The Captain's Paradise

The Captain's Paradise (1953)

He makes two-timing an art...and gets away with it

Mediterranean ferryboat captain Henry St James has things well organized - a loving and very English wife Maud in Gibraltar, and the loving if rather more hot-blooded Mistress, Nita in Tangiers. A perfect life. As long as neither woman decides to follow him to the other port.

Date of release
1953-06-09
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (26)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Romance, Comedy, Drama
Director
Anthony Kimmins

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Gibraltar
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

The Captain's Paradise is a 1953 British comedy film produced and directed by Anthony Kimmins, and starring Alec Guinness, Yvonne De Carlo and Celia Johnson. Guinness plays the captain of a passenger ship that travels regularly between Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco. De Carlo plays his Moroccan lover and Johnson plays his British wife. The film begins at just before the end of the story, which is then told in a series of flashbacks.

Production

The film was based on an original story by Alec Coppel. Nicholas Phipps wrote the script.

The original title was Paradise. In 1951, it was announced that Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer would star. The following year press reports said Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were going to star, with Olivier to direct and Alex Korda to possibly produce.

Olivier and Leigh became unavailable. According to Yvonne De Carlo, when she was offered her role by director Anthony Kimmins, she agreed to do it if Alec Guinness played the lead. Kimmins said it was unlikely to get Guinness and that they would probably go for Ray Milland or Michael Wilding; De Carlo urged they try Guinness anyway and the actor accepted.

Kimmins said: "We're trying to show man's triple side... there's the domestic wife – pipe and slippers side; then the jungle side – the girl-in-port sort of thing. Then there's the conversational, man-to-man side... And naturally we stay tongue in cheek throughout so we don't expect to wreck any homes."

Filming finished in March 1953. Yvonne De Carlo said she enjoyed the film because she "got the chance to act". She found working with Guinness "an exhilarating experience".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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