Frenchman's Creek (1944) on Netflix
Dona St. Columb leaves London and a fatuous husband for a Cornish estate the pirate Jean Benoit Aubrey uses as his base. She sails with his crew as a cabin boy.
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- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.1/10974 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
London's court society disgusts Dona St. Columb, and she has no patience left for her fatuous husband, Harry. When his friend Lord Rockingham makes unwanted advances, she takes her two children to the family's remote estate at Navron, on the Cornish coast, a property left vacant for years. There she learns that Jean Benoit Aubrey, the French pirate known along the coast, has made the house his base. The local gentry call him a desperate scoundrel, but the man she meets is educated, principled and dashing, and he sketches her portrait. The two fall in love. Craving adventure, Dona disguises herself as a cabin boy and sails with his crew on an expedition against a merchant ship, the Merry Fortune.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Frenchman's Creek (1944)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The 1944 Technicolor adaptation Frenchman's Creek cost $3.6 million, which made it Paramount Pictures' most expensive production up to that time.
- Producer David Lewis wrote that Joan Fontaine was wrong for the Du Maurier heroine and that he had envisioned Vivien Leigh, whom David O. Selznick told him could have had the part.
- Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, known for playing Holmes and Watson in Universal's Sherlock Holmes films, appeared together in Frenchman's Creek; it was their only on-screen collaboration besides the Holmes films.
- Victor Young's score incorporated the main theme of French composer Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune, using it as the love theme for the film.
- Arturo de Córdova was entirely untried in American films when he was cast, though he was very popular in Mexico, and the studio thought him a future Valentino even though Leisen disliked the idea.
