At sea, ferryboat captain Henry St. James (Alec Guinness) spends his time in deep conversation with men. In Gibraltar, he lives with his domestic wife Maud (Celia Johnson), enjoying a quiet home life. And in Spanish-Morocco he is married to the wild Nita (Yvonne De Carlo), and spends his nights drinking and dancing. His first officer (Charles Goldner) expounds on St. James’s perfect life, and he agrees. But women are not so simple, and refuse to stay in the boxes that St. James has defined.
Alec Guinness did all his best work before he was a big star, in a string of very British comedies. The Captain’s Paradise is not the best of those, but is a solid entry and a charming little film. De Carlo, best known as Lily Munster on the Musters TV show, is gorgeous and energetic and too few remember she had a more significant career in her early years. A talented dancer, she convinced Guinness (who was not skilled in that area), as well as the director, that Guinness should do the mambo with her, and spent a week training him. It resulted in one of the film’s best sequences. Cilia Johnson is equally good as the most English of wives.
This lightest of comedies was thought racy for its time. The U.S. version was even changed to make Nita the captain’s mistress to avoid him being a bigamist (though since he clearly lives with her, I’d have thought that would be worse). But it isn’t racy, nor does it have bite. And it won’t elicit peels of laughter. Instead it is a gentle, amiable film that’s easy to appreciate, if not love.
While not an Ealing Studios film (like other Guinness comedies of the ‘50s, The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, and Barnacle Bill), it feels like it is. It deals with criminal behavior—but not too criminal—in a congenial way, and presents us with eccentric characters, just as those Ealing comedies did. And like those, it is worth your time.