Fans of the three Pirates of the Caribbean movies will also want to watch the 1952 classic The Crimson Pirate, starring the acrobatic duo Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat.

This campy comedy adventure on the high seas is good for several laughs. This film abounds with gags, including flipping over a boat and walking under water, which obviously was one of several scenes that served as inspiration for the PotC movies.

The highlights of the movie are definitely the well-choreographed acrobatic stunts performed (without guide wires) by Lancaster and Cravat. You could tell these two were probably itching to create a Fairbanks-type pirate adventure with more flips, jumps, and rope-swinging than had ever been filmed before.
The circus-like stunts are well complemented by outlandishly vivid costumes of nearly everyone on the set. The red-striped pantaloons donned by Lancaster, though not likely worn by 18th-century buccaneers, are a common part of kids' pirate costumes today. Even the music seems to scream circus at times.

The mute character played by Nick Cravat is a great sidekick to the clean-cut swashbuckler portrayed by Burt Lancaster. In fact, Cravat nearly steals several scenes with his gesturing and facial expressions.

Unlike The Black Swan, this film used extensive ship sets, with rigging that allowed the acrobatic pair to put on quite a show, especially in the last scene. With all the CGI used in movies these days, the well-choreographed fighting scenes are quite refreshing, though I doubt many lead actors today could perform their own stunts like Lancaster and Cravat.

Although this is a pirate adventure, curiously something you will not see at all in this movie is gold or treasure (or blood).

Interestingly, they wrote in several scenes incorporating late 18th and 19th century technologies, such as a hot air balloon, tanks, a Gatling gun, a flamethrower, nitroglycerin, and even a submarine. With a fourth PotC in the works, can we anticipate a similar incorporation of technology to "spice up" the series?

If you can look past all the historical inaccuracies, this tongue-in-cheek swashbuckling adventure makes for a very entertaining evening. As Captain Vallo mentions at the start of the film, "Believe only half of what you see."