More than fifty film versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island exist -- the story has been staged on alien planets, as an anime featuring cartoon animals, by Disney, and in a TV version starring Orson Welles. This 1934 MGM adaptation is impressively mounted, well cast, and directed in a craftsmanlike, if pedestrian, manner by Victor Fleming. (Fleming later directed Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.) Fleming's project was a prestige picture for the studio and a top-notch cast was assembled for the film: Lionel Barrymore plays the cowardly, ranting Billie Bones; the child star, Jackie Cooper, is cast as the plucky protagonist, Jim Hawkins; Wallace Beery chews up the scenery as the sinister sea-cook, Long John Silver. Treasure Island, as a novel, succeeds on the basis of its anarchic energy -- the book is a boy's fantasy come to life, full of outrageous cruelty, violence, and terror. Fleming is too cautious a film-maker, too solicitous of his stars, to authorize the sort of devil take the hindmost approach that this material demands. His direction is a little bit predictable and, except for some perverse turns by the pirates of the Spanish Main, there's not much of interest in the film. Furthermore, the movie's ending doesn't work and casts a shadow on the picture as a whole.
As everyone knows, Jim Hawkins works as a serving boy at the Admiral Benbow Inn in seaside Dorset. A drunk and elderly sailor appears, bullies everyone, and, then, is cowed by the virtuous and brave Judge Livesy (Otto Kruger). This sailor, Billy Bones, is on the run from a vicious one-legged pirate -- the drunken Bones has a treasure map in his sea-chest. A mob of pirates attacks the Inn and Jim Hawkins finds himself in possession of the treasure map. Judge Livesy and Squire Trelawny outfit a sea-going vessel, the Hispaniola, retain a bold captain, Admiral Smollett (played by the dour and intimidating Lewis Stone) and they sail for the desert island where the pirate treasure is hidden. Unfortunately, the pirate, Long John Silver, has been hired as a sea-cook. Silver infiltrates the crew with his own pirates and, on the voyage to the treasure island, several of the sailors loyal to Smollett, Trelawny, and Jim Hawkins who is now the ship's boy, are murdered. At the treasure island, the pirate crew led by Long John Silver mutinies and many of the good guys are killed. There are several pitched battles, including a siege at a stockade on the island. Jim Hawkins cuts the Hispaniola mooring and ship goes adrift, crashing onto the island. He meets a castaway, Ben Gunn, a poor emaciated fellow who looks very much like the castaway that sometimes appeared as a non sequitur in the old Monty Python comedies. Gunn has hidden the treasure in a cave. There's more fighting and the pirates are vanquished. Long John Silver is locked in a cage and faces the gallows. At the end of the movie, he makes a maudlin appeal to Jim Hawkins. The boy admires the pirate's courage and charisma. So he lets the villain escape. The film ends with one-legged pirate rowing away from the Hispaniola in the darkness, setting up a sequel that Stevenson seems to have planned, but never wrote.
Stevenson's novel creates a lingering and tense ambiguity about Jim Hawkins' actions and allegiances. Hawkins is fundamentally a good boy, dutiful and obedient. But he seems to succumb at times to Long John Silver's dashing, if brutal, magnetism. Stevenson's book is luridly violent but it's real suspense involves the conflict in Jim Hawkins' soul -- should he cleave to the vicious, but liberating Long John Silver, a free man in all respects, or is it better to remain a servant of polite and law-abiding society? Fleming doesn't really understand this dynamic and the end of the movie degenerates into mawkish sentimentality -- Wallace Beery made five pictures with the child actor, Jackie Cooper, starting with The Champ (1931), a boxing movie. The formula is always the same: Beery plays a gruff, hard-nosed tough-guy who finds his humanity in his relationship with an adoring waif. Treasure Island was the fourth in this series of films and, at the end, when Long John Silver talks his way out of the cage and escapes, we seem to be seeing a reprise of earlier scenes involving the brusque hoodlum with a heart of gold and the orphaned kid. Here it doesn't work because the stakes are higher -- Long John Silver doesn't have a heart of gold; he's an egotistical, monstrous mass murderer. So when the kid starts sobbing and lets him escape, we're more than a little alarmed. The genre elements in the other films suddenly take over this picture and the movie works itself out in a predictable way -- but it's disorienting to see the villain blithely allowed to escape. (Stevenson avoided this problem by having the deranged Billy Gunn release Long John Silver.)
Fleming's direction is stolidly unimaginative. There is intrinsic grandeur in the shots involving the Hispaniola, a wonderful-looking sailing ship with towering masts and billowing sails. Many of the shots use poorly integrated rear projection. The villainous pirates are picturesque. Fleming gets a sense of Stevenson's raw violence in an early scene in which Blind Pew is run over, carnage staged in not one but two big close-up as his belly is crushed by the wheel of a carriage. But later, Fleming dilutes the violence -- of course, this is required by the movie's maudlin ending. There are some stirring, if brief, combat scenes shot in a jingoistic way -- I don't recall Stevenson making a big deal about the hoisting of the Union Jack. (Fleming seems to be reverting to the world-view in other action films in this era, particularly George Stevens' Gunga Din.) The best thing in the picture is the unsettling "Dandy Dawson", a pedophile pirate (played by Charles Bennett) who seems enamored with the girlish-looking Jim Hawkins (the boy has an unfortunate hairdo complete with bangs). In one scene, he appraisingly leers at Jim, scanning him from head-to-toe with obviously lustful intent. It's scary and funny at the same time.
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