The New Pictures, Dec. 7, 1942

The Black Swan (20th Century-Fox) dives headfirst into a Technicolored splash of kicking señoritas and their buccaneer abductors, settles down to handsomely routine piratical high jinks. For Sabatini-addicts there is veteran Director Henry King’s expert translation of Sabatini’s romantic novel about young love and buckets of blood on the Spanish Main. For others there is a coy love affair between Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara.

Décor is the Caribbean in the Golden Age of piracy. Hero is one Jamie-Boy Waring (Tyrone Power), who stands by his old captain, Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar), when Morgan decides to reform and put his buccaneering ex-mates out of business. Villain is Captain Leech (George Sanders, in a beard like a bonfire), also one of Morgan’s raiders. The Black Swan is unreformed Captain Leech’s pirate ship. Heroine is Lady Margaret Denby (Maureen O’Hara), daughter of Jamaica’s ousted Governor.

Jamie-Boy’s courtship is coarse but dashing. Time and again (on the rack, swimming, and, by a neat sidestep of the Hays office, in bed with her), Mr. Power gives Miss O’Hara and cinemaddicts an eyeful of his expensive torso. Later he kidnaps her aboard his ship, The Revenge, wolfs roast fowl at her in the Henry VIII manner. She succumbs. She stands by in a petticoat while, in a frenzy of rapiers, broadsides and bloated sails, Jamie-Boy and Governor Morgan liquidate Leech and crew. Occasionally Mr. Power has flashes of Douglas Fairbanks. Most of the time he is just a tougher-than-normal Tyrone Power. The aloof and lordly ships, whenever they get a chance, sail majestically away with the show.

Cairo (M.G.M.) is an ingenious spy picture which engages in a lot of good-natured spoofing of the standard Hollywood thriller. Robert Young (sent to cover the war in Africa because he is a typical “smalltown reporter”), Reginald Owen (a Nazi Intelligence officer posing as a British Intelligence officer), Edward Ciannelli (an Oriental mastermind) and Jeanette MacDonald engage in a game of deliberately slapstick I Spy. Climax comes when the sympathetic vibrations of Singer MacDonald’s high C tickle open a secret door into a pyramid, foil a Nazi plot to bomb a U.S. transport by remote control.

Seven Days Leave (RKO-Radio). In this musical lalapalooza, it is Private View tor Mature’s business to woo and wed Lucille Ball during his brief army leave, in order to fulfill a codicil in eccentric Grandfather’s will and inherit $100,000. The various soldierly and legal comics who help him are so neolithic that Mr. Mature at his best seems no worse than a particularly acute touch of Hodgkin’s disease. Lucille Ball looks patient, tired, a little frightened. As her young sister, 17-year-old Newcomer Marcy McGuire makes a charming jitterbug for those whom bugs charm.

Mr. Mature himself makes the kindest possible remark about the show: “We’re human.” Retorts an M.P.: “Ah, stop bragging.”