Anne of the Indies

Anne of the Indies is a movie, at its core, about a strong and capable female pirate captain who seeks revenge on the man who betrays her. It is short, at less than an hour and half run time, and fairly direct in its storytelling. For all intents and purposes, it is reminiscent of many other Technicolor high seas adventures of its day, like Treasure Island or Kidnapped, only with a darker twist. And yet, since the protagonist is a woman and the film makes “the role of women” a central idea to the story, it is hard, also, not to critique the movie with feminism in mind.

I think the movie deeply wants to be feminist. While strong and self assured women as leads were not uncommon in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when this movie was made, there is something unique about Anne. She is presented with a noticeable lack of the qualities traditional of femininity. Both figuratively and literally, she wears pants, which really meant something in those days. She not only seems to have the respect and admiration of her crew, but they follow her largely without question, something that is not true for all the male captains in the film. The story, too, asks us to question the assumptions of the feminine, or at least the feminine of the 1950s. When she tries on the fancy dress, is it a sign of her femininity coming through her masculine outward armor or something else? When her female prisoner questions her actions “as a woman” and Anne’s plans do not change, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is Anne’s desire for revenge any more or less justified than if she were a male captain, and is the cruelty of her plan to obtain it any more or less acceptable because she happens to be a woman. Though some, many, or all of these questions may seem passé to a modern viewer, I can see how in the context of the time in which it was made these were interesting narrative ideas to explore.

The movie also deeply wants to be a contemplation on the self-destructive nature or revenge or jealousy, depending on interpretation. This is where I think the movie gets into trouble, as these ideas often present in direct conflict with its own feminist ideals. As the movie sets up Anne being betrayal and subsequent desire for revenge, it lays the seeds of a story of a jealous woman scorned, which plays directly into stereotypes about women and the darker side of femininity. Is she angry that she was betrayed or because she is a girl enraged that the boy she has a crush on likes someone else?

Anne is shown to be a generally vengeful person, as the opening scene demonstrates. She takes no quarter for British sailors as repayment for the brutal and public execution of her brother by the British government. She is also shown to be about on par with other pirates for escalating revenge. Blackbeard, during a parlay in which he oversteps his authority as a guest, threatens to run her from the seas simply because she slapped his face and told him he wasn’t in charge on her turf. And yet, the movie frames this revenge seeking as ultimately a moral ill. The ship’s doctor, who functions as Anne’s and the film’s conscience, warns against the dangers of her path and ultimately falls out with her over her unwillingness to change course. Similarly, the image of the beautiful woman of noble birth as damsel in distress permeates the back half of the film, aligning the audience against Anne intentionally or not. This might be all well and good if there was better moral material around this point. For example, a foil character whose similar story is resolved in a better way by avoiding the path of vengeance. Or, perhaps, Anne is the only character out to make her enemies pay the ultimate price and that is this inherent character flaw that ends in her undoing. However, she is not the only one on the warpath, as the Blackbeard plot I mentioned early displays, yet she is the only one who suffers. This, whether intentional or not, creates a story where it is not that people can’t pursue bloody reprisal, it’s just women who can’t. It’s fine for the boys to get upset when they feel betrayed and sink boats with all hands to appease their egos, but when a woman does it now suddenly it’s too much.

Ultimately, and spoiler alert here if you haven’t put the pieces together, Anne is killed, her boat is sunk and all crew are lost at sea. This is after she accepts that she has lost her humanity and turns back to make amends with a single act of mercy. The fact that this act of mercy is what leads to her being killed is also a strange message to be made by a movie that seems keen on moralizing its story, but that’s not even what bothers me most about the ending. What really gets me about the ending is that she dies at all. I’m just so very tired of the feminism of dead women. How often must these stories about non-conforming characters end in their demise? Is the only way to reconcile their otherness with the morality of the viewing audience to end their stories with the death penalty. Or is it a cheap means for garnering ultimate sympathy. “See, they are real people who desire better but society won’t let them be their authentic selves.” Either way, I find the whole thing is often annoyingly trite and sloppily handled.

Anne was already living her authentic self, to a great degree, until the blasted morality of the rest of the world showed up and ruined everything for her. Where is the punishment for the conniving, adulterous Frenchman who betrays her? He, at least in theory, gets to sail to some safe port in the Caribbean with his beautiful young bride, even as pride and deceit led to him taking a pirate’s commission and then losing all hands.

Anne of the Indies muddies its storytelling. Either make a morality play in which the sinful are punished or make a rollicking feminist pirate adventure about nonconforming femininity. By making it about both, it ends up being a feminist movie where a woman is uniquely punished for her sins, missing the mark on both its likely targets. However, as a thrilling high seas adventure movie it holds up favorably to other pirate films of the same period. More adult in story than Treasure Island, more action filled than Captain Blood (albeit less than The Sea Hawk). So, in other words, ultimately the film is a bit of a mixed bag.

Would Recommend: If you love the destructive power of a good broadside of cannons.

Would Not Recommend: If you want a film whose deeper themes and subtexts are expressed with the same attention to detail as its action set pieces.