Yankee Buccaneer (1952)

Excellent but underrated film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

history and romance. atmosphere of a lot of other adventure films from the period. and something different. maybe the humor or the different manner to use ingredients of original recipes. in fact, a film who has the charm of the heroic stories and something more. maybe the acting or the American implication in a different European problem. maybe the absence of Errol Flynn and the inspired measure in definition of character by Jeff Chandler. or the performance of Joseph Calleia who explores the each side of his character. a film of great images and full of air from childhood books. an oasis for different viewers. and, sure, a certainly delight.

Ridiculous "historical" swashbuckler with zero historical credibility.A US Navy ship masquerades as a pirate ship to expose a conspiracy on the high seas. And somehow, they wedge in a silly girl.The sailors are dressed in bright colors or bright whites--one wonders if they have an electric washer and color-safe bleach available to them. Don't get me started on the shipwrecked-on-an-island chick's hair and makeup. The men's hair is the wrong length for the era. The speech is wrong. There's no Flynn or other charismatic actor making you forgive the stupidity. There are nationalistic lines of dialog that aren't just anachronistic, they gave me the McCarthyism shudders.They didn't even try on any of this to make it credible. I could not suspend my disbelief for one second, therefore the film failed miserably.

The real David Dixon Porter and the real David Glasgow Farragut are portrayed in Yankee Buccaneer by Jeff Chandler and Scott Brady. The film is concerned with a wholly fictitious incident involving about a US Naval vessel going undercover as a pirate ship to find out where these seemingly organized pirates are headquartered. In real life Porter and Farragut were more than teacher and pupil, in fact they were step-brothers.Yankee Buccaneer also has them involved in a way that the film does not make clear with the Portugese dynastic situation in the 19th century in the person of Suzan Ball. The Braganza family was exiled to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars which is a whole film in itself, but not terribly germane to the plot here. Anyway Joseph Calleia is a Spanish governor of one of the few islands in the Caribbean left to Spain. But that's his day job, by night he's the ringleader of the pirate activity and he's a slick article.This naval film plays like one of those old B westerns where real historic people are involved in fictitious situations. Yankee Buccaneer doesn't play fast and loose with history, it just rewrites it to suit the fans of Chandler and Brady. George Matthews has a nice part in this film as the CPO of the ship.A few others might like it as well as the fans of the leads.

Yankee Buccaneer is a pretty good action at sea movie. I had just recently seen it on AMC. I thought that Jeff Chandler played a brilliant part in the movie. Has some action and some good acting. I think you will like this movie and should give it a chance. On a scale of 1-10 I give it an 8.