Thursday, December 13, 2018

Movie review - "Caribbean" (1952) **1/2

Technically a swashbuckler though there's actually not much action - it was a Pine Thomas Production, so its inherently lower budgeted but they were dab hands at making things look relatively decent.

John Payne is a chap who is told to go undercover on a Caribbean Island by Cedric Hardwicke - a pirate (I think) who wants revenge on another pirate. He falls in love with Hardwicke's daughter Arlene Dahl, the poor man's Maureen O'Hara.

That's not a bad story. Payne is a decent action star. Dahl is flat - the story needed more spice. Hardwicke is good though his part isn't very large - he pops up at the beginning and end, that's it. Francis L Sullivan and Willard Parker (a leading man for five seconds a few years earlier) give the support cast some heft, as does Clarence Muse as a slave.

Pine Thomas allocate their pennies so there are a couple of big action sequences - one on a boat and the slave uprising at the end. It looks pretty good - nice colour. But the film lags in the Payne-Dahl scenes.

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