“LIGHTHOUSE
KIRK AND PIRATE YULâ€
By
Raymond Benson
Spend
eleven million dollars (that was a lot of money in 1970-1971), cast classic
Hollywood stars like Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner, hire an international
production crew from Spain, Italy, and France, appoint Alexander and Ilya
Salkind as producers (with Douglas himself credited as producer), and adapt a
little-known public domain novel by Jules Verne about pirates in the Cape Horn
area in 1865, and you’ve got the ingredients for a rousing, epic
action/adventure flick to rival Journey to the Center of the Earth or 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, right?
Unfortunately,
something went wrong. The Light at the Edge of the World flopped at the
box office, and, while the picture has its fans—who will welcome this
impressive new Blu-ray restoration from Kino Lorber—the movie is a dud.
Douglas
plays Will Denton, a lighthouse keeper on an isolated island. His only
companions are a crusty sea captain (Fernando Rey), young Felipe (Massimo
Ranieri), and a cute monkey named Mario. One day, a group of truly nasty
pirates, led by the sadistic Jonathan Kongre (Brynner), arrives. They proceed
to murder the captain, Felipe, and, in a particularly disgusting moment, the
monkey. Denton hides out amidst the caves and rocks on the island, and for the
rest of the movie attempts to pick off the pirates, guerilla style. Soon,
though, a ship of innocent travelers sails by. The pirates kill off everyone on
board except a Arabella (Samantha Eggar, who coincidentally is the spitting
image of the woman who broke Denton’s heart back in America). Kongre decides to
keep Arabella alive for himself. From then on, the tale becomes a case of one
man against a small army, with a final showdown, of course, between the two
leads.
On
paper it sounds exciting enough. However, one of the problems that struck this
reviewer today is the level of cruelty enacted by the pirates throughout
the movie. There are sequences of serious violence, and the film was rated only
PG at the time! Granted, in those days, the MPAA was rather lenient in the
movie ratings when it came to violence—this was the year of Dirty Harry,
Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange (which were rated,
respectively, R, R, and X, although Orange was eventually re-rated to
R). Light at the Edge contains R-rated violence and scenes of torture;
perhaps they got away with the PG because the producer/star was Douglas—who knows?
Besides
the relative unpleasantness of the feature, there’s nothing exceptionally
striking about it. Douglas delivers a solid “Kirk Douglas†performance, but
Brynner is simply awful. He’s suitably wicked in an “I’m-so-villainous†manner,
but it’s obvious he’s walking through it for the paycheck. Every beat of the
lighthouse keeper’s battle to regain control of the island is predictable and
oddly unsatisfying. The look of the picture also lacks that cinematic sweep
that usually accompanies such fare as Center of the Earth, 20,000
Leagues, or even something like the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty. The
thing feels like it was, well, made for television.
Perhaps
it was the skinning of the monkey that turned off this reviewer.
Kino
Lorber’s high definition restoration is quite well-done visually and sonically.
The feature comes with English subtitles for the hearing impaired, and there’s
an audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson,
who appreciate the picture much more than this reviewer. Producer Ilya Salkind
and director Kevin Billington make cameo commentary as well, and this adds some
extra value to the proceedings. Other supplements are a radio spot and
theatrical trailers to this and other Kino Lorber titles.
As
mentioned above, there are indeed fans of The Light at the Edge of the World,
and this Blu-ray will be cherished by them and those admirers of Douglas and
Brynner who will undoubtedly forgive the actors for lesser works.
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