FILMOGRAPHY

Scan the frame from left to right: the flame-kissed knife, the forcibly intoxicated monkey, the chopping block on which the sailors will lop off the monkey’s gangrenous tail. Curious children look on.

Don’t be deceived by the fact that the producers originally had Hayley Mills in mind for the role of Emily. They needed a Deborah Baxter (above center) and after seeing 2000 girls they found one. Dry, lost, affectless, a frighteningly ambiguous and internalizing thing. I wonder though how much more duplicitous a work it would have been with Mills in the role — this is not a children’s film.

Pirates Quinn and Coburn, never so charmingly nefarious, never so indelible.

The guileless morbidity and irreverence of children at play, as in this mock burial-at-sea which offends the pirate. Bullet-point juxtapositions of various religious practices, varieties of corruption and depravity. Kids’ casual appropriation of religion and superstition reinforces their power. The pirates are unnerved. Though their lives depend on the literal — ropes, water, sails — their superstitions are strictly observed and not to be trifled with.

It’s okay to be shocked at what a fifty-year-old man and ten-year-old girl convey here. (Quinn inscribed Baxter’s sister’s autograph book “To my future sister in law!”)

And it goes on; there are nuances. Say what you will about the release of sexual tension in the scene where Emily’s leg is impaled by a spike.

The song “High on a Gallows Tree” which opens and closes the film grossly contradicts what Mackendrick accomplishes with a pathos hewn from more durable substances.

Children are usually made out to be such sentimental creatures, but here their pragmatic efficiency seems at times to register as more cynical and brutal than what the pirates are capable of. When Emily asks if her eldest brother is coming back, not knowing he’s dead, Coburn answers coldly, “He’s not coming back, he had an accident,” almost daring the child to have an emotional response. She says, “Edward wants to know if he can have his blanket.” Coburn is nonplussed. Survival requires terse negotiation. Neither Emily nor the viewer has time for tears — that suppression of emotional payoff is Mackendrick’s most sophisticated technique.

It’s useless to talk about what the film could have been, how much was cut, what Mackendrick actually intended. Shipwreck analogies are too easy.