Dancing Pirate (1936)

Best movie of this year hands down!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

After watching The Dancing Pirate, I tried to decide what target audience was intended. It wasn't particularly humorous, adventurous, or full of great music; it just sort of unrolled over time.The star, the Dancing Pirate himself, was so gaunt and skeletal that it was hard to believe he could move as quickly as he did without fainting from starvation. One expects a dancer to be fit, with some musculature, but this poor guy desperately needed to eat something, and soon.There weren't really any sympathetic characters, either, although there were some dis likable ones.It's an odd movie, bringing together tap dancing and flamenco, inducing peaceful Indians to do violence, the star dancing with a noose around his neck, and more...it's like nothing else.

This movie bombed so bad at the theaters in 1936 that RKO didn't make another color musical for 16 years!!! And it still stinks today! And to make matters worse... the DVD copy they are selling is a Black and White, 16mm bootleg print, that they somehow got copyrighted.. or at least they claim to hold the copyright. This thing has bad film splices and grainy picture quality. Plus the DVD jacket confuses Frank Morgan who is in this picture and was the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz" with Harry Morgan who is not in this movie but was in "Mash" on TV. Real film historians!!!! Yeah right! I would have liked to seen the color version though, just for the fun of early Techocolor. I should learn not to take free movies from "friends". Do yourself a favor... don't buy dollar DVD's and never take free movies from friends! Oh and BTW, saying it is "digitally remastered" just means they transfered the film onto a digital DVD. They love to play word games.

I found this movie in a dollar bin. That should have been my first warning. The movie has been "digitally remastered", leading to the technicolor being remastered right out of it. The box also claims that Frank Morgan is "of Mash TV series fame", in spite of the fact that he died decades before the TV series came out.I suppose seeing the dancing instructor dance in a noose is worth the price of admission, though. (That's not a spoiler-it's on the menu screen.) And I probably would have liked it when I was a kid, and could handle nonsensical situations leading to improbable tap dancing scenes. :)

The Dancing Pirate is worth watching for a several reasons: the over-the-top early Technicolor hues, the spectacular finale featuring the Royal Cansino Dancers (including a young Rita Hayworth) and a very small appearance at the beginning of the movie by Pat Ryan, later to be Pat Nixon. But more than these things, I like The Dancing Pirate as a forgotten movie about Los Angeles. The movie depicts a Boston dance teacher kidnapped by pirates who escapes into the sleepy Alta California village of La Paloma.This is an obvious adaptation of the real-life story of Joseph Chapman. Chapman, originally from Boston, deserted Hippolyte de Bouchard's piratical coastal raiding party to become the first yanqui resident of Los Angeles in 1818. Chapman, like the character in the movie, became a solid citizen of the little pueblo. Unlike the character in the movie, there's no historical evidence that Chapman could dance, however.