Rewatched this off the back of the Mankiewicz biography I read - the script is very solid (Aeneas MacKenzie wrote the original but Herman Mankiewicz punched it up) and has some funny dialogue. Walter Slezak is a strong villain - he often played comic but while the guy he plays here is funny he's very dangerous and smart.
I'm not wild about Paul Henreid - he struggles with his English - but he has some dash. Maureen O'Hara is an old reliable in this stuff. Binnie Barnes has a dream part, a female pirate who is mates with Henreid, and is never any more than average. Actually come to think of it, there's a lot of undercasting in this - Henreid, Barnes and John Emery as a treacherous pirate.
There is colour, decent structure, impressive production values including a ship boarding, the novelty of a Dutch pirate hero, and a different ending where Henreid and O'Hara try to sneak out instead of blasting. There is a rapey subtext often found in O'Hara movies - Henreid forces a kiss on her and forces her to marry him; she gets into it but still too much of it is yuck. That and the casting holds this back for me but there's other things to enjoy.
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