'Twas the year 1961 and director Robert D. Webb ruthlessly plundered the footage of older pirate films to make the mild, stage bound adventure called Pirates of Tortuga. Yet Webb did shoot some decent sword fights for the film and some of the performances are terrific, though not necessarily extraordinary.
Most memorable is Italian actress Leticia Roman as Meg, a hastily conceived Moll Flanders pastiche. Captain Bart (Ken Scott) rescues her from a mob after she's caught pick-pocketing. She repays him by stowing away on his ship and taking a bath in his cabin. Then she changes into one of the many expensive dresses he has in one of his sea chests. Why is his sea chest filled with women's clothes and jewellery? This is never addressed.
All the men are wearing little tricorne hats so I figured it was set in the 18th century but then Bart gets orders from Charles II to track down Henry Morgan. My guess is Webb just didn't want his guys wearing big Restoration wigs. But that's not all the monkeying he did with historical accuracy. In this timeline, Henry Morgan has turned pirate again after being appointed governor of Jamaica.
Dave King is pretty entertaining in the film as one of Bart's officers called Pee Wee and there's a memorable scene of him giving fencing instructions to members of the crew. A lot of time is wasted on recycled footage, though. A bear fighting scene is taken from Anne of the Indies and several shots come from The Black Swan for ship exteriors. Since those older movies were shot in 4:3 and Pirates of Tortuga is a wide Cinemascope picture, all the old footage is obtrusively blurry and cropped.
At least sets were built for the film but I'm pretty sure a lot of the same parts used for the streets of London were reused for this film's really unremarkable looking Tortuga.
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