 Errol Flynn is Peter Blood, a doctor who becomes a pirate after "escaping unjust political imprisonment." They also say that "Captain Blood will skipper you on the high seas of unparalleled enjoyment." 1935, 119 minutes, VHS
With his rakish grin, his prowess with his sword, and the slickest hairdo I've ever seen on a pirate, I would feel quite comfortable having Errol Flynn escort my voluptuous fifteen year old step daughter out for a night on the town. The guy just emanates "gentleman."
And besides, you actually have proof that Mr. Flynn was a gentleman as he was acquitted by an all-woman jury of the statutory rape of not one, but two young gals. Was there so little to do in the early forties that young women had to make up bogus sex charges against the screen's biggest sex symbol? Luckily today, our top stars are too busy denying that they're gay for us to take seriously the baseless charges of some trailer park hussy (we leave that to our presidents, I guess).
Flynn is the perfect choice (even if he was the third choice) for his role as the gentlemanly pirate Peter Blood. He shows us that perhaps pirates weren't really the scourge of the seas that all those anti-buccaneer interest groups try and convince us of and that maybe, they were just good time boys looking for some adventure, the way kids today skateboard over the Snake Canyon and stuff. I've always believed that these pirate types were more along the lines of the dashing, well-scrubbed variety as portrayed by Errol than the filthy, double-crossing, sweaty kind played by Robert Newton in movies like Treasure Island .
Pirates weren't criminals and scalawags so much as they were lone wolfs (I would count the crew of the entire ship as a single entity) that played by their own rules and only stole stuff from the rich merchant ships and people that could afford it. I'm also assuming that they only killed when absolutely necessary and raped women only when they were really horny and not just for kicks.
These are the kinds of pirates that Errol leads (and I would add that I never saw them anywhere near the ladies!) and it's a testament to this film's strength's that by the time it was all over, I was calling up the Navy and Coast Guard to see how close to pirates they were in case I wanted to join up (It turns out that I could count on plundering radioactive material from suspicious foreign vessels and giving Cubans a ride back to Havana, so I figured that it would be best to keep my options open and maybe become an astronaut, like in Disney's whacky movie, Moon Pilot ).
My career as a gallant pirate somewhat stymied for the time being (I'm still waiting to hear back from some Alaskan fishing boats), the next best thing is to sit around watching this movie. It truly has an epic feel about it as we follow the retiring doctor, Peter Blood, from his days as an, err, 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.
Admittedly things don't get off to a very promising start when they start telling me that it is 1685 and they have a guy riding a horse in front of one of those screens that projects the background going by behind him. The movie gets points for serving up its singular worst moment in its first moment and I was willing to give it a chance since I didn't figure cute schoolgirls would be accusing a guy that was in an embarrassingly crappy movie of humping them.
And I was right! Things pick up for Dr. Blood and more importantly, for the audience, in a hurry. There's another of those problems in England again with a group of people not to enamored with the rule of King James. You might remember King James from such hit novels as The King James Bible . It seems like England is always tearing its hair out over these inbred slugs that rule their country. They really should've smartened up a lot sooner and started a democracy so that they could have the Supreme Court pick their President , just like we do.
But since they aren't as advanced as us (Remember when we still clung to the outdated belief that whoever got the most votes would win? Gawd, we were such babes in the woods!), we get lots of cool stories about people fighting over who's going to run a country that is pretty much an also-ran and American lapdog anymore. As a proud American, I find myself feeling a tad humiliated for all the Britons who act like what they say on the world stage matters. Kind of like how you cringe whenever your cousin Pookie gets too much PBR in him at the barbecue and starts braying about the IMF, World Bank, and the Antichrist. 
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 this movie 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 Vietnam 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 and when he's brought to trial he's the only guy that pleads not guilty.
At first I assumed that everyone else pleaded guilty because they had worked out some sweet plea agreement with the prosecutor. A little community service, some supervised probation, paying court costs - that sort of thing, but then it dawned on me that perhaps these people didn't have any deal at all, but were pleading guilty because of their principles. How backward were people three hundred years ago? Peter is more of a modern guy and irritates the judge with his not guilty plea (judges hate that) and 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 gets shipped to Port Royal where he gets 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. Along the way, 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 now by the way he fumes and by the fairly low cut dress she wears that they are love, though the low cut dress could surely be ascribed to the tropical heat and not to her desire to get Errol put on trial again.
Errol'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, Errol decides to simply steal the Spanish ship while the men are ashore partying. He and his boys take the ship and sail off. Blood then comes up with his Articles that everyone 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 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. Probably wouldn't work in a modern movie, but it comes off very well in this one, just adding to the atmosphere of old-school sea adventure and keeping you involved in Blood's large-scale story. 
Blood and his gang of merry thieves (you get the feeling that Errol 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. (It is a great battle between the two of them, fought on the beach of an island before all their men and in front of Arabella and ends with Blood sticking Rathbone in the guts and leaving him lying in the surf as the water washes over him - a perfectly staged and photographed fight that feels and looks like how a buccaneer battle would go between a couple of cocky guys intent on showing up the other in front of everyone.)
The movie eventually concludes with Blood finding out that King James has been fired and fled to France, that William of Orange has taken over and is now offering Blood and his gang full pardons if they'll whip some French ass (whom England is now at war with). No sweat says Blood and proceeds to engage some French ships that are attacking Port Royal in as spectacular a ship battle as you'll ever see (the mind positively boggles when one of the French ships gets blown completely to smithereens in a teeth-rattling explosion). Things are wrapped up nicely with Blood and Arabella reconciling and there is an amusing turn of events involving Colonel Bishop and Blood that ends the movie on an up note.
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 in this age of digitally processed shots. 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.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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