Orson Welles bulked up to play Hank Quinlan in 'Touch of Evil'. Soon afterwards he pitched up in this British effort to crack foreign markets with a multinational cast and exotic location shooting- and it became clear that he had surrendered in the battle of avoirdupois.
A shame, because he thereby condemned himself to playing 'larger than life' characters in historical romps or fantasies to finance his gargantuan appetites and bootlace productions. Trying to get closer to normality, as he had been in 'Tomorrow is Forever' or his own 'Lady from Shanghai', might have stretched him more than Genghis Khan, Louis XVIII or Long John Silver.
As Captain Cecil Hart, apparently a pompous British owner-captain of the titular old tub, Welles starts out as a relatively normal if annoying fellow, redeemed by his love of flowers and pet birds. But he soon devolves into spluttering, grimacing and waddling, like Charles Laughton slumming it with Abbott and Costello. And inevitably the skipper is unmasked as yet another flimflam artist: Welles gave dissenters from the martyred-genius myth ammo by playing so many.
He has his cigar, his card-deck prestidigitation and matchlessly modulated voice to remind us of the real Orson. His accent hovers between Brandoesque British and Father Mapple, with brief reminders of 'Black Irish, notorious waterfront agitator'. It is a ham's attempt to hijack the film, on a par with the Chinese pirates' attempt on the 'Fat Annie', and it is a disservice to his co-stars. As usual, Welles tried to rewrite his dialogue and take over direction, resisted by Lewis Gilbert. Curt Jurgens objected and the result was an unhappy shoot.
Gilbert hated the result, but it has its pleasures. He reconciles a largely confined setting and small star cast well with CinemaScope, while the shore footage of an amazingly undeveloped Hong Kong and Macau looks gorgeous in the brief heyday of Eastmancolor, which outdid monopack Technicolor. The cinematography comes up pin-sharp and lustrous; really there has been no progress in that department in sixty years. A former boy actor, Gilbert coaxes nice cameos from Sylvia Syms's schoolgirl flock.
Jurgens, replacing Peter Finch, has to wear one soiled suit all through. He seemed a strange choice but his hard edges as an Anglo-Austrian drifter, brawler and drunk are not planed down for a family film; his charm and courage emerge persuasively, and his blue eyes shine more brightly as he shapes up.
Syms was at the height of her beauty as an English rose with a steel core, following 'Ice Cold in Alex'. Noel Purcell contrives to take the nasty taste out of being an Irish engineer with a Chinese wife and big family in each port, though neither spouse speaks.
This is a very colonial flick, in which the only natives are hoodlums. And its structural problem is the tacked-on second climax of the pirate raid. Jurgens superseding the drunk Captain during a typhoon was enough to exonerate him. But we then have to sit through twenty minutes of menace from a bald thug, including a very discordant moment of violence involving the ever-wimpish Jeremy Spenser as the Captain's cowardly underling.
Welles is sidelined by then. For some reason he spends the last two reels dead drunk or with a board strapped to his back, as if the production were punishing him for insubordination.
Whatever his regrets, Gilbert went back to the Far East for my favourite Bond film, 'You Only Live Twice', and used Jurgens as the villain in 'The Spy Who Loved Me'.
