Today, mariners, we’ll be clapping eyes on to the 1950 adaptation of what may be the foundation of modern maritime adventure fiction, Treasure Island. We’ll be screening the Anglo-American Disney adaptation, one of at least 37 screen and 24 theatrical productions based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1881 work, originally serialized in the United Kingdom for the magazine Young Folks.
Stevenson drew on an array of 17th and 18th century sources, most notably including A General History of the Pyrates, by the pseudonymous Captain Charles Johnson, long identified as Daniel Defoe, although recent scholarship disputes this claim. The novel also explicitly mentions a real inn which was opened in the late 1700s in Savannah, Georgia, which remains in operation to this day, The Pirate’s House.
| Director | Byron Haskin |
| Starring | Bobby Driscoll, Robert Newton |
| Links | IMDB. Rotten Tomatoes score: 100. TMDB: Treasure Island. JustWatch streaming availability. |
The best-known prewar cinematic adaptation was made in 1934 and featured prewar nautical cinema regular Wallace Beery as Long John Silver. Beery is as squinty-eyed as his successor, English actor Robert Newton, who gnashes and stumps his way through today’s voyage. Newton’s portrayal of Long John Silver remains toweringly influential in popular portrayals of pirates. He is credited with inventing what we now think of as pirate dialect and his performance features many arrrrrrspects of that style of speech.
Later adaptations continue to be produced regularly and have featured performers including Eddie Izzard, Orson Welles, and Brian Blessed as the one-legged buccaneer.
This 1950 adaptation remains the most notable of all the adaptations for several reasons. It is the first wholly live-action film and the first wholly-offshore production by the Disney studio. The movie was entirely shot in England, primarily because wartime tax regulations prohibited Disney from investing profits earned within the United Kingdom in another location than the island nation itself. One might say that Walt was forced ashore with a treasure chest and chose to shovel money into the English film industry. Given that the film was an enormous success, the X which marks the spot of this film on Disney’s map of cinematic treasures is hardly a secret held deep in unexplored terrain.
Director Byron Haskins would go on to direct the classic 1953 adaptation of War of the Worlds, and cinematographer Freddie Young would fill the same role on David Lean’s immortal Lawrence of Arabia a few years after that.
Well then, make course for the Admiral Benbow Inn, where a chance encounter will take Jim Hawkins to sea and adventure in the blazing climes of the Caribbean! Batten down the tennis rackets! Tighten up, tightly now! Invoke the rhinoceros and spit ye upon the brasswork! Raise each hand high, I say HIGH, and raise the dome of the noonday sky! Cast off, up anchor, and set sail!
6.9
Photos
See all photos >>