CAPTAIN'S PARADISE Movie Review

Alec Guinness redefines compartmentalizing in this charming, lightweight British farce from 1953. He's the sailor with a girl in every port, but there are only two ports, and the two girls are both his wives. Brief Encounter's Celia Johnson is the respectable, traditional British wife who keeps their neat, genteel home in Gibraltar, and Yvonne De Carlo provides a considerably more spicy brand of domesticity whenever Guinness docks in Morocco. The implication of course is that the two women are symbolic of that eternal dual-circuit impulse every man is reputed to have about what he wants in a woman—and what he wants in a wife. The captain's blissful bigamy is the not-so-simple answer to having it all. Captain's Paradise eventually wears a little thin, particularly when old boy's two worlds threaten to collide, but the performers provide enormously compensating fun along the way. (The theme of one man obsessed with two very different women must have been dear to the heart of Captain's Paradise author Alec Coppel, for five years later he would co-author the great screenplay of Vertigo for Alfred Hitchcock. Of the two, it was Captain's Paradise for which Coppel received an Oscar nomination.)

NEXT STOP … Monsieur Verdoux, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob

1953 89m/B GB Alec Guinness, Yvonne De Carlo, Celia Johnson, Miles Malleson, Nicholas Phipps, Ferdinand “Ferdy” Mayne, Sebastian Cabot; D: Anthony Kimmins; W: Alec Coppel, Nicholas Phipps; C: Edward Scaife; M: Malcolm Arnold. Nominations: Academy Awards '53: Best Story. VHS FCT