A Movie You Might Have Missed #63: The Captain's Paradise

It's been 11 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

Capt. Henry St. James [referring to his two wives]: That, Rico, is my solution to man's happiness on Earth. Two happy women, each in their way perfect, and in between the company of men, the clash of intellects to stimulate the mind.

Mediterranean ferryboat captain Henry St James (Alec Guiness) has things well organized – a loving and very English wife Maud (Celia Johnson) in Gibraltar, and the loving if rather more hot-blooded Mistress, Nita (Yvonne de Carlo), in Tangiers. A perfect life. As long as neither woman decides to follow him to the other port.

A surprisingly feminist movie ... though in our times we often feel we invented feminism which in itself is not a very worthy attitude. In a way, this is a wonderful bookend to How to Murder Your Wife. Both treat women as something which must be controlled in order to preserve man's peaceful life. Of course, what both films show us is that women are not things, but people. And people can't be easily controlled. With hilarious results.

Thoroughly enjoyable and my favorite so far of the Alec Guiness comedies we've been watching.