Mia Farrow made her film debut in Denia, where the film about the American revolutionary sailor and Led Zeppelin keyboard player, John Paul Jones was made in 1959.
So well was she received in this film directed by her father John, that she was named Queen of the local Fiestas.
The port of Denia played its role of both a Scottish fishing port (where Jones was born) and Portsmouth (the American one), while the beaches of Javea and Benidorm and the Royal Palace of Madrid co-starred.
So pleasantly authentic was Denia as a typical port of just about anywhere else, that filmmakers returned there for bits of Krakatoa: East of Java (it’s actually west of Java, but when the producers found out they considered it to expensive to correct the mistake) and The Four Musketeers.
This was the first film produced in Spain by the legendary Samuel Bronston who, flush with money from the chemical giant DuPont, who like many companies could not take their money out of Spain and so ‘invested’ it in making films, which could then make them dollars back home.
Despite the final demise of his empire, Bronston’s ashes were brought back to Spain after his death (it’s usually better that way), to Las Rozas cemetery near Madrid, the city where so many of his epics, such as ‘55 Days at Peking’, were made. |
