Captain Blood (1935)

Captain Blood, nominated for Best Picture of 1935, is the film that made Errol Flynn a star, and for that, we should be very grateful. Did anyone ever seem to have as much fun on screen as Flynn did? He's asked to portray a pirate in Captain Blood, and his performance led to him being cast in a series of action films, many of them being of the swashbuckling variety. He would become one of the most reliable stars in films like this, and it's easy to see why from his performance here.

It's 1685 in England, and Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn) is awakened in the middle of the night to tend to a man who has been injured in a battle between the forces of King James II and a group of rebels who wish to replace him on the throne with his rival, the Duke of Monmouth. Blood, being a dedicated member of his profession, goes to help but is not interested in taking sides politically. He is arrested for helping a rebel and held for months awaiting trial. When he appears in court, the judge attempts to prevent him from mounting a defense on his own behalf. He and dozens of other men are found guilty.

Instead of carrying out the sentence of hanging that comes with a charge of treason, the king decides instead to ship the convicted men to the English colony at Port Royal in the Caribbean. There they will perform ten years of labor to the highest bidder. The ones who work on the island's sugar plantation will also be subject to the brutality of Col. Bishop (Lionel Atwill), the most notoriously callous slave owner on the island. Bishop, at first, refuses to purchase Blood because of the insolence he displays, so his niece Arabella (Oliva de Havilland) buys the doctor instead to save him from having to work in the mines of Port Royal.

Life on the plantation is difficult. The men work long hours and are given little food and rest. If someone attempts to escape, he is whipped and then branded on his face with an FT (for "Fugitive Traitor"). It's only through becoming personal doctor to the island's governor that Blood is spared. Rather than work at hard labor, he instead has to keep the governor's gout in check, no small feat considering how much of a hypochondriac the governor seems to be. His new job also provides Blood with frequent access to Arabella, whom he finds attractive enough to kiss only to have her slap him for presuming that a slave like himself could touch a lady.

When a Spanish pirate ship attacks Port Royal, Blood and some of his fellow prisoners take advantage of the distraction to escape. They cleverly steal the pirate ship and decide to become pirates themselves. They even develop some rules of piracy to follow, covering such items as taking no female prisoners and how much to compensate someone for the loss of a limb. (The price varies depending upon which limb you've lost, even which side of the body it's on.) After a series of successful raids on Spanish and English ships, depicted in a montage of images, Blood and his men join up with a French pirate, Levasseur (Basil Rathbone), and his men to make even more money.

The French pirates attack an English ship on their way to a rendezvous with Blood's ship, and one of the prisoners they take is Arabella. Blood fights Levasseur for possession of Arabella because he knows that the French pirate will not follow the rules of piracy Blood and his men have adopted. Of course, Blood wins, and he tries to convince her that she can have all of the jewels she wants from their treasure. She refuses him, but he counters that he now owns her the way she once owned him. Naturally (at least in terms of the movies), she is attracted to him--we have to have a love interest, after all--a fact that Lord Willoughby (Henry Stephenson), a fellow passenger on the English ship who is now a prisoner of the pirates, notices. As Willoughby tells her, "He's not such a bad fellow for a pirate." Indeed.

Willoughby has a surprise for Blood. King James has been replaced on the throne by William and Mary, who have pardoned the pirates for their crimes and given Blood a commission in the Royal Navy. And it's just in the nick of time, for the French have arrived in Port Royal and are attempting to take the city away from the English colonists there. Blood has to try to save the colony and defeat the French, and the film has its last chance to show a powerful battle between ships.

Captain Blood is a lot of fun to watch. Given the number of battles and the amount of historical detail crammed into it, you'll be surprised at how quickly it moves. Flynn is fantastic, a true star, although I do wish someone could have given him a better haircut. He always seems stuck with some sort of pageboy in his better films. He and de Havilland have a real chemistry, and they would appear together in several more films (and allegedly become lovers off-screen as well) over the new few years. They are both good here, but it's really Flynn and that smile of his that makes Captain Blood so enjoyable. Even when he's in the heat of battle, nothing seems to stop him from having fun (and from making this movie fun for us viewers as well).

Oscar Nominations: Picture and Sound Recording

Footnote: The year 1935 was the last year that the Academy allowed write-in votes and the last year that it announced the runners-up in each category. Captain Blood received votes in three categories in which it had not been officially nominated: Director, Screenplay, and Score. In fact, the film's director, Michael Curtiz, came in second in the voting, behind that year's winner, John Ford for The Informer, and ahead of the two other official nominees.