Frank Borzage’s 1945 film The Spanish Main is a colorful, typical swashbuckler starring the red-headed Irish spitfire Maureen O’Hara, and it’s all right as far as these things go, but it hardly seems the work of its maker. It stands as one of Borzage’s filler works, an anonymous assignment, like Flight Command or Stage Door Canteen, films that could have been made by anyone. Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of Citizen Kane and many other fine films, co-wrote the screenplay, which cannibalizes everything from Captain Blood to The Black Swan. There are swordfights, whippings, action, and Binnie Barnes as a macho female pirate. But nothing distinguishes The Spanish Main from a dozen other pirate films of this ilk, so that the auteur theory seems to go to sleep momentarily, replaced by the “versatility” prized by studio bosses and imposed on creators.
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