“The Pirate is Minnelli's most colorful and high-spirited movie, an exuberant send-up of swashbuckling adventures and operetta conventions. Judy Garland sparkles in a stylish, brightly comic performance and a mustachioed Gene Kelly mixes Douglas Fairbanks acrobatics and John Barrymore bravado with his customarily exciting dancing. The witty... screenplay is a free adaptation of S.N. Behrman's Broadway comedy, originally designed for the Lunts. The Cole Porter score includes ‘Nina,' ‘Love Of My Life,' and ‘Be A Clown.' When released in 1948, The Pirate was not a popular success: perhaps, as producer Freed recently observed, ‘the picture was twenty years ahead of its time....' It is, as Minnelli has described it, ‘a fantasy, highly colored, theatrical as possible, flamboyant, swirling and larger than life.”