Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
Flashing blades, roaring cannons, daring rogues swinging through the air to the aid of their true loves and to battle dastardly villains – there’s a definitive image, however ephemeral in exact detail, that comes to mind when you hear the word “swashbuckler.” Stories of romantic adventure in this vein stretch back at least to the days of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers, Baroness Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, and Sir Walter Scott’s Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and they’ve been mined for cinematic adaptation and inspiration almost since the birth of the medium, and their influence can be seen from Jack Sparrow’s Caribbean to galaxies far, far away. This month sees Cinapse’s team looking at nearly a century of swashbuckling sagas from their black-and-white roots to the brand-new reinventions of the form to examine why these tales are so enticing, so timeless, and who told them the best.
The Pick: Captain Blood (1935)
Kicking us off in style is the 1935 adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s historical adventure Captain Blood. Like many productions of this era, Blood was a second pass at a story that had initially been made as a silent film, which Warner Bros. decided to come back to after 1934’s The Count of Monte Cristo breathed new life into the Hollywood swashbuckler. Both Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland were second choices for their respective lead roles, but their blistering chemistry and natural talents helped turn Captain Blood into a huge hit for the studio and made the young leads into high-demand movie stars. Join the buccaneers at Cinapse to find out if this high seas adventure still has some wind in its sails.
The Team
Ed Travis
Part of me championed the idea of a month’s worth of swashbuckler programming at Cinapse JUST as a great excuse to finally cross Captain Blood off my list of shame.
I had a great time with it and am thrilled to have finally seen this seminal cornerstone of action cinema. I’m not sure it absolutely blew my socks off and enters a hallowed place of all-time greatness for me, but I highly enjoyed it and will spend my brief word count singing some specific praises that I wanted to single out.
First of all, this is a full on action movie. To some degree I feel like the modern understanding of an action movie didn’t quite coalesce until the 1980s, but here we have this 1935 rip roarer that is relentlessly paced, building to an all out massive action/battle set piece aboard pirate ships that rivals shit Peter Jackson was putting on the big screen in the Lord Of The Rings franchise. There’s model work and set design happening here that puts Star Wars to shame. That bit is just kind of mind blowing and makes you wonder how Michael Curtiz was even able to pull this off.
I also appreciated the epic scope of the story. It’s dated today, but you knew in 1935 you were being treated to a globe-spanning, years-passing epic when you have like a dozen title cards that walk you through big happenings. I didn’t mind. Actually, it kind of made me want those title cards to come back into style. Maybe a lil on screen text would help me not have to watch an entire Marvel TV series, for instance, to understand what’s happening in the latest chapter of the MCU? But I digress.
Through the first half of the film I feared there simply wasn’t enough sword fighting or rope swinging for my swashbuckling tastes, but we’re in good hands with a frankly cold and grim tale of slavery and autocracy that is building to a satisfying showdown of good versus evil for the entire final act.
Errol Flynn charms, Olivia de Havilland dazzles, Michael Curtiz flexs, and a dashing good time is had by all.
Brendan Foley
The only real knock against Captain Blood’s legacy is that it can’t help but feel like a rough draft for the Technicolor perfection that is The Adventures of Robin Hood. That film takes every necessary lesson from this one, doubling down on what works and delivering the definitive great adventure film.
But, hell, Captain Blood is still A great adventure film. Flynn swaggers and swashbuckles his way into movie star godhood, de Havilland is luminous throughout, and Basil Rathbone comes darn close to stealing the whole thing with his too-brief turn as a saucy French villain. You can feel the fingerprints of Captain Blood on most every pirate film going forward, as Curtiz so perfectly realizes the iconography of the genre that everyone else afterwards can use his work as a free cheat code.
In particular, the grand duel between Flynn and Rathbone amidst the crashing waves on a tropical beach is perhaps the entire ‘swashbuckling’ aesthetic in miniature, emblazoned onto celluloid forever.
Brendan Agnew
Watching Captain Blood is a slightly surreal experience, because – on the one hand – it’s very much a movie still reacting to the advent of the “talkies” and the (when it was made) modern approach to filmmaking (complete with the occasional interruption of narrative text block shepherding the audience between scenes, settings, or periods of time). Eric Wolfgang Korngold is on hand for the rousing score, but it’s not as nuanced or reactive as his later work in the genre, and it’s far more obvious here than in, say, The Adventures of Robin Hood that the stunt team was having to work around Flynn’s relative inexperience with fencing.
However, there’s still an undeniably potent core that comes through even so many decades later. Not only in how Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland have insane chemistry and could burn down Port Royal with their movie star sparks, but also in how deftly Casey Robinson’s screenplay adapts Rafael Sabatini’s historical adventure novel which condenses years into 2 breathless hours. Not only was this fairly early in Hollywood’s history of adapting (relatively) recent works, but it was also a complex period production with the army of costumed extras and set-and-model work that there wasn’t exactly a proven blueprint for at the time. However, the confidence with which director Michael Curtiz blazes through the story of Dr. Peter Blood’s journey from pacifist surgeon to slave to pirate iconoclast makes it a small wonder he had The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca in him.
For all that there’s more than a few elements of this movie that feel like a first pass at what would work even better in later collaborations, you can also see the straight line that connects this film to modern successors like The Princess Bride, Cutthroat Island, and Pirates of the Caribbean. And the beats still hit, from the cathartic escape and capture of a ship by Blood’s fellow slaves to the massive 2-on-1 ship battle finale in the harbor of Port Royal. The romance and swashbuckling and delightfully explosive models lose none of their potency for being able to see some of the seams, and the story of a man trying to live comfortably only to be radicalized when oppression finds him at home has proven all too timeless.
And with that, we weigh anchor and bid adieu to the good captain and his bonny lass. Our indomitable crew covered this creative team’s direct follow-up back in 2020 when we marked the passing of Olivia de Havilland with our merry band covering The Adventures of Robin Hood, but if you’re still hungering for more buckling of swash, we have many more in store for you.
March: Swashbuckling Adventure On and Off the High Seas
Our month of Swashbuckling continues all March, culminating in the two-part adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel!
March 10 – Cutthroat Island (Tubi / Hoopla – 2 hours 4 minutes)
March 17 – Hook (Digital Rental / Purchase – 2 hours 21 minutes)
March 24 – The Court Jester (Digital Rental / Purchase – 1 hour 41 minutes)
March 31 – The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Hulu – 2 hrs 1 minute) / Milady (Hulu – 1 hour 55 minutes)
And We’re Out.
