Something had to have gone monumentally wrong for the great Duvivier to turn out something as uneven, not to say unintelligible as this. Six writer credits on one Screenplay is never a good sign and I for one never thought I'd live to see the day when the names of John and Michael Pertwee shared a writing credit with Charles Spaak. The film has a disconcerting habit of cutting in the middle of a scene then showing the same characters in an entirely different setting dressed in different clothes and an obvious gap in time, the Patricia Roc character segues from cold indifference to passionate love with no discernible explanation, etc. What finally emerges is a cross between To Have And Have Not - smuggling refugees by boat - and The Third Man - black-market drugs in post-war Europe. I can only assume that on paper it looked good enough to attract Duvivier and Spaak but what gets on the screen wouldn't attract flies. It seems there were almost insurmountable problems in production so I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that Duvivier was incapable of making a bad movie, but it remains a major disappointment.
Review of Captain Blackjack
