It is easy to spot great acting in this movie. Wallace Beary is great cast as Long John Silver. Jackie Cooper gives another fine child performance. As a matter of fact, the entire cast does very well.

What might be over looked often is that part of the reason this is so so good is that it is well based on the Robert Lewis Stevenson novel. The rest goes to the most often overlooked Direction of Victor Fleming.

Fleming proves in this early film that his work in the films Wizard of Oz & Gone With The Wind is no accident (some critics have called him an erratic Director for hire). He does a great job directing this cast & this story. Some of the sequences show how good a director Fleming really is.

After seeing this film recently, I am now convinced that Victor is a much better director than his detractors give him credit for. While this film does not have all the whiz bang special effects that newer pirate films have created, the great acting & directing more than makes up for that.

Add to that the amazing fact that this film brings in so much good stuff that it only needs 101 minutes to cover a major novel is enough to make you wonder if some of the new longer films about pirates just aren't very efficient in telling their tales.

I noticed, like some of the other reviewers, that few in the film had the necessary British accents needed to play these characters well. However, despite this, the movie is an excellent version of the Stevenson novel--mostly due to good acting, great sets and the nice MGM polish you'd expect from one of their top productions.

As far as the film goes, it's one of the earliest of the Wallace Beery films that teamed him with a cute kid--a formula that was repeated again and again up until Beery's death in 1949. Considering that according to his co-star, Jackie Cooper, Beery hated children and did little to hide it off camera--so I am sure in some ways Beery probably wished this and "The Champ" hadn't been so successful!!

As for the story, it's the often told story of "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's reasonably faithful to the story and is better than other versions I have seen. However, I have NOT seen the very famous Robert Newton version (by many seen as the best),so I cannot say the 1934 version was the best--though many of the newer versions tended to be a bit more dull. Like it or not, the Beery-Cooper schmaltz was entertaining--and I can see why audiences fell for it by the millions!

By the way, like so many releases from Turner Entertainment, this film includes many wonderful extras from the same studio (MGM) from the same year as this feature's release. Turner also does this with many of their classic Warner Brothers releases as well--making them excellent values for customers.

Personal favourite goes to the Charlton Heston/Christian Bale version, but this 1934 film is very close behind(as blasphemous as this may sound I do prefer it over the Robert Newton film, although Newton is the better and perhaps definitive) Long John. This version is let down a little by an, for my tastes, overly-sentimental ending(though it is nowhere near as bad as the insulting ending of the bizarre-in-a-bad-way adaptation with Jack Palance) and Jackie Cooper's at times wooden and cloying Jim, though he does show believability in some of his scene with Beery. But it is wonderfully photographed and has great sets and costumes for the time, if the question of whether the film looks good by today's standards is asked the answer would be yes. The music score is rousing and fits the mood of the story and the film very well, not one of my favourites but all that matters is whether it's good and memorable and the score here is that. This adaptation of Treasure Island also has the wittiest and most quotable dialogue of any version, the dialogue too is also faithful to the style of writing of the book(which is a classic).

The story may not be as dark, suspenseful and majestic as the book, but it's not devoid of those qualities. While the pacing creaks a little here and there, the film is always fun and maintains the sense of rollicking adventure, Jim and Long John's chemistry/relationship is vital and it is endearingly done here. In terms of how faithful it is, there are a few changes but it is relatively faithful to the story, the changes are written in well and don't feel bizarre or unnecessary, which was the biggest problem that the Jack Palance film suffered from. Treasure Island(1934) is not one of Victor Fleming's very best films, it's not among the best films ever made like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind are, but it does rank high among his filmography and Fleming does a very good job directing, both technically and in his direction of the story and acting. The acting, with the exception of Cooper(who is not without his moments),is fine. Stealing the show is Wallace Beery who is perfectly-cast as Long John and does wonderfully showing the character's good and bad sides, usually I take or leave him as an actor but his performance here is one of his finest, a career-best perhaps. There is some great character actors involved and they don't disappoint, Lionel Barrymore plays Billy Bones with great menacing gusto, Nigel Bruce's blustering and bumbling fits Squire Trelawney like a glove and Charles "Chic" Sale is an amusing Ben Gunn. That the cast have good material to work from and don't suffer from distorted characterisation and story changes(unlike the Jack Palance version). All in all, very good as an adaptation and film in general of Treasure Island. 8/10 Bethany Cox