Review of The Spanish Main

. . . to realize that if you cross the wimp from CASABLANCA with the milquetoast from NOW, VOYAGER, you're bound to unleash a virile swash-buckling hero. This is the sort of DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE experiment undertaken by THE SPANISH MAIN, one of the Top 400 Grossing Films of 1945. Given the well-known fact that Hollywood ran out of steam six years earlier, it's not surprising to see Tinsel Town adopting a more documentary approach to movie-making a few years later. THE SPANISH MAIN details the fact that any wench worth her salt will be eager to cough up a hundred silver spoons to live happily-ever-after as a subsistence farmer with a scrawny, half-starved working stiff ("Van Horn") than to accept the stifling security offered by a smug, boring, corpulent rich dude ("Don Juan Alvarado"). This is especially True in Today's America, of course, where a pompous bronze buffoon has been forced to settle for a mail-order foreign Third Lady when NONE of the 180 million female U.S. Citizens were willing to give a potentially monied White House Occupant the time of day.