Overlooked Movies: Blackbeard's Ghost (1968)

Regular readers of this blog may remember that when I was growing up, there was a drive-in movie theater about a quarter of a mile up the road, and I saw many movies there, going with my parents or older siblings when I was younger and then walking to the theater either by myself or with my friends after I was nine or ten years old. I saw plenty of Walt Disney movies there, including most of the ones that starred Dean Jones. But somehow I never saw BLACKBEARD’S GHOST, maybe because it came out in 1968, and somewhere along in there, the Eagle Drive-In changed ownership and became an adult theater, showing those dirty X-rated movies. That was the end of me going to the Eagle. (Of course, if you cut through the neighbor’s yard and went behind the Western Lodge Motel, you could see the screen fairly well from the woods back there . . . not that I would know from experience. That’s my story, anyway.)

But to get back to BLACKBEARD’S GHOST . . . Wanting something lightweight, we watched it recently, and I found it pretty entertaining. The plot is fairly typical Disney for that era: Dean Jones is the new track coach at a small college on the North Carolina coast, an area where Blackbeard the pirate was supposed to have met his death centuries earlier. He stays at a picturesque inn run by little old ladies supposedly descended from the pirates, the main one being Elsa Lanchester. Suzanne Pleshette is a professor and Jones’s romantic interest. The great Richard Deacon is the president of the college. Joby Baker, a pleasant character actor who showed up on TV a lot in those days (he played a bullfighter on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW and was one of the leads on GOOD MORNING, WORLD, a decent one-season sitcom about radio DJs) is somewhat miscast as the gangster who wants to take over the inn. Then Jones accidentally invokes an old magic spell that brings the ghost of Blackbeard back to life, but of course, he’s the only one who can see or hear the ghost. Hijinks and crude special effects ensue.

All this works only if the actor playing Blackbeard does a good job, and Peter Ustinov is great in the part, poignant at times but mostly chewing the scenery with a large amount of gusto. It’s not a great script—some of the jokes hold up, others don’t—but Ustinov throws himself into the proceedings with such enthusiasm that it’s impossible not to be entertained. Everything works out well, leaving the viewer with a warm, nostalgic feeling. At least, that’s the way it left me.

Now, I was sure I had told my Peter Ustinov story on the blog before, but I searched and don’t find any posts with his name in them, so as a bonus, here’s the tale of how I had a brush with celebrity. In 1975, parts of the movie LOGAN’S RUN were filmed at the Water Gardens in downtown Fort Worth, so my friend Bruce Washburn (Livia’s brother) and I decided to go down there one night and watch the filming. We’re walking along the street near the Water Gardens when this scruffy-looking old guy shuffles past me, a foot or so away. I didn’t pay much attention to him—there were a lot of homeless people who stayed around the Water Gardens in those days—but then a little while later, Bruce and I are standing at the top of the Water Gardens watching the scene they’re shooting down at the bottom, and sure enough, that same scruffy-looking guy shuffles out and starts acting. Yep, Peter Ustinov his own self.

I also almost bumped into Steve McQueen (literally) when he was filming THE GETAWAY in San Marcos, Texas, when I was going to college there at Southwest Texas State University, and I walked past Ben Johnson at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show & Rodeo. Didn’t speak to either of them. I probably should have, but people like that get bothered all the time. I figure sometimes it’s best just to leave ‘em alone.