The Captain's Paradise

Rating:
Summary: A cute, crafty, playfully sexist 1950s comedy
Review: A deft, charming dark comedy featuring Alec Guinness as a crafty sea captain who has achieved the ultimate male chauvinist dream: the foolproof scheme to cheat on his wife. Wives, actually. He has one in each port -- a dowdy, respectable English frump stowed away in Gilbralter, and a wild, exotic hottie at his love shack in Tangiers. Complications ensue, of course, and while the subtext of sexist humor may be dated or offensive, the script is quite skillful and the performances grand. A lot of attention will go to Yvonne De Carlo, who plays Alec's Latin lady, but the plum comedic role goes to English actress Celia Johnson, who liberates her mousy character with an economical and hilarious transformation. Guinness is great, too... but you knew that already, right? A very funny film.

Rating:
Summary: A cute, crafty, playfully sexist 1950s comedy
Review: A deft, charming dark comedy featuring Alec Guinness as a crafty sea captain who has achieved the ultimate male chauvinist dream: the foolproof scheme to cheat on his wife. Wives, actually. He has one in each port -- a dowdy, respectable English frump stowed away in Gilbralter, and a wild, exotic hottie at his love shack in Tangiers. Complications ensue, of course, and while the subtext of sexist humor may be dated or offensive, the script is quite skillful and the performances grand. A lot of attention will go to Yvonne De Carlo, who plays Alec's Latin lady, but the plum comedic role goes to English actress Celia Johnson, who liberates her mousy character with an economical and hilarious transformation. Guinness is great, too... but you knew that already, right? A very funny film.

Rating:
Summary: One of Guinness's weaker films, but still some fun
Review: Alec Guinness is one of my favorite actors, and I'm especially fond of the films he made with Ealing, including such gems as THE LAVENDER HILL MOB, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, and KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. However, among Guinness's Earling comedies, this is the least among his efforts. The basic problem with the film is twofold. On the one hand, the film embarks with an ill assorted group of elements and a weak script that never pulls those elements together. In fact, many of the conceits of the film are a bit too obvious and heavy handed to succeed as comedy. I'm thinking of the gifts that the captain gives to his two wives, or the way he rigidly forces each one to adhere to the role he has charted for them, or the constant way his first mate refers to the captain as a "genius," when nothing even especially clever is detectable in his actions.

The story is of a ship captain who runs a regular route between North Africa and Gibraltar who has not merely a girlfriend in each port but a wife. But each one is selected to cater to a particular set of needs. His wife in North Africa is a wild, unbridled, dancing, hard drinking party girl (played by Canadian Yvonne de Carlo), while his wife in Gibraltar is a solid, unpretentious, conservative (or so he thinks) homebody (played by the great Celia Johnson, in one of her rare film appearances). Predictably, each one wants to break out of the role he has prescribed for them: the hottie wants to cook and wear and apron, and the stay-at-home wants to go dancing and wear a bikini. The problem is that this is all only superficially funny, and while all the principles do the best that they can under the conditions, it all doesn't add up to very much.

The film is moderately enjoyable for two reasons: first, Guinness is a joy to watch even in a lesser role, second, the film contains some fascinating location shots. It was amazingly interesting to see the shots of early fifties Gibraltar and Africa, although none of the actors actually appeared in them (one shot of Guinness walking along a street in Gibraltar obviously was the result of film of him being superimposed on the location footage). As much as I like Celia Johnson, this simply wasn't a very good role for her. All in all, one at the end feels that so much more should have resulted from all of this. I can moderately recommend the film for Guinness and Ealing completists, but overall I don't think it is much of a film.

I should point out that Alec Guinness was a real life ship captain. During WW II, before his screen success, he captained landing ships. He liked in interviews to boast of having been in charge of the first ship to hit the shore in the invasion of Sicily. Unfortunately, that experience didn't seem to help this film very much.

Rating:
Summary: A Devoted Wife in Every Port
Review: I recently purchased The Horse's Mouth (1958) from Amazon as well as "The Alec Guinness Collection" which includes The Captain's Paradise (1953) plus four others: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). Frankly, I was amazed how well each of the six films has held up since I first saw it.

Although I do not rank The Captain's Paradise in the highest echelon of Guinness' comedies, his character is nonetheless a highly entertaining variation on Thurber's Walter Mitty. As the film begins, Captain Henry St. James seems to be having his cake and eating it too. In a word, bigamy. He has Maud in Gibraltar (played by Celia Johnson) and Nita (played by Yvonne de Carlo) in North Africa. This ship's captain has not only a girl but a devoted wife in each port. Working with a script by Alex Coppel-Nicholas Phipps and directed by Anthony Kimmins, Guinness is in fine form as both the prim and proper husband of homebody Maud and the night clubbing companion of the sultry Nita. One of the oldest and most effective of comic devices is the role reversal. In reality, Maud years to be viewed as St. James sees Nita and Nita...you get the idea. That is the basic conceit of this delightful film.

The plot developments accelerate when St. James purchases what he deems to be appropriate gifts for his two wives, only to get them mixed up and inadvertently gives the wrong one to each. Their reactions threaten his paradise. How does he handle the crisis? What is his situation as the film ends? And are there any lessons to be learned from all this? Judge for yourself. One final point: If you have not already seen this and the other four films in "The Alec Guinness Collection," I envy you. I really do.