Word: winded
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. Based on Richard Hughes's classic novel about the corruptive power of young innocents, this lively adventure film follows seven captive children as they hasten the ruin of a dissolute pirate captain (Anthony Quinn) and his raffish crew...
G.W.T.W. was Selznick's greatest adventure. "It was such a stupendous undertaking," he said. "Anything else, no matter what we'll ever make, will always seem insignificant after that." He even proposed as his own epitaph, "Here lies David O. Selznick, who produced Gone With the Wind." He also recognized that his former glories could become a handful of dust. When the G.W.T.W. plantation set, including the mansion Tara, was finally dismantled and shipped to Atlanta in 1959, Selznick philosophized: "Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside...
...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...
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...
...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...