By VINCENT CANBY
Published: August 22, 1992, Saturday
"Christopher Columbus: The Discovery," produced by the same wags who brought us "Superman: The Movie" and "Santa Claus: The Movie," is not quite a nonstop hoot, but it is pretty funny far more often than it intends to be. It opened in theaters here yesterday.
Surprisingly little is known about Columbus and his life. Yet the film makers' imaginations seem to have fallen over the edge when they place Tomas de Torquemada, Spain's most notorious inquisitor, on the quay to wave his pudgy little hand at the departing Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Torquemada? Shouldn't he be pulling out the fingernails of heretics instead of attending bon voyage parties?
This Torquemada could have dropped in from a lost Jerry Lewis movie. He doesn't look quite real. Though he is strangely familiar, it's not easy to recognize him. Then you have it: the nearly round, evilly smiling face is that of the man in the moon. A spitting image, really. The effect is emphasized by the fact that the head seems unattached to the body below it. It's as if the face of the man in the moon had been perched on a great gray cassock, which serves as a sort of mobile plinth.
Another shock is to come. The actor playing Torquemada turns out to be the great Marlon Brando. Torquemada doesn't have a great deal to do with Columbus's epic voyage of 1492, but he was a significant force of his time. In consideration of this, and of the salary Mr. Brando was receiving to play a bit role in an early sequence, the producers probably thought it was little enough to ask that Mr. Brando also appear for a couple of minutes in a seaside crowd scene.
"Christopher Columbus: The Discovery" is that kind of movie: expensive, sloppy and, at its most ambitious, a frail reminder of the Warner Brothers swashbucklers that Michael Curtiz used to turn out with Errol Flynn. The French-born George Corraface, who resembles a robust, healthy Al Pacino, plays Columbus as a fellow who smiles a lot, has a set of extremely white teeth, enchants the ladies and is handy with a sword.
The team-written screenplay, directed by John Glen and credited to John Briley and Cary Bates and Mario Puzo (the last two conjunctions are apparently called for by their contracts), cannot sustain the film's swashbuckling aspirations. A certain amount of historical scene-setting is necessary, all of which is dead wood. Tom Selleck and Rachel Ward, who appear as Ferdinand and Isabella, behave like a couple who have become separated from their Mardi Gras float.
The film preserves, but never enlivens, all those gestures so dear to old-time Hollywood costume dramas: people sweeping into and out of throne rooms, kissing royal rings and unrolling parchments that are of more interest to them than to us.
"Christopher Columbus: The Discovery" is concerned only with Columbus's first remarkable voyage.Yet the depiction is perfunctory and sort of hurried, in part because of all those throne-room scenes and of others showing Columbus romancing a very pretty young woman to whom he later compares the Santa Maria ("a bit top-heavy and too narrow in the beam"). "Christopher Columbus: T he Discovery," which has been rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned), includes partial nudity.