Captain Blood: A Pirate Is Born

Flynn was just twenty-six and swooningly handsome, with an innate dash and magnetism that the camera showed at every angle. But he was also inexperienced, and early in the production, his terror often showed. Like many studio directors at the time, Curtiz believed merciless bullying was the best way to get a performance out of an actor. This was a bad approach for almost anyone, but especially so for an uncertain lead with both the studio’s money and his own career on the line. Flynn understandably bore a grudge toward Curtiz for the rest of his life.

As shooting continued, though, Flynn loosened up and let the ornate dialogue flow like his natural talk. He had been hired for who he was—young, athletic, with a wicked jokester streak. At some point, Flynn seemed to decide that these qualities were all the movies were going to need from him. During Captain Blood and for a long time after, the conventional wisdom on Errol Flynn was that he could be a real actor—eventually. This was precisely the wrong take. It was Flynn’s lack of “acting” that was essential to his appeal. The more he realized his own persona was the key, the better he got, so much so that producer Hal Wallis ordered filming extended to give Flynn another go at the scenes that revealed his anxiety. His improvement was clear to everyone, even Curtiz. And so in the finished film, Flynn’s Peter Blood could thrill with an elaborate speech to his new pirate crew, simply by not saying it like a “real actor”—“Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! There’s no chains to hold you now. Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind that’s carrying us all to freedom!”

Perhaps it’s doubtful that any real-life pirate on the Spanish Main ever talked like that, but much else about Captain Blood was surprisingly accurate, due to its source material. Rafael Sabatini was known for his careful research, and many historical plot points of Captain Blood, as implausible as they may seem, happened as the film shows. The downfall of Peter Blood, a former sailor who is practicing as a doctor when the book opens, is set in motion by the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685. That year, King Charles II died without heirs, leaving the throne to his charmless and unloved brother James. Charles did, however, have several illegitimate children. One of them, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, raised an army (of sorts) and declared himself rightful king in several towns along the way, a presumption that Peter Blood openly mocks in the book. The armies of Monmouth and King James fought at the Battle of Sedgemoor on July 6, 1685, and Monmouth’s poorly equipped forces were demolished, a fact conveyed in both movie and book by the appearance of Jeremy Pitt (Ross Alexander) on Peter Blood’s doorstep.

Pitt is there to fetch Blood to treat a wounded officer, and the doctor is arrested for his pains. Like other lines in the script, Blood’s ill-advised rationale is almost the same in Sabatini’s novel—“It’s a Christian country, this, and Christian men do not make war upon the wounded, nor upon those who harbor them.” The good doctor finds out just how wrong he is when he’s arrested, imprisoned, and brought to trial before Judge George Jeffreys, the original “hanging judge.” Blood gets a small measure of revenge by advising Jeffreys that he is terminally ill (as was the real-life judge, with kidney disease), a telling moment that the movie retains. That exchange is fiction, but the sentence handed down to many of the rebels, that they be transported to the West Indies as “slaves,” is fact. The status of the transported Monmouth rebels was more akin to indentured servitude, and they were eventually pardoned, but their treatment while serving their sentence was indeed comparable to chattel slavery. The movie raises the stakes for Blood and his compatriots by consistently describing them as “slaves.”

Several of Blood’s exploits are based on the life of Henry Morgan, which Sabatini slyly acknowledges by attributing one of Morgan’s most famous raids to Captain Blood and suggesting that Morgan was just taking credit for it. The movie doesn’t do that, but 1930s filmgoers, who devoured tales of historical derring-do, would have recognized the echoes of Morgan in scenes like the defeat of the Spaniards at Port Royal. (The character of Blood also owes something to Henry Pitman, a doctor transported for rebellion who had encounters with pirates, although Pitman didn’t join their ranks.) Sabatini also incorporated the seventeenth-century written constitutions, or “pirate codes,” that spelled out pirate rules. Honor toward women, alas, was the novelist’s invention, but the laws about division of spoils and compensation for injuries (“for the loss of a right arm, six hundred pieces of eight”) were entirely real.

Achieving realism with the special effects would be trickier. Warner Bros. was as penny-pinching a studio as any in Hollywood, and a sea picture struck fear into the hearts of its accountants. Not only were the tall ships themselves an exorbitant expense, but their use meant a lot of waiting around for just the right conditions of wind and waves. The naval battles and ship sinkings in Captain Blood, it was resolved, would sidestep that whole mess. Instead, miniature ships (about eighteen feet long, so not all that mini) were filmed in the studio tank. Process shots, the good old back lot, and judicious pilfering of useful bits from the silent Captain Blood and 1924’s The Sea Hawk (an enduring technical marvel) made up the rest. The climactic sword fight between Levasseur and Blood—a demonstration of both Rathbone’s skill as a fencer and Flynn’s as a quick study—was shot on location at Laguna Beach.

Underlining the action, and adding immeasurably to the drama and emotion, was the score by the great Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Brought to Hollywood at the behest of Max Reinhardt to conduct the Felix Mendelssohn incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Korngold was now asked by Jack Warner to come up with a score for Captain Blood. The composer at first told Warner that pirates didn’t inspire him all that much, and refused. He changed his mind after seeing some rushes, and realizing (along with the rest of Hollywood) that the movie was going to be something special. What the meticulous Korngold didn’t know was that Warner expected a turnaround of three weeks. The composer had to fill out the score with a little Franz Liszt, and because of that, Korngold insisted on being credited only with “musical arrangements.” Most of the music, however, is pure Korngold, including the magnificent title theme, with an opening blare of trumpets that promises thrills to come.

Captain Blood debuted at Christmastime, then as now a sign of studio faith in its Oscar potential—and it was nominated for five, including Best Picture and Best Director. Flynn, on whose shoulders the whole production had been riding, was not nominated. Warner Bros. threw a party for the premiere, attended by then-contract writer Delmer Daves; Flynn’s wife, Lili Damita, greeted Daves with a tearful plea not to tell her husband how wonderful he was. For most of Flynn’s career, critics had little trouble complying with Damita’s request. From a greater distance, it’s possible to see that none of Flynn’s most celebrated roles would be as memorable without him—and it all began with Captain Blood.