The Spanish Main (1945) on Netflix
Passed19451h 40mAdventureDramaRomance
Dutch captain Laurent van Horn is shipwrecked off Cartagena and sentenced to death. Five years on, a pirate, he seizes the ship carrying Contessa Francesca to her wedding.
- Watch on NetflixThis title is not on Netflix right now. Please check back later for updates.
- Watch on Prime
- Watch on NordVPN
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.3/102,124 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Sailing toward the Carolinas with a band of Dutch refugees, Laurent van Horn is wrecked on the coast of Cartagena, a Spanish settlement ruled by Don Juan Alvarado. Alvarado has him imprisoned and sentenced to death, but van Horn and his crew escape. Five years later he is a pirate known by his ship's name, and his men take the vessel carrying Contessa Francesca, daughter of a Mexican noble, to her wedding with Alvarado, a man she has never met. To spare the escort ship further bloodshed, Francesca offers to marry van Horn, and he agrees and sails her to the pirate hideout, where the pirate Anne Bonney and Captain Benjamin Black are already jealous of the match.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Spanish Main (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- RKO executive Charles Koerner refused to film Henreid's scripted finale, a slave revolt and the burning of Tortuga, because it would cost an extra $200,000, and Henreid dropped his offer to pay for it himself after agent Lew Wasserman advised against it.
- When RKO began building sets for a film budgeted at $2 million, star Paul Henreid used the leverage to demand producer powers and the removal of writer George Worthing Yates, then persuaded Herman J. Mankiewicz to rewrite the script.
- Paul Henreid took his treatment for a pirate film to Warner Bros. head of production Jack L. Warner, who refused to make it; Henreid's agent, Lew Wasserman, warned that audiences would not accept him "swinging from the yardarm with a bare chest."
- Henreid wrote in his memoirs that the film was his idea: tired of being cast as a suave ladies' man and of playing Nazis, he wanted a swashbuckling part in a pirate story.
- A May 1945 strike of Hollywood crew members held up shooting on the film, which still had 28 days of filming miniatures to go; by then The Wall Street Journal put the cost at two and a quarter million dollars.
- Maureen O'Hara was to be replaced by Laraine Day, who had signed a contract with RKO, in January 1944, but by July of that year O'Hara was back on the project.
- Ann Dvorak and Binnie Barnes both auditioned for the film's second female lead, and Barnes ultimately landed the role.
- The Spanish Main was RKO's first all-Technicolor film since Becky Sharp; the studio had waited ten years to make another.
