A doctor, a pirate: this week’s movies

Reading Amicus Horrors prompted me to rewatch Amicus’ contribution to the Whoniverse, DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965) . This reworking of TV’s The Daleks — on the big screen! In color! — starred Peter Cushing as “Doctor Who,” with Who apparently his real name (I’m equally curious why he’s reading an issue of the Eagle weekly comic; you’d think TV Comic, which had the actual Doctor Who strip would be the choice). Still it’s a nice character bit: while his granddaughters Barbara (Jennie Linden) and Susan (Roberta Tovey) read physics for fun, old Who is reading SF comic strips like Dan Dare.

In this story, Who has invented TARDIS (no “the”). When Barbara’s boyfriend Ian (Roy Castle) shows up, Who shows off his machine, Ian accidentally activates it and they land on an alien planet where radiation has left everything dead. As in the TV show, the Doctor fakes a TARDIS breakdown to give him an excuse to explore a nearby city. Unfortunately the city is inhabited by the Daleks, just as malevolent on TV. Can the time/space travelers and the pacifist Thals stop the Daleks from killing them all?

I was very tired when I watched it so the amount of running back and forth from the city to the dead forest got pretty tedious. And the Thals drop their pacifism way too easily when the Doctor pushes them. That said the sets look decent, the Daleks are menacing and Cushing makes an enjoyably grandfatherly Doctor, much more affable than Hartnell’s rather toplofty First Doctor. And while TARDIS’ interior is a mess, it certainly looks like something the Who family could have cobbled together in the back yard. “If the Daleks consider us to be monsters, what must they look like?”THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952) starts Burt Lancaster in the title role as one of the most acrobatic swashbucklers ever, which may have something to do with having actual circus acrobat experience (Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate is the only one to match Lancaster).  Captain Vallo (Lancaster) captures a British envoy (Leslie Bradley) out to crush revolution in the Caribbean. Vallo strikes a deal to sell the envoy’s cargo of guns and gunpowder to one of the rebel movements, then capture the leader and sell him back, all of which horrifies a traditionalist pirate (Torin Thatcher) who declares “this isn’t piracy — it’s business!” Like so many cynical opportunist heroes, Vallo and his sidekick Ojo (Nick Cravat, Lancaster’s trapeze partner, who stays silent to hide his thick Brooklyn accent) are out for themselves, but when Vallo gets a look at Eva Bartok as the rebel leader’s daughter, things start to change.

This is a terrific, fun movie, and quite unusual in swashbucklers. Despite all the evil tyrants who get overthrown in these films, the genre is actually pro-monarchy — once you remove the usurper or the corrupt vizier or awake the king to his true duties, it’s a great system of government. In The Crimson Pirate and The Flame and the Arrow Lancaster overthrows colonial governments in favor of independence, rather than resolving things by having the king appoint a better governor.

A second departure from the usual is the climax. One of the revolutionaries is a scientist and when the revolution takes on the British troops they’re equipped with steampunk versions of tanks and machine guns. It adds fun to what’s already a delightful film. The only flaw is that Bradley isn’t quite strong enough as the villain. “If you know it was bolted you must have tried it — and if you tried it, you know why it was bolted.”

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