The Spanish Main

The Spanish Main (1945)

Loving her . . . taming her . . . called for all his reckless daring!

Laurent van Horn is the leader of a band of Dutch refugees on a ship seeking freedom in the Carolinas, when the ship is wrecked on the coast of Cartagene, governed by Don Juan Alvardo, a Spanish ruler. Alvarado has Laurent thrown in prison, but the latter escapes, and five-years later is a pirate leader. He poses as the navigator on a ship in which Contessa Francesca, daughter of a Mexican noble, is traveling on her way to marry Alvarado, whom she has never seen. Laurent's pirates capture the ship and Francesca, in order to save another ship, gives her hand-in-marriage to Laurent, who sails her to the pirate hideout. This irks his jealous pirate comrades Anne Bonney and Captain Benjamin Black. They overpower Laurent and send Francesca to Alvarado, and then Mario du Billar, a trusted right-hand man, makes a deal to deliver Laurent to Alvarado.

Date of release
1945-10-01
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Adventure, Drama, Romance
Director
Frank Borzage

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

The Spanish Main is a 1945 American adventure film starring Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak and Binnie Barnes, and directed by Frank Borzage. It was RKO's first all-Technicolor film since Becky Sharp ten years before.

Development

Paul Henreid wrote in his memoirs that the film was his idea. He said he was "getting tired of being cast as the suave ladies' man and I had definitely decided no more Nazis so I started thinking in terms of something that would be more fun, a swashbuckling part in a pirate story."

Henreid was under contract to Warner Bros.; he wrote up a treatment and took it to head of production Jack L. Warner, who refused to make the film. Henreid said his agent at the time, Lew Wasserman, advised him audiences would not accept him "swinging from the yardarm with a bare chest".

However, the actor remained enthusiastic. Henreid had an existing commitment with RKO to make one film a year dating from his appearance in Joan of Paris, so he decided to take the movie there. Henreid said RKO's then head of production Charles Koerner loved the treatment and agreed to make the film.

In October 1943, RKO announced the film would be their big spectacle of the following year, to star Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders and Walter Slezak. It was based on an original story and script by Aneas MacKenzie By the end of the month, Sanders was out and replaced by Arturo de Córdova with Robert Fellows to produce.

Henreid said RKO assigned script writing duties to George Worthing Yates but when the actor read the first hundred pages "I hated all of it. It was a completely different story from the one I had concocted and I was furious." Henreid said he refused to make the movie until it was rewritten following his outline.

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

Recommended