From the Rental Vault: Yankee Buccaneer (1952)

While filming Against All Flags in 1952, star Errol Flynn broke an ankle during a swordfighting scene, just before shooting was scheduled to finish. That left the set with several months down time while he recovered, and Universal Studios decided to get some use out of the sets while he was down. So they tweaked the ship a little and knocked together Yankee Buccaneer, a B-level swashbuckler headlined by Jeff Chandler with Scott Brady and Suzan Ball as primary support.

The USS Essex, under the command of David Porter (Chandler), is looking forward to orders that would direct them home for a refit and some leave. Instead, they find their own former midshipman David Farragut (Brady) back on board as a lieutenant, carrying orders that will have them disguise themselves as privateers in order to track down pirates who have been preying on American merchant cargos. When the ship puts in for stores and some repairs, they acquire Countess Margarita La Raguna (Ball), a Portuguese noblewoman trying to warn her countrymen of a plot by Spain to collude with pirates and steal the royal treasury as it is sent from Brazil back to Portugal. Farragut naturally falls for her but can't reveal the secret of the ship's true mission, which leaves Margaret convinced he is a pirate. Farragut's impetuous manner draws Porter's ire, whose by-the-book nature is already edgy with this wild scheme.

Buccaneer is solidly in the second tier of seaborne swashbucklers -- Chandler was a popular actor coming off several hits and even an Oscar nomination for playing Cochise in the 1950 Western Broken Arrow. But though he was a solid performer, he usually played the same kind of square-jawed intense authority figure he played here and the role didn't stretch him much. Most of the looser and more active scenes go to Brady; even when the movie tries to tease a competition between them for Ball's affections it doesn't really work. Brady has some of the swagger Farragut needs but doesn't get to display it too often. Ball, only 18 at the time and playing against men who were 10 and 16 years her senior, demonstrates the prerequisite pluck of a swashbuckler heroine and a bit of her own cleverness more than once. 

Charles Peck's screenplay plays out far too leisurely for real swashbuckling, meandering around for close to an hour before actually pitting the crew of the Essex against any real foes. It does have a nice dungeon sword melee and George Mathews as Link the bosun offers some humor, but it also has far too many lulls that could have been replaced by action, romance or a combination of the two. Director Frederick de Cordova, who would later helm The Tonight Show during the reign of the mighty Johnny Carson, can never really find the gas pedal to tighten anything up.

When Flynn healed up from his ankle injury, the ship set was returned to the look it had for Against All Flags so he could finish that movie, and may have welcomed the return to the quicker pace.