The Spanish Main

One name strikes fear among Spanish ship captains plying the coastal Caribbean waters of the Spanish Main: Barracuda, the notorious scourge of the seas. Yet it was not always so. In this lavish swashbuckler, Casablanca's Paul Henreid stars in a change-of-pace role as Captain Laurent Van Horn, a Dutch trader in the Caribbean who is wrongly imprisoned by the Spanish governor (Walter Slezak) and sentenced to hang for trespassing. But Van Horn stages a breakout with other unjustly incarcerated prisoners, resurfacing as the rakish Barracuda to command the pirate waterways, rescue fair Francesca (lovely Maureen O'Hara, who also sailed the celluloid oceans in The Black Swan and Sinbad, the Sailor) from marriage to the governor and avenge the wrongs done to him. Filmed in Technicolor, the film received a 1945 Oscar nomination for Best Color Cinematography.