Buried treasure: 12 pirate flicks to dig up

“Captain Kidd” (1945)
Some pirates are handsome, debonair and heroic — and some are scoundrels. Charles Laughton plays Captain Kidd as a scheming, treacherous social climber possibly more dangerous for his silver tongue as for his steel rapier. “I detest violence,” he tells one of his blackguard companions in a rare moment of candor, “but people have such an awkward habit of getting in my way.” Hoping to use a fortune in buried treasure to buy himself a lordship, Laughton kills off the pirates who know the treasure’s location one by one, taking pleasure in delivering acidulous mock eulogies for them in which he talks about how horrible they were and how much he despised them. Laughton clearly relishes his role, and rightfully so — as good as his performance is, it’s nearly the only thing that buoying up this low-budgeted, talky C-lister, which doesn’t have a sustained action scene until 20 minutes before the end. Still, Laughton is terrific, and he liked the role enough to return in the spoof “Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd.”

“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958)
Kerwin Mathews stars as the sailor of Arabic legend, who’s sent on a quest by an evil wizard after his beloved princess is bewitched and shrunk to doll size, and must fight giant birds, Cyclops and a magically animated skeleton. Though definitely a lesser film in terms of acting and script, “Sinbad” has two not-so-secret weapons that make it crackle with life: First, Bernard Hermann’s musical score, but most of all the special effects of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, who has one of his finest turns here, second perhaps only to 1963’s “Jason and the Argonauts.” Though it might seem artificial in comparison with modern CGI, Harryhausen’s painstaking work was the gold standard for years, lending his creations genuine personality (which is more than can be said for some of the human actors here).

“The Crimson Permanent Assurance” (1983)
“Yellowbeard” (1983)
Originally intended as just a short sketch to be used in “Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life,” Terry Gilliam’s whimsically Kafkaesque, allegorical pirate tale “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” took on a life of its own, growing into a full-fledged short film as Gilliam was creating it. (Not the last time a Gilliam movie would go overboard during production, but in this case the resulting film was well worth it.) A group of elderly accountants suffering at the hands of their arrogant corporate bosses decide to rebel, and convert their office equipment into cutlasses and cannons and the building itself into a marauding vessel that raids larger, richer buildings.

It’s a funnier and more well-made movie than the other Python-related pirate film of 1983, the intermittently amusing but ultimately pointless parody “Yellowbeard,” which starred Graham Chapman alongside fellow Pythons Eric Idle and John Cleese; Mel Brooks veterans Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn; British comedy vets Peter Cook and Spike Milligan; and stoner poster boys Cheech and Chong. With all that talent involved, the failure of “Yellowbeard” is only more disappointing, but it’s still a must-see for Python diehards.

“Captain Hareblower” (1954)
A lot of people complained that the plotline in the second “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie was too complex and had too many characters to follow. Here’s the perfect antidote. Bugs Bunny is on a ship, right? And then the ship gets attacked by Yosemite Sam, who’s playing a pirate in this particular cartoon, right? And then Bugs and Sam spend the rest of the cartoon firing cannons at each other. What more does anyone need?

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