CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE (47)

Directed by: Henry King (1947)

Starring: Tyrone Power, Jean Peters, Cesar Romero, Lee J. Cobb

The Pitch: A 16th-century Castilian nobleman, hounded by the Spanish Inquisition, flees to the New World and joins Hernando Cortes's expedition to conquer Mexico.

Theo Sez: An oddity : a swashbuckler with the flavour of a religious epic. It begins with swordplay and daring escapes, but you know something's a bit off when our hero not only kills a man but makes him renounce God first (and subsequently feels a lot guiltier about the latter than the former). Just when the action seems about to take off - when Cortes and his men set off on their historic expedition - it dries up instead, turning into a thoughtful movie that's more interested in things like Honour and Morality than in derring-do, even dropping in a little speech about the evils of colonialism : it feels as though King and his scriptwriter (Lamar Trotti) had decided to transplant the worthy solemnity of their WILSON from three years earlier into the kind of ground the director had covered previously (and more enjoyably) in THE BLACK SWAN. The result is the kind of film that proudly tells us it was shot "whenever possible" on the actual locations Cortes had passed through but neglects to show what actually happened on those locations - the hardships Cortes and his men suffered, or the battles they fought : the climax is instead taken up with whether our hero can hew to his Christian vow, and resist the temptation of avenging himself on the man who killed his sister. It's all very admirable, but - even by the standards of post-war seriousness - a little bizarre. The fact that it ends just as the conquistadors approach the Aztec capital, with Cortes warning his troops of bloody battles ahead - "many men will die in the next few days" - is a fittingly perverse anti-climax.