Vincente Minnelli is a master of misdirection, so his overlooked musical, The Pirate, is less about its swashbuckling subject than it is about the romantic yearning for a fantastical brigand. Gene Kelly is that brigand, Serafin, a traveling vaudevillian who takes on the guise of the famous pirate Macoco. His conjurer is Judy Garland's Manuela, a pert young gal from a Caribbean village who's being married off to a portly but prodigiously wealthy gent (Walter Slezak). Sheltered and innocent, Manuela is a powder keg of desire attached tenaciously to the myth of “Mack the Black,” who according to one Cole Porter song “leaves a flaming trail of masculinity” wherever he ventures. The two, false pirate and piner, cavort upon a lush and steamy set, built from the ground up in tropical color and libidinal ornamentation. A sly parody of the brash buccaneers played by Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, this merriment is not about swag or swagger, but about a buried treasure of unbridled fantasy.