Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The Dancing Pirate which was released by RKO in 1936 was one of the last films done with an original score by Rodgers&Hart. They would be moving back to Broadway and had a string of hit musicals only interrupted by Larry Hart's death in 1943.As this was an RKO film watching it now it was fairly obvious that this film was created with Fred Astaire in mind for the lead. Had Astaire done it The Dancing Pirate might be better remembered. Certainly the two songs done by Dick and Larry aren't among the most memorable. In fact the best number in the film is a dance by lead Charles Collins to Yankee Doodle Dandy that had Astaire written all over it. In fact the main weakness of the film is Collins. A good dancer, Collins had a screen presence that was colorless, odorless, and tasteless. He plays a Boston dancing teacher who gets shanghaied by pirates and escapes the first chance he can when they put in to California for provisions.Still ruled by Spain, the local Alcalde is Frank Morgan at his decisiveless best. Morgan on loan from MGM is the best thing about The Dancing Pirate.Collins is sad to say guilty by association and the men want to hang him, but the women want to learn to dance so he's in legal limbo of sorts. He also has competition for the hand of Morgan's daughter Steffi Duna in the person of Captain Victor Varconi from Monterey at the head of a platoon of dragoons ostensibly there to protect the village from pirates. But Varconi has his own plans, Snidely Whiplash type plans.The Dancing Pirate won an Oscar nomination for the now defunct category of dance direction. I long for the day when musicals of all kinds were being churned out and a category like dance direction was warranted. Speaking of dancing Rita Hayworth is in this film as part of her family troupe of Spanish dancers, The Dancing Cansinos.The Dancing Pirate is an amusing enough film, but it really needed Fred Astaire to put it over.

This movie bombed so bad at the theaters in 1936 that RKO didn't make another color musical for 16 years!!! And it still stinks today! And to make matters worse... the DVD copy they are selling is a Black and White, 16mm bootleg print, that they somehow got copyrighted.. or at least they claim to hold the copyright. This thing has bad film splices and grainy picture quality. Plus the DVD jacket confuses Frank Morgan who is in this picture and was the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz" with Harry Morgan who is not in this movie but was in "Mash" on TV. Real film historians!!!! Yeah right! I would have liked to seen the color version though, just for the fun of early Techocolor. I should learn not to take free movies from "friends". Do yourself a favor... don't buy dollar DVD's and never take free movies from friends! Oh and BTW, saying it is "digitally remastered" just means they transfered the film onto a digital DVD. They love to play word games.

I found this movie in a dollar bin. That should have been my first warning. The movie has been "digitally remastered", leading to the technicolor being remastered right out of it. The box also claims that Frank Morgan is "of Mash TV series fame", in spite of the fact that he died decades before the TV series came out.I suppose seeing the dancing instructor dance in a noose is worth the price of admission, though. (That's not a spoiler-it's on the menu screen.) And I probably would have liked it when I was a kid, and could handle nonsensical situations leading to improbable tap dancing scenes. :)

I saw this movie when I was five years old and never heard of it again. All I could remember was the fellow dancing with a noose around his neck. Looked for it for years, then saw it, just in the past year, in a bin as a Rita Hayworth movie. Thanks to the generic title I recognized it right away. There won't be many comments on this one, as it's virtually unknown, but I've looked at it twice and it brings back a memory of a movie I loved so much as a child, though nothing came back to me except the mentioned dancing scene. It's offbeat, in terrific color and I think enjoyable . Did anybody ever hear of the dancer who played the title role again?