The Pirates of Blood River | |
---|---|
Directed by | John Gilling |
Screenplay by | John Hunter John Gilling |
Story by | Jimmy Sangster |
Produced by | Michael Carreras |
Starring | Kerwin Mathews Christopher Lee Glenn Corbett Peter Arne Marla Landi Andrew Keir Oliver Reed |
Cinematography | Arthur Grant |
Edited by | Eric Boyd-Perkins |
Music by | Gary Hughes |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release dates | 31 July 1962 (United Kingdom) August 1962 (United States) |
Running time | 87 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
The Pirates of Blood River is a 1962 British swashbuckler film directed by John Gilling and starring Kerwin Mathews, Glenn Corbett, Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed. [1]
While in a penal colony, Huguenot Jonathan Standing is captured by pirates led by Captain LaRoche who force him to lead them back to his home village to retrieve a treasure supposedly hidden there.
The film was produced at Bray Studios, Berkshire. Location shooting took place at Blackpark Lake, Black Park Country Park, Black Park Road, Wexham, Buckinghamshire, England, UK (Blood River); Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, England, UK (jungle); Callow Hill Sandpit, Virginia Water, Surrey, England, UK (penal colony).[ citation needed ]
The film was issued on a double bill with Mysterious Island (1961), Britain's biggest grossing double bill of the year. [2] According to Films and Filming it was the tenth most popular movie in Britain for the year ended 31 October 1962. [3]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Stodgy, two-dimensional costume piece. Blood flows freely against colourful locations, but most schoolboys are likely to wish that the pirates had stayed out at sea." [4]
Leslie Halliwell said: "Land-locked blood and thunder for tough schoolboys" [5]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "This Hammer swashbuckler is a colourful, action-packed adventure. ... There are wenches and scurvy knaves galore, but only tantalising vestiges of the X-rated bloodbath intended, as the film was reduced to U certificate derring-do for the school holidays after long sessions at the censor's office" [6]
Captain Blood is a 1935 American black-and-white swashbuckling pirate film from First National Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Ross Alexander. With a screenplay by Casey Robinson, the film is based on the 1922 novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and concerns an imprisoned doctor and his fellow prisoners who escape their cruel island captivity to become West Indies pirates. An earlier 1924 Vitagraph silent film version of Captain Blood starred J. Warren Kerrigan as Peter Blood. Warner Bros. risked pairing two relatively unknown performers in the lead roles. Flynn's performance made him a major Hollywood star and established him as the natural successor to Douglas Fairbanks and a "symbol of an unvanquished man" during the Great Depression. Captain Blood also established de Havilland, in just her fourth screen appearance, as a major star and was the first of eight films costarring Flynn and de Havilland. In 1938 they would be reunited with Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The same year, Rathbone also starred with Flynn in The Dawn Patrol. In 1962, Flynn's son Sean starred in The Son of Captain Blood.
Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment is a 1966 comedy film directed by Karel Reisz and starring David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave, and Robert Stephens, with Irene Handl and Bernard Bresslaw. It was made by British Lion and produced by Leon Clore from a screenplay by David Mercer, adapted from his BBC television play A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), in which the leading role was played by Ian Hendry. A film poster for the film is prominently shown in High-Rise (2015).
John Richardson was an English actor who appeared in films from the late 1950s until the early 1990s. He was a male lead in Italian genre films, most notably Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) with Barbara Steele, but he was best known for playing the love interest of Ursula Andress in She (1965) and then of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966).
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Andrew Keir was a Scottish actor who appeared in a number of films made by Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s. He was also active in television, and especially in the theatre, in a professional career that lasted from the 1940s to the 1990s.
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John Gilling was an English film director and screenwriter, born in London. He was known for his horror movies, especially those he made for Hammer Films, for whom he directed The Shadow of the Cat (1961), The Plague of the Zombies (1966), The Reptile (1966) and The Mummy's Shroud (1967), Cross of the Devil (1975), among others.
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Kerwin Mathews was an American actor best known for playing the titular heroes in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), and Jack the Giant Killer (1962).
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The Shuttered Room is a 1967 British horror film directed by David Greene and starring Gig Young and Carol Lynley. It is based on the 1959 short story of the same name by August Derleth, published as a so-called "posthumous collaboration" with H. P. Lovecraft. A couple move into a house with dark secrets.
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