The Pirate Reviews

It’s impossible to separate the final version of The Pirate from its fractured, turbulent production. Star Judy Garland was absent for roughly 75% of its shooting schedule as her marriage to director Vincente Minnelli crumbled, her pill addictions took a stronger hold on her life, and her mental/emotional states unraveled accordingly. Garland’s bad behavior, however understandable in hindsight, causes much of the final film to be handed over to Gene Kelly, in full hammy swagger and never sexier.

This lopsided effect leaves The Pirate as one of the strangest musicals to come out of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM. After all, Garland doesn’t sing until roughly thirty minutes into the film, Kelly’s extended dance sequences get the lion’s share of time, and the plot is a practically a bitch in heat. Somehow the confluence of Kelly’s peacocking, Garland’s overwhelming neurosis, and Minnelli’s overwrought imagery craft something unique.

Whether that “unique” is a positive or negative depends largely on the viewer. For me, I’ve long been fascinated and enthralled by The Pirate’s dream space Caribbean and overcharged erotic allure. I’m part of the cult that thinks this is a musical underdog just waiting for everyone else to take notice of its brilliance and vault it out of its limbo state. Others are not quite as forgiving of the patchwork plot and hyperbolic artistry.

There’s Garland’s quivering good girl just aching to go bad at the guiding hand of Macoco, the scourge of the Caribbean seas. Her first meeting with Kelly, a meet-cute flirtation, finds her practically vibrating with repressed sexual desire and Kelly turning up the sleazy charm. Garland’s legs are practically locked together at the vaguest change in vaginal humidity, and one can’t blame her as Kelly’s tanned seducer slides up to her.

Kelly’s a proud cock on display. His performance registers as something of either a parody or homage to John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks’ pirate roles and hammy theatrics, and a display of his thick, muscular body. The costumer outfits Kelly in pants and tights that look as if they were painted on, and he’s never looked more alluring than he does here. Kelly was never more erotically charged and open a star than he was during the pirate ballet, the masterpiece sequence of the film, where he becomes the object of the camera’s desire in a way that is typically reserved for female stars.

This ballet sequence highlights his powerful thighs, arm muscles, and athletic dancing just as much as it functions as an elaborate erotic fever dream from Garland’s chaste good girl. He brandishes a sword throughout, and yep, it’s completely loaded with Freudian metaphor. Kelly and Garland generate heat in The Pirate, and this fantasy ballet exemplifies that this no sweetly pure romance story like Kelly and Garland’s other films, such as Summer Stock.

Awash in dreamy reds, purples, and then speed towards an ending run of sequences that seem at odds with the rest of the film. “Be a Clown,” first performed in a leg destroying routine with Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers then reprised with Garland and Kelly in pure slapstick mode, feels like an imposition from a more routine MGM production. It’s a remarkable and strange film nonetheless, one that’s psychologically complex in the ways it juxtaposes its characters interior realities with the fussily designed exterior. The Pirate is a fascinating, complex film that feels alternately designed for cult worship and begging for rediscovery as a damaged jewel in everyone’s oeuvre.