THE BLACK SWAN (1942)

Power makes a dashing pirate in this colorful swashbuckler, fighting Sanders and Quinn, rescuing O'Hara from their clutches. Leon Shamroy's cinematography deservedly earned him an Oscar. (Leonard Maltin review)

CMM : Certainly one of the best swashbucklers of the 40s. Power is excellent particularly when his character is shown with some depth, you are rather unsure if he will remain on the side of the British against the pirates. Only mildly annoying thing for me was Power's character was occasionally called Jamie boy. Hard to recognise George Sanders as the villain but he is very good too. I'm sure many female fans in the audience were drooling when Power is stripped to the waist in glorious Technicolor, the restored movie looks great on DVD. (3 out of 5)

Just saw this on DVD. Excellent restoration.

It's on FilmFour later this week. I shall watch it as I don't think I've seen it before.

A real good swashbuckler. Love the color cinematography and Laird Cregar as Morgan is great. You're right about the "Jamie Boy" thing--it begins to crawl on me after a while.

Yeah I don't know now whether to record it from Film Four onto DVD-R this week or buy the restored commercial DVD version?

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new Tyrone Power DVD set and caught this one the other day. However, I must disagree with most people here. I thought this was a weak pirate film. It wasn't even close to par with The Black Pirate (Douglas Fairbanks), The Scarlet Pirate (Bruce Lancaster), or Sea Hawk (Eroll Flynn).

Now no one has EVER accused me of being politically correct, but one of the many things that bothered me was the "romance." Basically this pirate sexually assaults this girl, kidnaps her, and generally acts like ... well, a pirate ... and so she naturally falls in love with him! Pleaseeeee.

Frankly, the plot didn't get much better. In fact, it just seemed an excuse to mask the romance of the story.

I give it two stars, but watch the Captain from Castille, that one is a real gem.

My first impression when I saw this film was that it was an adventure story for kids (in spite of the political incorrectness). The Saturday afternoon at the movies crowd. I liked it okay, but it's not my favorite.

I watched this film over the long weekend, and so am reading this thread with interest.

First, I don't think it's a big deal about Jamie Boy kidnapping her and her falling in love with him anyway. I mean, this is the movies...and so a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is in order. And they have been doing this sort of thing in the movies forever: one of the most blatant examples in my memory being Rudolph Valentino's character in THE SHEIK (1921). The same exact plot mechanism was used in that film - boy kidnaps girl, boy acts like macho chestbeating incredibly sexy 'bad boy' man...and girl falls in love with him anyway.

Valentino did it...Flynn did it...so I see no reason whatever why Tyrone Power couldn't do it. I just put aside that PC stuff while I'm watching films like these...and just have fun with them.

Second, I liked this film alot because it got to the point. The whole thing was like 98 minutes or something - a perfect length, IMO. They didn't drag out the story needlessly - they just told it and moved on. And good for them! I like a well edited film!

Third, gotta say something about the beauty of technicolor here - it no doubt contributed massive amounts to the beauty of this film - especially of the sea scenes, which were quite well done. But as a fangirl aside (you can't get away with me not putting in at least ONE!!! ) the use of technicolor did Tyrone Power NO HARM AT ALL in that black and red getup with the cape.

I am now firmly of the opinion that Tyrone Power should have ALWAYS been made to wear black and red. Whoa BABY!

Finally, a word about George Sanders: I barely was able to recognize him, he was playing so against type. Well done, George!

Overall, a good film which I'd watch again. Might even be my favorite Tyrone Power film to-date...although that's not saying much since I've seen less than a dozen.