Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #535 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-11-03
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1

Customer Reviews

This is my favorite movie!
Joan Fontaine is the gorgeous Lady Dona St. Columb, wife of an English baronet, who's had enough of her pompous husband Sir Harry (Ralph Forbes) & his best friend Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone), who lusts for her. Dona needing to flee takes her children & goes their country estate, Navron, on the coast of Cornwall. Her property borders an inlet. When she investigates she comes upon a French ship "La Mouette" & is forceably taken onboard where she meets the scruptous pirate captain Jean-Benoit Aubéry, who loves & respects her (as he says to her "I have said to myself her & no other" as he reiterates a comment aloud he once made to himself). They fall hoplessly in love & share in a pirate venture. The chemistry between them bring Daphne du Maurier's lavish romance epic set in the mid 17th century story to life.

BEAUTIFUL TO SEE AND HEAR
This lavish romance epic set in the 17th century has gentle British noblewoman Lady St.Columb (Joan Fontaine) fleeing her spineless husband (Ralph Forbes) and his lecherous, dangerous friend, Rathbone, who lusts after her. The production is stunning in lush color with Claude Debussy's ethereal "Claire de Lune" as the picture's theme. A wonderful tearjerker and Rathbone excels as the menace.

Thinking Woman's Pirate Movie
Based on the Daphne DuMaurier novel, this rapturous adventure is unapologetically female in its viewpoint. Joan Fontaine plays an English noblewoman neglected by her foolish husband, and stalked by a decadent, womanizing lord (the great Basil Rathbone, at his most silky and depraved). Fleeing to her county home in Cornwall, she finds French pirate Arturo De Cordova operating out of a secluded creek on her property-causing an uproar among her neighbors. She tries to stick up for the moral principles of her class, but finds herself so attracted to the philosophical Frenchman and the freedom of his outlaw lifestyle, that she protects him, even joining in his illicit adventures.

The idea of skullduggery as foreplay as a woman and an outlaw earn each others' love is a powerful one, however watered-down by the film's moralistic finale (very different from DuMaurier's free-spirited book). More than any other movie, this is the one that made me want to write my own pirate novel, "The Witch From The Sea," from a woman's perspective.