Captain Blood follows Errol Flynn’s Peter Blood, from his days as a retiring doctor, to sailing the seven seas, getting into sword fights with Basil Rathbone and kicking the entire French armada’s les arses all the way back to where ever it is that French people go when they lose or give up at something.
Now, if you’re like me and you worry that some movie is going to try and sneak a history lesson in on you, I should warn you that Captain Blood tries to get you up to speed on current events circa 1685-1687.
We learn that King James was not well liked and that a number of his subjects began rebelling against him. In the course of this rebelling, some fancy lad gets his ass shot off and Dr. Blood (almost as catchy for a doctor as it is for a pirate) is called out to help him.
Blood explains to his lippy maid that he has had his share of fighting from back when he did a six year tour in whatever the Seventeenth Century’s equivalent of Vietnam was and that now he is a healer and not a slayer. So he goes to help out, even though these guys are rebels and the Crown wants them for treason. Blood gets caught up in all this and is arrested with everyone else.
Just before the judge can sentence everyone to hang, it is decided that the Crown could get better use out of these traitors by sending them off to beautiful Jamaica to be slaves for ten years!
Blood and the rest of the gang get shipped to Port Royal where he’s bought by the niece of Colonel Bishop. Bishop is played by Lionel Atwill, a guy that somehow managed to appear in almost all of Universal’s Frankenstein movies, but never in the same role more than once. Bishop is going to be your heavy, though he does little more than treat the slaves poorly and once they all make their inevitable escape, his role decreases quite a bit.
Blood gets in good with the governor there by treating his gout. This puts the royal doctors out of work and Blood uses their desire to get back to working on the governor’s nasty feet to get himself a boat for he and his fellow slaves.
Blood also finds time to hang out periodically with the niece, Arabella (Olivia De Havilland), where he fumes about her buying him as a slave and her helping him out of jams and such. We know by the way he fumes and by the fairly low cut dress she wears that they are love.
Blood’s escape plan is foiled a bit when some Spanish dudes show up and attack and sink his boat. Being the roguish gentleman he is, he decides to simply steal the Spanish ship while the men are ashore partying.
Blood then comes up with his Articles that everyone on the ship has to agree to. These Articles lay out the rules for pirating and include such things as no raping, provisions for splitting the loot, and not getting drunk on duty. Everyone enthusiastically agrees to these rules and it’s off to a life of good clean pirating.
As big of sissies as these pirates would seem to be from their Sunday School rules, they don’t come off as pansies so much as guys having a high old time sailing the seas, mixing it up and splitting the loot.
Director Michael Curtiz smartly uses a montage of these things to show us their pirating without slowing down the movie with pointless pirate encounters. He also isn’t afraid to use some text on screen to keep the action moving along and relieve the characters of clumsy exposition scenes where they would have to explain where they’re going or who they are.
Blood and his gang of merry thieves (you get the feeling that Flynn is merely warming up for his role in The Adventures Of Robin Hood) set in at the pirate haven of Tortuga, where they meet up with a French pirate named Levasseur (Rathbone) who seems friendly enough and wants to enter into a partnership with Blood. Blood is reluctant, but finally gives in and gets Levasseur to agree to his precious Articles.
After he signs the agreement, Blood continues to express his dread at entering into this agreement. I found this to be the weakest aspect of an otherwise exceptional movie as this was completely inconsistent with how Blood was portrayed before and after. He’s a smart, decent guy and yet he signs on to something he knows is a mistake and even worries about it as he does so. Why in the world does he do this? There isn’t anything in the movie to explain why he would ever entertain the notion of joining another pirate and it seems to happen solely to set up the big sword fight with Rathbone.
This is a film that anyone who has even the slightest itch to see derring-do, guys swinging on ropes, and larger than life heroes should not miss.
It’s still apparent how this movie catapulted Flynn to superstardom as soon as it came out. He has a cool authority about him, barking orders at his loyal crew, while able to remain happy go lucky most of the time (except when his lady dumps him briefly) and is completely convincing as both an action hero and someone that can deliver lots of dialogue that others surely would have tripped over.
The villains are well done, with Rathbone playing a pirate who isn’t pure evil, but is quite simply just a pirate (more so than Blood ever thought of being – Blood was just an ex-patriot killing time until he could figure out what to do with his life) and Colonel Bishop is a stuffy, mindless bureaucrat, more a cruel and petty slug than anything else.
Curtiz’s direction is lively, his editing in the various battle scenes combining shots of the actors and the special effects are such that these scenes retain their explosiveness and grab you even today.
Not all the special effects are very convincing, but the whole movie, down to its costumes and musical score manage to capture the joyful freedom we imagine privateering to have been. An involving romanticization with moments of surprising depth (like when Blood admits he doesn’t know why he became a pirate), Captain Blood should be in every first matey’s film collection.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
