The Weary Master

Errol Flynn tiredly takes to the seas once again in a watered down 1953 adaptation of The Master of Ballantrae. The book is a smouldering, devilish masterpiece of unreliable narrators who take the conflict of the Jacobite uprising to a personal, family dimension (I reviewed the book in a 2022 entry). This film drains most the life out of the plot to drag a bored Flynn and a livelier Roger Livesey through a run of the mill pirate adventure. One saving grace is the film has some gorgeous cinematography by Jack Cardiff.

The book is primarily about the conflict between two brothers, Henry and Jamie, Jamie being the elder. When the future of the kingdom looks uncertain, whether the king will be a Stuart called James or a Hanover called George, the brothers decide to protect the future of the family estate by taking both sides, with Jamie going off with the Jacobites. While the book primarily follows Henry at home, dealing with the resentment of his father and wife, both of whom preferred the absent and presumed dead Jamie, the film stays with Jamie (Flynn), evidently preferring him, too. As in the book, Jamie is taken by pirates along with his new Irish friend, Burke (Livesey), becoming members of the crew, but it's in Tortuga that Jamie wrests control from the French captain and there's a couple sequences added for a dancing girl in Tortuga played by a charming Gillian Lynne in a translucent blouse. Lynne went on to choreograph Cats and The Phantom of the Opera for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The festering resentment and gradually hardening perspectives of the book are replaced by a simplistic, easily mended little misunderstanding between the brothers and Henry (Anthony Steel) barely has a presence in the film.

Alison (Beatrice Campbell), Jamie's fiancee when he left at the beginning of the book, who married Henry when it seemed Jamie was dead, becomes a steadfast love interest for Jamie. The film interestingly keeps the subplot about Jamie's peasant mistress, Jessie, played by Yvonne Furneaux, who later appeared in Hammer's version of The Mummy and in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The love scenes between Flynn and both women are graced by some of Cardiff's best lighting and are a pleasure to look at, even if, or especially if, you fail to focus on the dialogue.