Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951)

Director: William Marshall
Writer: Errol Flynn
Stars: Errol Flynn, Micheline Prelle, Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead and Victor Franken

Index: The First Thirty.

It’s a shame that Adventures of Captain Fabian isn’t a better movie to wrap up the First Thirty of Vincent Price, but, as we all know, he went on to much better things, not least the horror genre that turned him into an icon. At least that gives me a start for this review, because it would otherwise be awkward.

This ought to be an Errol Flynn film, partly because he’s the star, top billed and in the title role, but also because he wrote the screenplay. It may be telling that he never wrote another one, though he did write whatever counted as a script for Cuban Rebel Girls, his final feature which is so utterly bonkers I included it as my Q for Quickie chapter in my first book, Huh?

However, he simply isn’t notable here. The film establishes itself before he shows up, but he does have an impact when he does. He’s an older seafarer, not remotely as ripped as he is in the poster but still dashing and charming. However, he’s also annoyingly calm, whatever else is happening at the time, leaving every bit of drama to his co-stars.

He also vanishes again for a while, as events play out, because he isn’t the protagonist, just a character who sticks his nose into something he shouldn’t and thus enables a whole bunch of chaos and heartbreak. What’s telling is that, had he left well alone, we wouldn’t have a film but a lot of fictional people would still be alive. Is that what Flynn saw as adventure?

That co-star is Micheline Presle, her name a little Anglicised for the credits. She’s the lead but she’s not the heroine, even if we certainly have sympathy for her at the start.

She’s Léa here, a French Creole girl working for George Brissac, with whom she’s having an affair. She’s beautiful and he’s rich, or at least he will be when his uncle dies, as he’ll inherit everything. Well, if he manages to stay out of trouble. Guess how well that goes?

Brissac is played by Vincent Price, so is just as elegant and charming as we expect, even if George is clearly no good. The film begins with him leaving his New Orleans mansion to visit his plantation, accompanied by his fiancée, a bossy Miss Cynthia. However, as the servants fire up a party in their absence, he returns to be with his mistress. Another admirer of Léa gets jealous, which prompts her to whack him over the head a lot of times and, with a corpse on his hands, George hurls her under the bus.

She’s standing trial for her crimes, George Brissac conspicuously absent but Henri Brissac presiding, when Captain Fabian sails back into port. He and his father used to be a big deal in town but the Brissacs own everything now, his family’s mercantile company included. In fact, technically Fabian works for them too.

So he wanders into court just to stir things up and cause trouble for his enemies. He does enough to get the charges dropped and Léa is bound over into his custody. Not content with that, he buys the local tavern for $5,000, gives it to Léa and even persuades George to pay for it. Then he sails away again, chaos sown.

Now, that could have been our movie, with a neat rise fall rise story for Léa, who could be seen as the heroine at this point. There’s love and lust and cheating. There’s murder. There’s the drama of a trial, sparked by betrayal and fuelled by corruption. It’s a David vs. Goliath story, the servant against the master. And the dashing Captain Fabian sweeps in to save the day and sail off into the sunset, secure in the knowledge that justice has been done.

Except we’re only three quarters of an hour in and that’s not even halfway. Flynn sees this as the groundwork for a tragedy, Léa not at all happy about the role of a woman scorned and willing to do whatever it takes to bring George Brillac down. She doesn’t want to kill him, as that would be too easy. She wants to own him.

There are plenty of moments when this is a powerful film. Presle has charm and presence, so we can easily buy into everyone falling for her, whatever their station in life. She makes Léa fiery enough that we have no trouble with the idea that anyone daring enough to reach for her is likely to get burned. That holds true for George Brissac, who Price plays two ways. To the world, he’s an elegant gentleman who’s born to society, even with wild sideburns. To his uncle, he’s trouble and he’d happily leave his fortune to anyone else, if only there was someone else. All the best scenes here are with Léa and/or George, regardless of which genre they’ve waltzed into for a particular scene.

This appears to be an adventure movie, but it really isn’t, except perhaps towards the end when things start to burn down, both literally and metaphorically. It’s a period piece, set in New Orleans in 1860, and a rags to riches tale, with the creole girl manouevering her way up to St. Charles St., where the proud people live. It’s a drama, of course, but also a melodrama that moves into the realm of the gothic. There are also grotesque scenes that go beyond mere gothics into the territory of horror; some feel like they were borrowed from Poe. And it’s a romance, though we’re never quite convinced about whether that truly counts.

All in all, it travels quite the distance across many genre lines, and, as you can imagine, it’s not remotely all successful. There are points when we shift from powerful dramatic scenes like Léa realising that, by getting all she wants, she ends up with nothing, and George finding that he isn’t quite as emasculated as he thinks he is, only to veer sideways into melodramatic romance cliché. One moment we think about Oscars, the next we think about Razzies, and it continues to bounce between those extremes, ending up much closer to the latter.

I liked Presle’s performance here, though I didn’t like Léa at all. Similarly I enjoyed Price’s performance without liking George at all. The last few paragraphs haven’t mentioned Errol Flynn or Captain Fabian once and there’s good reason for that. He does return to the film, of course, but he’s never really there even when he’s on screen. Flynn underplays Fabian even when he does some swashbuckling late on, as everything’s falling apart. We pay attention to the mass brawl unfolding around him.

There are reasons that Errol Flynn’s movies in the fifties aren’t remotely seen in the same light as those in the thirties. They would only get worse from here. Presle went on to a long and successful career, dying only last month at 101. Price, of course, went from strength to stretch, soon finding horror with his 33rd film, House of Wax, and only getting more iconic. As Flynn’s fortunes fell, theirs rose.