cockneys often drop the initial h in many words and add it in others, like the bus conductor who announced “‘yde Park Corner.” When a rider called him on it, he said, “That’s all roight, guvnor, we’ll pick it up again at Marble Harch.”
    “”

    1. I’m pretty sure Robert Newton was doing an exaggerated West Country Accent rather than Cockney. Newton was born in Dorset and grew up in Cornwall so he was acquainted with that accent (which would make sense for a pirate as a lot of sailors came from the West Country and Bristol, where Treasure Island begins is in Somerset.)

    2. No -as Northcountrygal says, Newton’s Long John Silver accent (which pretty much created the entire ‘pirate accent’ tradition in movies) was his own native Dorset tongue, hammed up just a little. He wasn’t laughing. The West Country accent is very rhotic, unlike that of SE England, from which British ‘Received Pronunciation’ comes, and ‘Ah’ in Devon, Zummerzet and Cornwall naturally comes out as ‘Ar’ (as in ‘Ar, Jim lad’). It can convey any number of meanings, including but not restricted to ‘aha!’, ‘hmm’, ‘oh, well’, ‘yes’, ‘You got me there’ . . .

  5. I rather liked the bathtub. Was that an wink to Egyptian revival? Or Crystal Allen’s tub in “The Women”?

  6. How I missed this cheesefest on a Sunday afternoon on channel 5 growing is beyond me! Maybe I saw it and wiped it from my memory. Loved the review.

  7. I love these low budget piratefilms. The Italians produced even more trashy stuff – for example with Lex Barker in the leading role.
    However the painted beard really is something Special and I ask myself how to follow the plot, when I just have to look on that “beard”.
    Perfect content for Frock Flicks universe. I would revommend to write more such posts – maybe giving point to factors like: most stupid looking ship models. Even some great successful actors were in such films like Linda Darnell.

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