Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Blackbeard the Pirate!

Yeah, I got all my screengrabs from a YouTube upload. Sue me.

Pirate movies before and after Pirates of the Caribbean 1 have uniformly sucked with the exception of RKO's 1952 banger Blackbeard the Pirate. Never heard of it? Of its star, Robert Newton? But I guarantee you've heard unwitting impressions of him from everyone from Geoffrey Rush in Caribbean to your relentlessly unfunny friends, for so definitive was Newton's performance in this and Treasure Island that he single-handedly bestowed upon the profession of pirate its iconic accent, complete with yarrrs.

His Mansonesque crazy eyes have equally become a staple of buccaneer comportment.

Blackbeard the Pirate is flagrant fiction, which is odd because the real-life tale of Edward "Blackbeard" Teach sounds almost suspiciously as though written for the screen (spoilers: his nemesis Robert Maynard ambushes him, duels him to the death and hangs his severed head from his ship's rigging. Nothin personnel...kid...). In the movie, Maynard goes undercover with Blackbeard as a surgeon to investigate rumours Henry Morgan has returned to piracy*. Blackbeard lets him remove a bullet from his fucking neck while openly shit-talking him and daring him to take the opportunity to bump him off, because Blackbeard is just that low in trait agreeableness in the movie (not, in fact, IRL). Maynard is a stuffed-shirt cipher like most ""hero"" characters, not half as entertaining as Blackbeard, nor half the badass that he was in life. Happily, Linda Darnell is typecast as a smoking hot babe, which makes up for it.

That's actually my worst-taste joke because she tragically died in a fire. A fire caused by her searing pulchritude.

OK, the swordfights don't come close to the Tyrone Power/George Sanders showcase in The Black Swan a decade prior, nor do the sea battles even hint at what the Caribbean flicks would later offer, but it's like comparing Browning's Dracula with George Melford's Spanish-language version. Sure, Melford's is better in every technical aspect, but Browning's has Lugosi, and Newton was to the image of the pirate as Lugosi was to the vampire: if your version doesn't define the archetype so thoroughly it becomes parody within your lifetime, did you even really play the role?

Arrr, yo ho ho.

*This would be an impressive feat, because in real life Morgan died when Teach was eight.