Pirates of Tripoli

Enjoyed this old film which was interesting to view the type of picture watched in 1955 and how cheap this picture was made. However, it had an interesting story and Paul Henreid, ( Edri Al-Gadrin ) played a great role as a Pirate Captain. Patricia Medina, (Princess Karjan) appears in the role as a princess of Misurate who losses her kingdom to a wicked King named John Miljan who wants to kill her and be in control of all her wealth. Princess Karjan at first wants to give herself up, but a faithful servant advises her to seek out a Pirate, Edril Al-Gadrin to secure her kingdom back and she is willing to pay him great riches. In the meantime there is plenty of swords clashing against steel blades and cannons blasting away at model ships in the background. There are all forms of torture and whippings and of course, romance between Henreid and Medina. This is a really a low budget film with too much fake scenery and a complete burn out.

Paul Henried tries valiantly to carry this movie, which is badly written, badly directed, and badly edited. Large portions of the film are devoted to people looking blankly around at something or other (or at each other), or perpetually riding horses about the countryside. Actors often seem to be still waiting for their cues even as they're on camera ("oh! am I on?"). At one point, a cannon ball explodes behind a soldier but he grabs his stomach. The sense of scale often is missing due to the overuse of close-ups. The best scenes take place on board ship, and the pursuit scenes are fairly well done. But for the most part, the acting is wooden and formulaic, and the sword fight scenes are poorly choreographed.

Princess Karjan promises pirate captain Edri-Al-Gardian a fabulous reward if he helps her regain her lost kingdom of Misurata from Malek. When the latter destroys Gardian's armada, Karjan and Gardian enter Misurata in disguise in order to get Karjan's hidden jewels to buy new ships.

Pirates of Tripoli is a rather fun mix of Arabian adventure and pirate genre, with a nifty pace, a plot that always moving with some twist and turns and some lively action, ok some of that does consist of stock footage, but this is a low budget programmer after all. Personally I enjoyed it, loved the scene where they dive for the treasure box and the sword fights are well-choreographed. Paul Henreid is witty, energetic and charming as the pirate and Patricia Medina is just beautiful. This is a harmless slice of comic strip actioner with an endearing innocent charm, a feel-good escapist fare.

I saw this movie today on TCM and it was really pretty bad even allowing for the year that it was made. The dialogue was beyond corny and I thought that the acting was just plain bad. Most of the time it sounded like they were reading the script off a teleprompter without prior rehearsal. The "dramatic" fight scenes were not very well staged and when you compare the long shots and close up's in the same scene you can tell that the continuity person (if indeed there was one) did not do a very good job either. When you see the type of performance that Paul Heinreid gave in Casablanca and Hollow Triumph I can only assume that it was the directing. Black and White maybe... but I cannot believe that they wasted Technicolor on this !