The Corsair

In July of 1939, director Marc Allégret shot the first scenes of a new pirate film in the south of France, at the studio de la Victorine in Nice. It was an adaptation of Marcel Achard's play Le corsaire, which took place in a film studio in Hollywood and called for a screen adaptation. Producer André Daven wanted it to be a prestige production and lavish sets of ships and of a Spanish village were built.

Madeleine Ozeray & Louis Jouvet

Marcel Achard's play had opened to moderate success March 24, 1938 at the Athénée theater  play starred Louis Jouvet and Madeleine Ozeray with music by Vittorio Rieti, costumes and sets by Christian Bérard. For the film, André Daven secured international screen legend Charles Boyer to star with Michèle Alfa as his leading lady. Solid character actors like Saturnin Fabre (from Pepe le Moko), Marcel André (who would play Belle's father later in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast) and newcomer Jacques Dufilho were to round up the cast.

Marcel Achard's play

Louis Jourdan

Director Marc Allégret had another card up his sleeve. On his previous film Entrée des artistes, he has spotted a young hunk of an assistant camera operator named Louis Jourdan whom, he figured, would be a perfect screen heartthrob in this film.

Finally, famed composer Georges Auric (Beauty and the Beast, Roman Holiday...) was commissioned to write the score.

After several weeks of shooting, on September 3, 1939, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. Charles Boyer, who had come back to France just to do the film, was drafted in Agen and production stopped.

Charles Boyer as Kid Jackson, the corsair

In December, movie magazines still announced that the film would probably be completed in May. However, by then, Charles Boyer was already back in Beverly Hills, effectively burying the project.

Louis Jourdan did not wait long for another opportunity to start an amazing career in France and in the US, where he worked with David Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock soon after WWII. You probably remember him from Gigi too and as the James Bond villain from Octopussy.

In July 1945, the film magazine l'écran français reported that remains of the set were still standing, although in very bad shape, in Nice; but that the producer André Daven was now in Hollywood and that The Corsair would never reach port.

Sea battle at the Victorine studios

However, in 1995, Bruno Esquirol released a 28 minute documentary about the film, with some of the remaining footage which has been stored to this day. Some of it also surfaced at different events, like the "40 years of French archive" in 2009 at the Cinémathèque française where 6 minutes of rushes were screened and are still available to researchers at the French film archive at Bois D'Arcy. Moreover, it appears that a French VHS of Marcel Allégret short films also allegedly contained 35 minutes of footage from this film.



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That's all for today folks!