A Film Canon

 

 

This seminal pirate film elaborates many hallmarks of that genre, including the (Caribbean) dichotomy between racially homogeneous colonial outposts and racially heterogeneous rogue harbours, the correspondence between exotic locales and aristocratic decadence, the spatial and temporal magnification of the chase sequence and, above all, the presentation of piracy as a legitimate critique - or explication - of (British) imperial policy, here directed at its brutality, as well as its inherently dislocating, emasculating impact upon the individual subject. Hence the detailed depictions of the white slave trade, whose privations, humiliations and torture constitute the dark underbelly of imperial rhetoric, as well as the pirates' own oath, in which they describe themselves as "men without a country, outlaws in our own land and homeless outcasts in any other." It makes sense, then, that the protagonist (Errol Flynn) should be conspicuously Irish, displaying a charming, vernacular irreverence, reasonableness and, ultimately, eloquence that nevertheless proves itself willing to acknowledge its English sympathies - or, alternatively, to cater its physical manifestation, as lithe, swashbuckling displays of bravura, to English ends - given the kind of massive, systemic change that causes Mutiny On The Bounty so much hesitation, here figured as the reconfiguration of monarchical power ushered in by the Glorious Revolution.