Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 alpha 3/24/83; site seismo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!flinn
From: flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: The Spanish Main (1946)
Message-ID: <746@seismo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Mar-84 12:40:21 EST
Article-I.D.: seismo.746
Posted: Sat Mar 24 12:40:21 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Mar-84 10:48:48 EST
Organization: Center for Seismic Studies, Arlington, VA
Lines: 43

---

	One sees the 1946 film "The Spanish Main" occasionally on
television, and network readers may be interested in a review of the
movie that was published in The Observer when the movie first
appeared:


	"The Spanish Main," which is not meant to be funny, seems to
me a much funnier pirate picture than "The Princess and the Pirate,"
which was.  It is an incredibly genteel account of the adventures of a
Mexican heiress with an Irish accent (Maureen O'Hara), who is
betrothed to a Spanish Governor with an Austrian accent (Walter
Slezak).  On her way to her wedding she is abducted and married by a
Dutch pirate with another Austrian accent (Paul Henreid).  Since the
lady has brought her trousseau, her vanity case, and her hairdresser
with her, she is able to dress for dinner with some formality aboard
the pirate ship, and lend quite a tone to the captain's table.
Unhappily, the sight of her deep decolletage and the blue baby ribbons
she affects in her hair proves too much for the pirate's ex-fiancee
(Binnie Barnes), an outdoor type with a wardrobe confined to two
crisply laundered blouses and a couple of golfing outfits.  With her
eye on a Brussels lace nightgown, she betrays the married couple to
the jilted governor, and it is then that the heroine's fully-
fashioned, non-austerity models prove really useful. For she manages to
secrete in their folds (1) a dagger, (2) a horse pistol, (3) a rapier,
and (4) the keys to all the cells in the local prison.  With a hurried
plea, for she is a tender-hearted girl, that the apoplectic governor
shall be allowed to live and 'find a way to do some useful work,' she
puts out to sea again with her pirate husband, prudently
reappropriating the nightgown, still incredibly free from signs of wear
and tear.  The last shot shows the happy couple sailing away toward the
Carolinas, into a Technicolor sun rising boldly and bloodily in the
west.

	NOTE:  Herodotus records the same phenomenon on the authority
of the Egyptian priests.  In eleven thousand three hundred and forty
years, he declares, 'they related that the sun had four times risen
out of his usual quarter, and that he had twice risen where he now
sets, and twice set where he now rises.'  On none of these occasions,
he adds, had the phenomenon been accompanied by other curious
manifestations, a point in which superiority must be allowed to "The
Spanish Main."