DeMille's 1938 version of The Buccaneer is a case study in both Paramount's roster of stars as well as DeMille's semi-private repertory company, whom he would hire to stock the supporting roles. Frederic March was rather strangely cast as pirate Jean Lafitte, and DeMille's latest "find", Hungarian chanteuse Franciska Gaal, played Gretchen, one third of a romantic triangle that included March and Margot Grahame as "nice girl" Annette. Paramount's "colorful" character actor Akim Tamiroff, a former denizen of the Moscow Art Theater, did one of his patented hyperbolic turns as Dominique You, one of Lafitte's assistants. (Tamiroff's career at Paramount is a fascinating example of just how wide ranging Paramount was in terms of developing star talent—even if Tamiroff never quite caught the brass ring. Once Tamiroff was on board as a Paramount player, the studio worked overtime developing different projects for him, playing up his ability to magically inhabit various characters, almost like Lon Chaney's vaunted "thousand faces". The results were mixed, at best. Tamiroff actually often found himself in mediocre potboilers, as in one of his other 1938 Paramount outings, the really strange Ride a Crooked Mile, where he plays an émigré Cossack cattle rustler who has reinvented himself in Kansas, where he attempts to reconnect with his estranged son, a soldier played by Leif Erickson. Erickson's then-wife, Frances Farmer, is on hand as a Russian cabaret singer. It truly must be seen to be believed, and remains one of the all time weirdest movies from Paramount's late thirties efforts). Walter Brennan, Ian Keith and—wait for it—Anthony Quinn round out the supporting cast of this 1938 version.

The studio system was heaving its last labored breaths by the late fifties, and so contract players were largely a thing of the past, but the aegis of DeMille (even if he ended up not having much to do with the final product) was enough to attract some major heavyweights for the 1958 remake. In this version, a hirsute Yul Brynner assumes the role of Lafitte, Claire Bloom is the rustic girl, here named Bonnie, while a winsome Inger Stevens is Annette. Charles Boyer takes over the Tamiroff role, and the supporting cast is a crazy wonderful assemblage of everyone from E.G. Marshall to Lorne Greene to none other than DeMille's Moses himself, Charlton Heston, as Andrew Jackson, a role Heston had essayed years earlier in another film, The President's Lady. (You Star Trek fans should also keep a sharp eye out for a bit played by Majel Barrett, the future Mrs. Gene Roddenberry and veteran of several Star Trek iterations.)

The story is based—rather loosely, it must be admitted—on the War of 1812, when the British were attempting to take the peninsula of New Orleans, where a short distance away Lafitte had his own swampy "territory" called Barataria. (There's a National Historical Park and Preserve there to this day which is a major tourist attraction.) Jackson initially thinks he'll simply conquer Lafitte and his colorful band of pirates in order to take over strategic control of the area, but of course what actually happens is that Lafitte ends up allying with Jackson and the vastly outnumbered American troops to fight back the British. There's really little historical accuracy in any but the broadest details here, for the real emphasis is on the mad bunch of Lafitte followers, as well as the kind of turgid soap operatic love triangle that develops around Lafitte.

The Buccaneer is a rather stilted affair, even by the somewhat iconically fake standards of a lot of DeMille films. That faux ambience is on display from the very first scene in the film, a deserted battlefield with weird auburn colored skies and (for some reason) what appears to be a matte painting of a tree in the foreground that looks like it was ported over from an unused Disney feature. The performance styles are cartoonish for the most part, which is not to say they're unenjoyable. It's fun to see Brynner hamming it up like the King of Barataria (as opposed to Siam), even if it's patently odd to see him with a long mane of hair on his head. Bloom struts and pouts like a pirate girl Calamity Jane, and Boyer is perhaps too suave to be believable as a scheming pirate aide. Quinn does stage a couple of battle scenes fairly effectively, but the entire film has a weird, distant quality where the actors may share the frame but rarely seem to be in touch with each other.

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