O Pirata Real

Rod Taylor essays the role of Sir Francis Drake in Seven Seas To Calais, a tale of piracy and politics in the Elizabethan Age. Sometimes those two professions were blended quite a bit.

A good deal of this has been gone over in the two films that Flora Robson did playing Queen Elizabeth I, Fire Over England and The Sea Hawk. In this film we get Sir Francis Drake's round the world voyage picking up all kinds of loot for the British crown, stolen from the Spanish who would be using it to finance their great Armada to crush those Protestant upstarts over on that island kingdom. We also have the plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put her Catholic kinsmen Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. That's woven into the film where Drake's aid Keith Michell woos lady in waiting Edy Vessel. But she doesn't like the fact that he's off having all kinds of adventures. While Michell's away, Vessel is courted by Sir Thomas Babington played by Terence Hill before he went into spaghetti westerns who gets her involved in the plot against Elizabeth. Babington was a real life figure whose capture and confession by that other real life figure Francis Walsingham turned up the whole plot that led to Mary Stuart's execution.

Action and intrigue are the hallmarks of Seven Seas To Calais. But I fear a lot of it is rehashed from those old classics which were done a lot better.