"Faith, but it’s an uncertain world entirely."
This was Errol Flynn's first leading role in a film and it turned him into a star. More than eighty years later it's still easy to see why. Captain Blood has daring heroics, amazing swordplay, big action sequences, strong characters and a great romance with one of the most beautiful women to ever make movies. Flynn's handsome, graceful but masculine onscreen presence made both men and women flock to his movies for escapist fun for nearly twenty years. Captain Blood is as good an example of perfect filmmaking as I can imagine. It's one of the greatest pirate films ever made and my own favorite movie of all time.
Flynn plays Doctor Peter Blood, who in 1685 is arrested and sentenced to slavery for treating rebels wounded in battle against the British crown. Shipped to the town of Port Royal in Jamaica he is bought in a fit of pique by Arabella Bishop (Olivia De Havilland), the niece of one of the island's major landowners, Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). Unsure what to do with her impulse purchase she drops the doctor into the regular slave population working her uncle's plantation. Using his medical skills to treat the island governor's gout, Blood gains some privileges and secretly arranges to buy a boat for an escape attempt. Instead, fate intervenes when a Spanish attack on the colony enables him to steal a full-sized ship and make an escape with his fellow liberated slaves as crew.
Turning to piracy, Blood spends the next few years plundering any and all vessels that come under his sword until a partnership with flamboyant French pirate captain Levasseur (Basil Rathbone) goes badly. Having captured the ship bringing Miss Bishop back to the Caribbean from England, Levasseur plans to ransom her but Blood, emotionally torn about this beautiful, kind woman, tries to buy her away. When this fails the two captains fight to the death and Blood walks away with the lady his prisoner. At first relishing the turn of slave to master he ultimately cannot treat her cruelly and stubbornly sets out to return her to Port Royal even though he'll most likely be caught there and hanged by her uncle, who has become Jamaica's new governor. But there's a surprise or two at the island for Blood and his crew that will test their loyalties and their fighting abilities.
The film is so remarkably faithful an adaptation of the Raphael Sabatini novel that when I finally read the book I was shocked by its fidelity. I expected the usual monkeying typical of the movies but clearly Warner Brothers saw a great adventure story with exactly what Hollywood needed and stuck to it. In fact, like most novels of its time the story seems to have something for nearly everyone — political villainy, explosive sea battles, a noble hero, a classic swordfight, a smart romance and plenty of pirate action. Often with adventure movies there is little time for smaller moments but Captain Blood has sharply drawn minor characters and even the dialog is clever with dozens of smart, quotable lines that linger long after the fun is over.
A movie with so many elements could have easily flown out of control but as directed by the great Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) it never feels frantic, but rather moves so smoothly it seems to be a much shorter film than it really is. Indeed, what at first glance seems to be an episodic story of a man's fall from respected citizen to "thief and pirate" and his serendipitous return to grace reveals itself in hindsight to be a remarkably linear tale of overcoming unjust, oppressive authority. Of course, none of that would matter if the film wasn't fun and on that front it succeeds admirably. This is two of the most entertaining hours I've ever spent watching a film and I never tire of introducing new people to this classic.
Sadly, seeing Captain Blood in its original form hasn't always been easy. When I first saw and fell in love with it on commercial TV and it's first VHS release the running time was 99 minutes. To accommodate the necessities of a two-hour time slot on television a full 20 minutes of character and detail had been snipped out! For decades that was the only version of the movie available. Some have argued that these cuts didn't hurt the film, that at full length it's overcrowded and too busy. Ridiculous! These are the types of folks that would look at a gourmet banquet and complain that their plate was too small. Luckily in the late 1980's Ted Turner's TBS cable station started showing a beautiful uncut print... but only colorized! Mon dieu! But then in 1993 the 119 minute cut was released on tape (and later Laser Disc) with a banner on the cover that made Flynn fan hearts flutter: "In Glorious Black & White". The long overdue DVD release of Captain Blood put one more sword thrust into the shorter edit, relegating it to a reference book footnote. Warner - where is the Blu-Ray?
