Charles Lamont directed this movie for Bud Abbott’s Woodley Productions in 1952. The script is by John Grant and Howard Dimsdale. Grant, in addition to writing several Abbott and Costello movies, also worked on the previous year’s Double Crossbones.
Besides Abbott and Costello, this movie stars Charles Laughton doing a comical reprise of his 1945 turn as William Kidd. Anne Bonny appears as a sub-villain who turns good, played by frequent Abbott and Costello collaborator Hillary Brooke who was 38.
Like in Double Crossbones as well as in The Spanish Main before that, these characters have little to do with their real life namesakes. Also like those movies, Anne Bonny appears here without John Rackam or Mary Read. She is a pirate captain here like she was in Double Crossbones (and unlike real life).
The premise of the movie is that Abbott and Costello are inept Tortuga waiters tasked with delivering a love letter to Bruce, a singer at their club.
The infamous Captain Kidd is at the club to settle a territory dispute with Captain Bonny, but the boys repeatedly confuse the love letter with Captain Kidd’s treasure map, and they end up as prisoners on the way to recover the buried treasure.
When Captain Bonny first reads the sappy love letter, she assumes it is for Puddin’ (Costello), and says, “The more I look at you, the less I understand this.” But then she decides that “Only a Romeo could inspire such a letter” and she becomes determined to get her hooks in him, hinting that men who don’t requite her feelings end up dead. Puddin’ is attracted to her but terrified.
Lady Jane, the female romantic “lead”, ends up on Captain Kidd’s ship and Captain Bonny finds out she’s the one who wrote the letter. She is jealous, but it resolves itself anticlimactically when Lady Jane and Bruce sing a duet. Weirdly, even though now Captain Bonny knows the letter was not for Puddin’, for some reason, she is still into him…
Eventually Captain Kidd tells her that he intends to double cross her and cut her out of the treasure, so she saves A&C and they team up to defeat him.
Depictions of John Rackam, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read 