Piratical Americans: Representations of Piracy and Authority in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Swashbucklers

Abstract

During the course of the twentieth century, the pirate film evolved into a fundamental mainstay of the adventure film genre (Bourget 198-200; Taves 25-30). While many pirate movies were never wildly successful at the box office (with certain notable exceptions), their simple ubiquity demands some degree of attention. For instance, a survey of the American Film Institute Catalog from 1900 to 1970 yields at least 175 films and shorts (live-action or animated) made during this period that deal with the subject of pirates or piracy. While it is true that these films vary in the extent to which they treat piracy as a plot element (it might be as central as it is to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl [2003], or as peripheral as it is to Charlie Chaplin's 1915 film, Shanghaied), these films encouraged American movie-going audiences to reckon continuously with the exploits, and the attendant meanings, of these on-screen swashbucklers. Specifically, many pirate films articulated a linkage between pirate behavior and the boundaries associated with legitimate political and legal action. By mixing the piratical and the political, these films repeatedly melded the political communities imagined, sustained, and legitimated by the pirate protagonists with the ongoing exploration of a cultural and political national identity, or nation-ness, in which twentieth-century Americans were simultaneously participating (Anderson 5-7). Surprisingly, this association was not always cast in a negative light- pirate antagonists (seen, as they were historically, as enemies of the world) were pitted against legitimate political states that symbolized American ideals of the perfect polis (Benton 702-06; Perotin-Dumon 28-33; Rediker 82; Ritchie 183-205, 235-37). Yet onscreen pirates were also rendered as acceptable stand-ins for American citizens to model their real-world behavior on; such substitutions became permissible either because the pirates' own extralegal political systems were in greater accord with twentieth-century American democratic values and political practices than their fictive imperial antagonists or because their end goals resonated with contemporary American political and cultural needs. For instance, the presence of key political tenets and institutions, such as trial by jury, a commitment to democratic decisionmaking, and the desire to combat tyrannical and dictatorial forms of government among the pirates signified for audiences that the extrapolitical and formally illegal pirate deeds were, in reality, legitimate forms of political action. Moreover, the lines of significance traveled in both directions. Even as these films coded pirates' actions within the framework of historically contingent American values, it is worth asking if these movies also helped Americans to make sense of the world in which they lived. In essence, did the extralegal and transpolitical actions that the pirates undertook provide answers to contemporary American problems? Were there ongoing domestic or international crises that required piratical acts to combat, in which participants could seek solutions outside of the law so long as these solutions remained embedded in acceptable American and democratic values? Finally, did the contours of a pirate community and its specific aims speak to different types of problems at different times? This article will address these questions through an examination of three classic pirate films: Captain Blood (1935), The Sea Hawk (1940), and The Crimson Pirate (1952). Essentially, one can find in all three of these films a variety of answers to the above questions. For instance, in Captain Blood, a pirate community is created around certain democratic, shared responsibilities and goals, but it is legitimated by the presence of the film's educated and quasiaristocratic hero and the community's ultimate goal: the restoration of a traditional power structure that had been corrupted by political and economic despotism- themes that deeply resonated with 1930s audiences. …