Le pirate aux dents blanches

This is an odd film but not sympathetic. It is odd because, although it takes its title from a novel by humorist and poet Don Marquis, it really does (apart from a couple of the names of the characters, a woman on the run - a persecuted suffragette in the novel - and the existence of the ship) have nothing whatsoever to do with the novel. Perhaps the fay humour of Marquis was an inspiration....

Odd because La Rocque (always, like Fairbanks, a swashbuckler at second degree) is here taking on Fairbanks not so much in his swashbuckling roles as in his superb zany comedies (The Mystery of the Leaping Fish or When the Clouds Roll By. And in theory it should have all the ingredients f a classic zany comedy - a woman on the run from a man with a sponge who is trying to wash her back takes refuge ("Don't let him wash my back" "Never!") at the home of a man whose house and property is being auctioned around him as he tries to bath and shave, much to the delight of the elderly women at the auction. They chase off to the coast, followed mysteriously wherever they go by a coffin-like box (in fact there are two boxes, one containing the villain and the other a priceless tapestry, but they never manage to work that out).

The woman has a will printed on her back - the question of how quite it got there is never explained - a will which later transfers itself impossibly onto a door.

Meanwhile the robbery of the tapestry, designated a "federal" matter - the FBI had been set up in 1908 but Hoover became director in 1924 and it was during the Prohibition years that it attained its real importance - gets escalated up through an absurd chain of command until army, air force and navy are all mobilised to bomb and bombard the ship where our hero and heroine, quite unaware of the cause for the attack, are trying to get an ancient sea-captain to marry them.

This is really a very heady cocktail and at points it works well but somehow it does not quite make the grade, always lapsing back into more mundane farce (Horne would make his name as a director of shorts for Hal Roach in the first years of the talkies) and it is a little difficult to put one's finger on why. Zany humour is tricky except for those rare beings like Keaton for whom it seemed second nature, and requires the creation of a whole world of counter-reality which here never quite comes off.

I think perhaps the other reviewer is correct in seeing two principals as the main weakness. They make a good job of remaining earnest despite the absurdities but they lack the bravura indifference to reality shown, say, by Keaton and McGuire (one of the best comic duos in the whole of film history) in Crisp's The Navigator and they do not have that touch of the manic that distinguished Max Linder or Dougie Fairbanks or for that matter Alice Howell or the much under-rated Martha Sleeper. Here, veteran comic Jack Ackroyd, who plays the servant Wiggins, has to work hard to keep the adrenaline going. Snitz Edwards as the villain is a bit wasted.

Still such humour is sufficiently rare in the US tradition to be well worthy of notice.

This is quite an enjoyable romantic comedy romance from James Horne that sees Rod La Rocque (that'd surely be a porn name nowadays) as the eighth generation of the "Cleggett" family, descended from pirates who made their fortune a-robbing and plundering on the high seas. The family's continued success is dependent on the eldest son getting married on his 25th birthday upon the decks of their ship - the now concreted-in "Jasper B". By the time we get to this latest inheritor, we have a handsome young lad who wakes up that fateful day without so much as a girlfriend! The race is on to find true love and stop him being turfed out, penniless... Luckily, he has the services of his wily, long suffering valet "Wiggins" (Jack Ackroyd) at his side - though it is not always quite clear what his agenda is! Anyway, meantime, heiress "Agatha Fairhaven" (the pretty, but otherwise rather bland, Mildred Harris) might just be the woman for him. Can it all be arranged in time? La Rocque is a charismatic, handsome man who shies not from showing off his finely honed torso nor from smiling charmingly at his co-stars and the camera; and there is plenty of slapstick-lite style of comedy complemented by some really quite wittily written inter-titles to keep this entertaining.

When Cecil B. DeMille walked away from the studio he helped form, Paramount Pictures, he gained a feeling of total independence he hadn't felt in quite a long time. He had been battling with Paramount's president, Adolph Zukor, about a number of his elaborate films that went over budget. Once he left, DeMille established his own production company in 1924, financing both his and low-budgeted films, labeled production pictures, under his DeMille Pictures Corporation umbrella. He gathered a team of working colleagues from his Paramount days and gave them the freedom to come up with creative projects, no matter how far out and harebrained they were.

As film historians note, DeMille was a great director but a poor businessman. To take one example, the December 1926 "Cruise of the Jasper B" was as wacky of a movie as can be imagined. The plot itself almost defies explanation. A rich young man, Jerry Cleggett (Rod La Rocque), is facing losing everything, including a large inheritance, if he doesn't marry by his 25th birthday on the family's old Jasper B ship. At the same time, another young woman, Agatha Fairhaven (Mildred Harris), stands to gain her father's inheritance when he dies. Trouble is, the uncle on her father's side is cut out of the will. Mr. Fairhaven's nurse is in cahoots with Agatha's uncle and tosses the father's will out of the window, only to land on Agatha's bare back that happens to be wet. The will sticks on her back for quite some time, with the ink imprinting on her skin. The uncle eventually gets hold of the will and rips it up, only to discover she's got a copy of it on her back. He and the nurse begin to chase her with a wet sponge in an effort to wipe it clean. That's when Agatha and Jerry meet and forge an alliance of love and romance.

To show how much freedom DeMille gave his team, he okayed the production. Writers Tay Garnett, who wrote "The Postman Always Rings Twice," and Zelda Sears, who possessed an impressive resume of scripts, including Norma Shearer's "The Divorcee," were no amateurs to the business of scriptwriting. The cast in "Cruise of the Jasper B" were no slouches either. Actress Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin's first wife, a very busy actress in Hollywood at the time with some pretty impressive credentials, signed on to the project. And Rod La Rocque, the male lead, who married Hungarian actress Vilma Banky a year later, would successfully make the transition to sound movies before becoming a real estate broker in 1941.

After a dedication, "To those who believe in Santa Claus, thirty miles to the gallon, and other fairy stories," a flashback to the year 1725 shows bare-chested Rod La Rocque (as Jeremiah Cleggett) adventuring aboard the pirate ship "Jasper B" in its glory days. His taking over of the ship, and wedding a Spanish maiden on board, starts a tradition - each generation's "Cleggett" must marry on his twenty-fifth birthday, aboard the old ship known as the "Jasper B", or lose his inheritance.

In the present (1926), Mr. La Rocque (now as Jeremiah "Jerry" Cleggett VIII) turns twenty-five, and knows he has to marry a woman on the deck of the old "Jasper B", or lose the family fortune, according to tradition. Trusty companion and valet Jack Ackroyd (as Wiggins) wants his hunky pal to remain single, but La Rocque finds the ideal lass in Mildred Harris (as Agatha Fairhaven), who is also inheriting a fortune. But Ms. Harris' disinherited stepbrother, Snitz Edwards (as Reginald Maltravers), wants to stop the potentially wealthy couple from reaching the alter.

La Rocque became a top star in Cecil B. Deville's "The Ten Commandments" (1923), and remained popular through the 1920s. "The Cruise of the Jasper B" is a good film to see an appealing La Rocque in his peak of popularity as a star (and it provides a generous look at his physique). It would have been nice to see Vilma Bánky as his leading lady in this one; instead of the current Mrs. La Rocque (Bánky), we get a former Mrs. Charlie Chaplin (Harris). Mr. Ackroyd, the "spoof" prologue, and the "chase" scenes are highlights.

****** The Cruise of the Jasper B (12/13/26) James W. Horne ~ Rod La Rocque, Mildred Harris, Jack Ackroyd

Allegedly, Rod La Rocque didn't make it in the Thirties, because he slapped a producer who had made the moves on Mrs la Rocque, silent star Vilma Banky.

We certainly missed out because of that. But then again, how would Errol Flynn ever have found a niche with Rod La Rocque around? 'Cruise' is vintage La Rocque, and at every turn the viewer is smitten with his infectious grin and invited to share the fun by those intelligent dark eyes. In the movie he is fifth or something generation of rich merchants, a direct descendant of glamorous pirates, down on his luck. The whole house with all the furniture and all his clothes is being sold at an auction while he is still in bed, and the women bidders are suitably titillated by his increasing nakedness. He combines his efforts to that of a lovely woman who, by some strange coincidence, has the will of her deceased uncle printed on her naked back ... The swashbuckling is supreme, the pacing is riveting, and La Rocque reigns!