Cinema: Kids Are Worse Than Pirates

A High Wind in Jamaica is a family picture with a ferocious theme. Like the quasi-classic novel written 36 years ago by British Author Richard Hughes, it is on the surface a conventional tale of piracy, kidnaping, and adventure on the high seas. And like the corrosive original, its deeper purpose is to fathom the psyches of seven stolen children whose innocence is only skin deep. Blood kin to the tykes in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, they are remote, ritualistic, amoral—natives of a savage Lilliput that adults invade at their own risk.

Director Alexander Mackendrick (Tight Little Island, A Boy Ten Feet Tall) has perfected the art of making small films immoderately successful. In High Wind, he shrewdly sugarcoats every point, spinning his 19th century yarn in such lively style that only discerning palates will pucker at the aftertaste. His subjects are the Thornton children, a quintet of improper Victorians who, along with two Creole friends, are packed off from Jamaica to be properly educated in England. En route they are inadvertently abducted when their ship is hijacked and they wander aboard the pirate vessel, manned by a dissolute captain (Anthony Quinn), his raffish mate (James Coburn) and a crew of inept, superstitious ruffians.

To their befuddled captors, the children soon seem as unlucky an omen as a dead albatross. Horridly adaptable, the youngsters regard lust and violence as spectator sports, cruelty as commonplace. Death itself is a game to them.

“We’re having a burial at sea,” they explain to Quinn as they play.

“What are you—heathen?” he rages.

“Church of England,” comes the indignant reply.

Ashore at the sinful port of Tampico, one Thornton lad tumbles to his death in a courtyard while observing the late-night debauchery below. Hustled back aboard ship, the children reveal unpredictable sensibilities when the boy’s small sister creeps topside to ask: “If John’s not coming back, Edward wants to know if he can have his blanket.”

As Chavez, a captain more likely to buckle than swash, Quinn provides an exuberant reprise of his Zorba the Greek characterization, though the parallel becomes a bit insistent when he starts nuzzling Tampico’s (and Zorba’s) rarest old jade, Lila Kedrova. Despite an occasional drift into the shallows, High Wind never loses sight of its goals. The script even touches upon the novel’s suggestion that the captain harbors a disquieting yen for the spunky ten-year-old Emily (Deborah Baxter), who ultimately spells his destruction.

Young Actress Baxter, adroitly steered by Mackendrick through a delicate and provocative role, manages to project both tomboyish pluck and the elusive boldness of a child grown prematurely wise. In a fit of terror, the girl murders a Dutch hostage taken by the pirates, thus setting the stage for the film’s incisive postlude. Safely delivered to England, her former captors gone to the gallows charged with her crime, Emily, like any pretty English schoolgirl, stands by a pretty English pond watching a toy sailboat drift away. Only the eyes reveal that within her child’s body dwells a pint-sized Circe attuned to evils as old as the human heart.