Made by Pioneer Pictures, the same independent studio who made Becky Sharp, The Dancing Pirate was the first musical feature in three-strip technicolor. Today, when people use of Technicolor as an adjective, what they are picturing is probably a musical, and it is possible that the same association applied in 1936 as well: the plurality of synch-sound pictures in two-strip technicolor (made 1928-33) were also musicals. [1]

In the intervening years between the release of The Dancing Pirate and prior Technicolor musicals like Whoopee (1930) and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1931), much had changed, both for the medium of Technicolor and for the musical as a genre. Technicolor had gained a fuller gamut and, with the success of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, begun to prove its potential for use in mainstream (non-demonstration) movies. Meanwhile, the movie musical had become less stagey - breaking the proscenium and beginning to adopt a less plot-logical, more emotional approach to production numbers. [2]

As a musical, The Dancing Pirate is certainly less stagebound than its two-color predecessors. None of the production numbers happen on a stage, and it is not a backstage story by any means. Charles Collins plays a dancing teacher in 1820s Boston who is shanghaied onto a pirate ship and in rather quick order arrives in Spanish Colonial California, where he escapes and woos and wins the heart of a Spanish Lady, played by Steffi Duna. Collins's dancing in the movie is easily explained by his vocation as a dance instructor, Duna wants to learn the waltz, and we can rather easily accept that the whole town joins in these dances a) because the waltz is irresistable, b) because we are in an exotic, colorful locale and breaking into dance is just what we expect of the exotic colorful locals, and c) because we know we are watching a musical and we'd be disappointed if they didn't.

A Restrained Musical?

As I mentioned before, in the 21st century the idea of the Technicolor musical carries very clear connotations about the mood and look of the movie. The movie will be upbeat (to a cynic, even disturbingly so), the clothing and settings lavish, and the use of color florid and possibly excessive. The Dancing Pirate fulfills these criteria to varying extents: the mood is upbeat (there is no real threat of danger), but is more swashbuckling than cheery; the settings are rustic and feel somewhere between realistic and exotic, and the color is not particularly ebullient. If we return to Scott Higgins's reductive heuristic of 1930s Technicolor films as being demonstrative, restrained, or assertive, we'd probably say that much of The Dancing Pirate is in the restrained mode, a somewhat unlikely choice for a musical.

Indeed, using our previous two films as points of reference, the look of The Dancing Pirate more or less represents a midpoint between The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Becky Sharp; neither as plain and undramatic as Pine nor as lurid as Becky. Given that it was made by much of the same production staff as Becky Sharp, (including color designer Robert Edmond Jones), perhaps it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to find that the color mood feels closest to the quieter, later moments in Becky, where saturated color enters more as an accent or flourish within what is otherwise a more muted mise-en-scène.

Missing Information - A Caveat

Before continuing my color analysis, I need to bring up The Dancing Pirate's preservation status, since that has some bearing on the extent to which I feel able to comment on the film's color design. For years, The Dancing Pirate was a lost film, at least in its original form. Both Becky and Pirate were made by Pioneer Pictures, and were rereleased in the early 1940s in 2-color Cinecolor, and two of the three original Technicolor camera negatives were used create these prints—the red and blue records. In the case of both films, the green negatives were disposed of.

Today, the preferred method for digital restoration of Technicolor films is to use the original camera or color separation negatives, since they are exceedingly sharp, and also correspond well to the RGB primaries at the heart of digital color for screens and projection. In the case of Becky Sharp, a surviving complete Technicolor release print was used to chemically recreate the third lost negative in UCLA's 1980 restoration of the movie, but for a long time, no comparable print of The Dancing Pirate existed, until one finally found in Australia by film collector Wade Williams in 2015. [3] In February 2022, a Blu-Ray of The Dancing Pirate was released by The Film Detective. In their press release for the film, the company stated that the movie elements came from "the late Alexander Korgan's Films Around the World library," and were "original, 35mm archival material [...] obtained from the famous film collector Wade Williams." [4]

I cannot tell exactly how many sources this digital restoration uses. The sharpness of the blu-ray version suggests that either the print was in excellent shape or they did indeed have access to at least some original negatives. The publicity and documentation for the release is not explicit on this point either.

I do not want to criticize this Blu-Ray release too harshly. It is incredible to be able to view such a rare film in such good condition in the comfort of one's own home. That said, there are some faults in the print and its digitization which I worry may affect my ability to analyze the film's use of color. Some segments have a notable pink-blue tinge (almost as if a third of the spectrum was missing!), and the color can vary substantially from shot to shot. Sometimes the color is incredibly beautiful and balanced (as above on the right) and at other times washed out and clearly "off". In the two images shown above, Frank Morgan wears the same military jacket - which appears to be brown in one scene and then red several scenes later. Obvious mistakes like this give me pause about making any sorts of sweeping statements about the movie's use of color.

Understanding Color in The Dancing Pirate, Round 2

With the preceding caveat out of the way, I'm going to try for a second time to analyze the color in The Dancing Pirate, because even in this imperfect form, the film's use of color feels like an important step. Pirate both echoes Pioneer's previous approach to color in Becky Sharp and improves upon it. The use of capes in the final dance number of Pirate evokes the flapping capes of the flight prior to Waterloo in Becky: the drab military blue-grey is suitably nocturnal (the film's climax takes place at night), but flashes to reveal a rich red interior.

The women in the dance number all wear gold and are alternately swathed in the grey cloaks and filmed set against their red lining, a touch that feels both suitably spanish-exotic and adds a much needed touch of sparkle to the otherwise somewhat neutral hacienda set.

A sizeable proportion of the film is set at night, a possible concession to the tremendous amount of light early three-strip technicolor required. This leads to a very strong cold-warm contrast between the exterior night shots (designed to appear mostly moonlit) and the interior night shots (designed to appear candlelit).

Having learned their lesson in Becky Sharp, where scenes were largely lit too evenly, The Dancing Pirate shows a decided preference for chiaroscuro, and far greater willingness to let shadows cover the front of the faces of the actors. This darker key of lighting not only introduces a level of menace to the film that is rarely present in either Becky or Pine (and one might argue, is not merited in the script), it also represents a key step in the advancement of Technicolor photography. In the moodier moments of The Dancing Pirate we can begin to see what is to come in the work of cinematographers like Jack Cardiff.

Benjamin Crisler, writing under the acronym B.R.C., specifically highlighted the new key of chiaroscuro lighting in his largely favorable review for The New York Times on June 18, 1936:

Reasons

Reasons to watch: historical significance or curiosity, especially for those interested in the histories of musicals, technicolor, or film generally; the performances of Frank Morgan and Charles Collins; to support the work of independent film restoration and release. If you're into this kind of trivia, you can also try to spot appearances by Pat Nixon and, in a slightly more prominent role, a pre-Rita-Hayworth Rita Cansino as a member of the Royal Cansino Dancers.

Reasons to avoid: this is a film which hasn't aged well, it doesn't offer much to like to contemporary viewers; full of lazy stereotypes of Mexico and Mexicans; a particularly ridiculous sequence where Collins dances a "war dance" with a local tribe of "peaceful Indians" in order to get them to fight for him, which also abounds in stereotypes (it was a ridiculous sequence in 1936, too – Benjamin Crisler, in his review for the New York Times, specifically called out the scene as unintentionally humorous.)

Credits

All images above from the 2022 Blu-Ray release of Dancing Pirate by the Film Detective. I do not own any rights to any of the images.

[1] Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing, (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, inc., 1993), p. 15-16.

[2] My understanding of the development of movie musicals comes directly from Janine Basinger's remarkable book, The Movie Musical (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in classic Hollywood films generally or movie musicals specifically.

[3] "Technicolor Firsts" from the (now defunct) Films Around the World website, kept viewable through the marvelous Wayback Machine.

[4] Stephanie Prange, "1936 Musical The Dancing Pirate Due on DVD and Blu-Ray Feb. 22 from Film Detective", Media Play News website.

[5] B.R.C. "At the Rivoli", The New York Times (June 18, 1936), p. 19. Accessed 11/15/2023 through TimesMachine.