Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #198 Yellowbeard (1983)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

A self-proclaimed “white Christian Conservative Republican” recently went viral with an essay-length temper tantrum about how the cultural plague of wokeness has ruined Disney World for him. 

I would tell you more but the essay is behind a paywall and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give those vultures a goddamn penny of my hard-earned money. Publicity? Of course? Attention? Why not? Cold hard cash? That’s where I draw the line. 

This tissue paper-soft man baby was sad because the monsters at Disney tweaked the rides and attractions at their theme parks to keep up with the times and be less racist and rapey. This apparently is a deal-breaker for the much maligned editorialist. 

Is it really asking so much that nothing ever change at Disney Land or Disney World out of deference to the man’s fragile feelings? Do they have any idea how traumatic it is to see something that you grew up knowing and loving change slightly over time? Do they know what that does to a man’s mind, soul and spirit? It destroys them! Instantly! 

Cool hat, terrible performance.

Do we really want to live in a world where the Pirates of the Caribbean ride no longer features a part where terrified, sobbing women are roped together and sold to the highest bidder after being abducted by pirates because some PC Nazi got it in their foolish heads that that’s somehow not appropriate for small children to see? 

This gentleman’s essay invites the question, “What really is being lost at the supposed altar of woke political correctness? The disingenuous “free speech” brigade would have you think that EVERYTHING is being lost, that we have devolved into a cowardly, craven, dishonest and hypocritical dystopia where the cost of speaking inconvenient truths is being shunned by society and left to wither in the barren, icy wilderness. The anti-PC people would have you believe that we have willfully sacrificed our freedom for the sake of not offending the thought police and the woke mob. 

From my perspective, however, it feels like what we’re mostly losing is overt racism and the idea that rape is not something serious that should be handled with sensitivity and care but rather something that is hilarious, hot or some combination of the two. 

Is that a hill worth dying on? I don’t think so. If we’re a little hyper-sensitive these days towards issues like rape and race that’s because we as a culture were so glaringly insensitive for so long. 

Take 1983’s Yellowbeard. It delights in the yucky freedom to find make rape jokes, to be as crass and offensive and politically incorrect as possible. That comes with the territory. After all, pirates are notorious for raping and pillaging and the title character, as played by Graham Chapman, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is monomaniacally obsessed with raping and murdering every woman he encounters, preferably in rapid succession. 

Yellowbeard’s relationship with his wife Betty (Madeline Kahn) is similarly rape-centric, as Yellowbeard cannot conceive of himself having a relationship with a woman that does not revolve around sexual assault and murder while she prefers to think of their comminglings as “cuddles.” 

Two wonderful human beings, gone too soon.

Yellowbeard is one of those DOA disasters where seemingly everyone involved realized early on that there was no chance whatsoever that the movie they were in could possibly be any damn good so they might as well have fun and enjoy the money, company, camaraderie and cocaine that came with the gig.

God bless Kahn.  She was a comic genius who gleaned every last bit of humor out of her abysmal dialogue. The screenplay gave her next to nothing but she made a goddamn meal out of it all the same. 

There were too many talented people involved in the making of Yellowbeard for it to be a complete waste. But on the whole it very aggressively does not work, and every moment that does feel like it was stolen by virtuosos intent on generating laughter out of nothing at all. 

Director Mel Damski assembled a once-in-lifetime assemblage of legendary comic talent for his lazy hodgepodge of rape and pirate jokes. In addition to Chapman and Kahn the cast includes Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan and Peter Bull in their final film appearances as well as Cheech and Chong, Peter Cook, Kenneth Mars, Peter Boyle, Eric Idle, James Mason, John Cleese, Susannah York, Beryl Reid, Bernard Fox and David Bowie. 

According to show-business legend, Bowie ended up in this random and half-assed pirate comedy in an appropriately half-assed and random fashion. He was reportedly vacationing on the beach when he stumbled upon “pirate ships” that were in actuality the film’s set and somehow stumbled into being cast in an un-billed cameo as “The Shark.”

Bowie has about thirty seven seconds onscreen in which he delivers Betty to Commander Clement (Eric Idle), a foppish British Naval officer intent on discovering the location of Yellowbeard’s buried treasure. 

The Commander refers to Bowie as an ensign and he speaks like a human being but he also has a cheap-looking fin on his back and is referred to as a shark. It is, as you might imagine, very silly. And nonsensical. Is Bowie’s character a shark? A man-shark hybrid? A man who thinks he’s a shark? A shark that thinks he’s a man? 

Yellowbeard has no interest in answering those questions or any others. It’s barely a movie and barely a comedy but Bowie’s weird turn marks one of the only instances when its randomness actually works for it instead of feeling lazy and slapdash. 

The critically reviled box office bomb opens with its titular anti-hero/villain getting tossed into prison for, all of all things, tax evasion rather than murder and rape. Twenty years later Commander Clement visits him in prison to inform him that 140 years have been added on to his sentence. 

This inspires Yellowbeard to break out of prison for the purpose of reclaiming a treasure whose location is tattooed on his now-adult son Dan’s head. I misremembered the son being an offensive caricature of a flamboyant homosexual but in actuality he’s just a boring, milquetoast bookworm type. 

Adam Ant was originally cast as Dan but dropped out during the lengthy development process and Sting reportedly wanted to play the role but was rejected in favor of newcomer Martin Hewitt out of fear that casting a famous Brit like Sting would make the movie too British. 

As Hewitt himself acknowledged, that was a mistake. When you have a fundamentally straight character in a lead role in a raunchy, outrageous comedy he has to have charisma and presence in order to avoid being an energy and comedy-sucking vacuum at its core. 

Hewitt has neither and Chapman is stuck playing a role that would need to be developed further just to qualify as one-dimensional so it falls upon scene-stealers like John Cleese, as a blind man with preternatural hearing abilities and Marty Feldman as a prisoner none-too-subtly trying to subtly coax the location of Yellowbeard’s treasure out of the imprisoned pirate to provide sporadic laughs. 

It does not help that the cast seems to be acting in different movies. The presence of Chapman, Idle and Cleese unsurprisingly gives the proceedings the feel of off-brand Monty Python, with highbrow silliness replaced by lowbrow vulgarity while Cheech and particularly Chong are trapped in a companion piece to The Corsican Brothers that similarly proves that Cheech+Chong-Pot Jokes=less than zero. 

Without all its rape jokes, Yellowbeard is nothing. Unfortunately with all its rape jokes it’s nothing as well. I vaguely remembered it sucking the first time I saw it for My World or Flops. I was right. Some movies merit extensive, obsessive analysis. Then there are films for whom “it fucking sucked” suffices. Yellowbeard is the second kind of movie.

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