MGM's Historical Mysteries

After my recent post on God's Little Acre, I watched a short from the late 1930s titled Captain Kidd's Treasure. This is billed in the opening credits as "An MGM Historical Mystery" which, for some reason, I thought was another series headed up by Carey Wilson who did MGM's Nostradamus shorts that I've mentioned in the past. In fact this was a completely different series, and Wilson was mostly a writer and sometime producer.

This being a 10-minute short, there's not much here. William Kidd was a privateer, working to keep pirates away from the American colonies, especially New York. But in the late 1690s he fell afoul of the British authorities, most likely for political reasons. He was eventually hanged for this, but before his hanging he wrote a letter claiming to have buried some of the loot he had stolen and would hand over the loot to the Crown in exchange for his freedom. He was hanged anyway. But the legend of the buried treasure remained.

Fast forward to the 1930s, and the framing story for this short has an adventurer who has what he says is a map highlighting the location of Kidd's buried treasure. But, this adventuree doesn't have the money or ship he needs to mount a voyage to the specific location on the map. That's why he's asking a couple of wealthy men if they'd fund the expedition in exchange for a share of the proceeds, since this was before the days where governments arrogated such finds to themselves.

Now, you'd think that with Kidd having been dead for well over 200 years by this point, somebody would have found any treasure buried on land, especially if there were a record in the form of a map. And, unsurprisingly, one of the two rich guys is extremely skeptical. The other one, however, seems more open to listening. The short, apart from the framing story, is a vehicle for each of these three men expounding a theory of what might actually have happened to any theoretical treasure that Kidd might have had, as well as to exactly how Kidd fell afoul of the authorities. These are accompanied by original (as far as I can discern) film with Stanley Andrews playing Capt. Kidd.

There's really not much here, and what there is isn't particularly good. A longer film version of the Kidd story might have been more interesting, and indeed several years later we'd get a film called Captain Kidd with Charles Laughton as the privateer. I'm not certain whether I've seen that one. For some reason I think I have but a search of the blog says I haven't done a post on it.

There were about 10 of these MGM Historical Mysteries made in the late 1930s; I don't think the Warner Archive has compiled them together and put them on a box set. Frankly, other film series are much more interesting.