The 1935 production “Dancing Pirate” has gained footnote status in movie history for several accomplishments: it was among the few productions nominated in the short-lived Academy Award category for Best Dance Direction, it was the first musical feature shot in the three-strip Technicolor process, it was the last film produced by the independent Pioneer Pictures studio, and it included uncredited blink-and-you-miss-them appearances by a young Rita Hayworth and future First Lady Pat Nixon as members of the dancing ensemble.
Beyond those bits of trivia, however, there’s not much to recall about this cheerful but silly tale of a Boston dance teacher in 1820 who gets shanghaied on a pirate ship and winds up in California – he escapes from the pirates, but Mexican villagers believe he is a cutthroat and prepare to hang him. Mercifully, the pretty daughter of the mayor saves his life because she wants him to teach her the waltz.
Broadway actor Charles Collins seeks to come across as a mix of Douglas Fairbanks and Fred Astaire as the dance teacher, but he is somewhat deficient in the charisma department, and it is easy to see why he never clicked as a Hollywood star. Leading lade Steffi Duna was a Hungarian starlet whose accented English typecast her to playing exotics – obviously, no one in 1935 seemed to mind that the Mexican señorita had a Central European accent. Reliable character actors Frank Morgan, Luis Alberni and Jack LaRue keep the film in motion between a pair of Rodgers and Hart tunes and the Oscar-nominated dance numbers.
The real tonic here is William V. Skall’s Technicolor cinematography, which gives the film a sense of style and vitality that is absent in the connect-the-dots screenplay and Lloyd Corrigan’s less than stellar directing. A new Blu-ray and DVD release of “Dancing Pirate” via The Film Detective offers a visual superiority lacking in many crummy public domain copies circulating online.