Though he had yet to grow his trademark pencil-thin mustache, Errol Flynn rocketed to stardom with Michael Curtiz’s Captain Blood, a high-spirited remake of a 1924 silent film of the same name (based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini) that provided the actor with the first of his eight on-screen pairings with Olivia de Havilland. Not nearly as exciting as 1940’s The Sea Hawk, the film—greenlit after MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty proved a hit—features a spirited score by the legendary Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and supplies jolly pirate action while simultaneously, and none too subtly, mocking the dictatorial British monarchy.
In 1685 England, Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn, in a role originally intended for Robert Donat) helps treat a rebel wounded in an uprising against King James II, and for his trouble gets labeled a traitor and sent to Port Royal in Jamaica to be sold into slavery. There, he’s purchased by the beautiful niece, Arabella (de Havilland), of a vicious plantation owner (Lionel Atwill), but during an attack on the colony by a Spanish armada, Blood takes to the ocean aboard a stolen army vessel. Now a notorious pirate surrounded by a band of loyal, exiled Englishmen, Blood—an Irish buccaneer with vigor and wit to spare—steals from anyone foolish enough to cross his path and spars with a rascally Spanish pirate (Basil Rathbone) before eventually reuniting with, and successfully wooing, Arabella.
That Blood’s reputation is restored thanks to the newly installed King William doesn’t change the film’s playful critique of English rule, which is presented as ruthless, irrational, and wholly unconcerned with the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. However, such rusty political undercurrents—clearly intended to appeal to the film’s tyranny-loathing American audience—are much less important than Flynn’s dashing, gallant performance as the impudent Blood.
Conveying emotion in big, broad strokes and through buoyant, lithesome physicality, Flynn—shot in light almost as downy as that which envelops de Havilland—dominates Curtiz’s frequently overcrowded and busy frame like a shining sword cutting through the fog. As a result of the charming de Havilland’s rote role as a moralizing stick-in-the-mud, the film’s central romance isn’t as captivating as the on-screen couple’s later collaborations, and one pines for more (and more elaborate) set pieces than the somewhat wooden Flynn-Rathbone duel and a sea battle culled from silent movie and miniature model footage. Yet even if Captain Blood often seems overloaded with too much time-consuming exposition and unfunny peripheral characters, Flynn’s wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.
Image/Sound
From densely populated crowd scenes to the soft-lit close-ups of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, the new 4K digital restoration of Captain Blood is rich in detail, highlighting the film’s elaborate costumes and exquisite set design. Contrast is strong, with inky blacks and a wide range of grays throughout, while grain is evenly distributed, showing no signs of smoothing. The uncompressed mono soundtrack is surprisingly robust for a film from 1935, especially in regards to Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rousing score, with little of the tinniness that still plagued many Hollywood films until a couple years later.
Extras
On his audio commentary, author Alan K. Rode does an excellent job of contextualizing the release of the film, both through its importance in re-popularizing the swashbuckler film and its relevance in its director and lead actors’ careers. He also talks at length about the 1922 source novel and 1924 silent film. Also included is a 22-minute documentary on the film from 2005, in which various interviewees, including the late TCM host Robert Osborne, talk about Flynn’s career, the risk Warner Bros. took in pairing two relatively unknown stars in the lead roles, and the parts played by Basil Rathbone and Lionel Atwell. Rounding out the package is the Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1937, with Flynn, Havilland, and Basil Rathbone and a foldout booklet with an essay by Farran Smith Nehme that deftly covers, among other things, Flynn’s star-making turn, the adaptation process, and the film’s special effects.
Overall
The Criterion Collection has outfitted Michael Curtiz’s classic swashbuckler with a stunning new 4K transfer and small yet incisive batch of extras.
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