Well, maybe not 37…
Fiona wanted some Technicolor Laird, so we ended up running both THE BLACK SWAN and BLOOD AND SAND. The former, directed by Henry King, is pretty good fun: co-writer Ben Hecht treats it like a gangster movie: the pirate genre gives him license to dispense with moral or sympathetic characters. On first meeting Maureen O’Hara, Tyrone Power forces a kiss on her, gets bitten, punches her unconscious, slings her over one shoulder — then Laird turns up, as Sir Henry Morgan, (“when evil wore a sash,” reads a title card) and he actually throws her away.
It’s all a bit of a rape fantasy, but with a respectable back-and-forth power struggle (O’Hara brains Ty back with a rock) and a conclusion that playfully confirms a relationship based on play, drama, and mutual respect. The filmmakers’ confidence that they can get away with the dicier material is kind of impressive, but of course, it was a different era, the 17th century. They’re really convinced the audience wants to be ravished by Power. He even gets to share a bed with O’Hara, via a complicated bit of censor-circumvention where they have to pretend to be married and their lives depend on it.
Laird’s Morgan is a lovely creation, though George Sanders, unrecognizable in red whiskers and a prosthetic nose, takes some getting used to.
Then there’s —
BLOOD AND SAND, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, is a much more artistic affair, the rich Technicolor starting off surprisingly muted. There’s some weird system in place at Fox where Ray Rennehan, maybe the first DoP to master the medium, gets paired with another, highly regarded cinematographer again and again (I just watched DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, where he works with the great Bert Glennon; here it’s Ernest Palmer. Was it a scheme to get more cameramen trained up in the process?)
Laird plays some kind of matador critic. I guess that must be a thing. Does it pay better than film critic? When I’d seen bits of this on TV, it was always Laird, grinning biggly from the stands while Ty decimates Spain’s bovine populace. But Cregar gets to swirl a cape at one point, too. He moves beautifully — Fiona reports that he once replaced a friend in the chorus and made an effective Chorus Boy of Unusual Size.
shadowplay 