Paul Heinreid

  • The Spanish Main (1945)

    The Spanish Main (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Ah, pirate movies: For a long time in Hollywood, seeing one of them meant that you’d seen half of them. They’d have a capable hero, a good person forced in service of a pirate until he became the pirate, largely to have the allure of piratical protagonists without, well, being as repellent as a real pirate. Adventures on the high seas would follow: ship battles, sword fights, swinging for the rigging, capturing the corrupt governor, navigating through a storm, but especially romancing a reluctant beauty, progressively seducing her through good deeds and fearless action. In this context, The Spanish Main is no outlier. Perhaps its most distinctive trait is the unusual casting of Paul Heinreid (not normally known as a swashbuckling hero) in the lead role. Oh, there are other niceties as well: Maureen O’Hara is wonderful as the heroine, especially when the colour cinematography does justice to her red hair. Some of the action sequences are thrilling. The dialogue is not bad. In other words, you get what you expect from a pirate adventure in seeing The Spanish Main. Where the film doesn’t do as well is in distinguishing itself from similar films — it’s an average example of the form, without the extra flourish of other better-known examples. But that’s already not bad (and have I mentioned O’Hara?), especially if you know what you’re getting yourself into.

  • The Conspirators (1944)

    The Conspirators (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I’m not sure why it took me so long to discover this, but Warner Brothers turned out a slew of Casablanca-light movies in the mid-1940s. Most of them took place in Europe, dealt with a combination of often-fictionalized European politics and romance, often featured Nazis as villains, and Casablanca performers as players. The Peter Lorre/Sydney Greenstreet duo alone is a good way to identify the half-dozen films in that sub-sub-sub-genre, and here they are indeed in The Conspirators, a film that sticks far closer to Casablanca than the other films in the same vein. Here, the Lorre/Greenstreet pairing is supplemented by Paul Heinreid and the beautiful Hedy Lamarr as members of a Portuguese anti-Nazi resistance group trying to root out a traitor among them. It’s all fairly familiar stuff, but the cast knows what it’s doing, and so does the Warner Brothers apparatus surrounding them. Lamarr is close to her most glamorous here, and the Greenstreet/Lorre combo is a known quantity as well. Churned out quickly to take advantage of topical events and the American public’s appetite for anti-Nazi material, The Conspirators is, in some ways, an ordinary wartime thriller, but the combination of some above-average elements does make the result more interesting even when it’s clearly trying to repeat a much-better film.