Here's the transcript of my introduction to
Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), in the Art of Action season, which took place at the BFI Southbank in London on Wednesday 6 November:
"Hi,
I’m going to tell you a bit about the background to Captain Blood, its enduring significance and a few things to look out for while watching it.
There’s a line that the judge in the film speaks early on – “In heaven’s name, be brief, man” – and I’ve taken that to heart. I’ll talk for about nine minutes, and then I’ll let you watch the movie.
Can I just have a show of hands as to who’s seen Captain Blood before…?
It's about a third of you. Well, all of you are going to have a great time, but only about a third of you realise it yet.
Captain Blood is the film that made stars out of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and, with its release in 1935, launched a swashbuckler craze that lasted for five years, before exploding again in the early ‘50s.
Swashbucklers had been a key part of silent cinema: Douglas Fairbanks turned himself from a rom-com lead to an action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920 – and there’s a screening of that movie, with its astonishing final reel, at the BFI on Saturday 23rd. Fairbanks then made a string of huge hits in the same mould, including his 1922 Robin Hood, and The Black Pirate. But when he retired from swordfighting with the elegiac The Iron Mask in 1929, the genre went with him.
Swashbucklers were reborn in the sound era with The Count of Monte Cristo, an independent film made in 1934, and Warner Bros – wanting to get in on the action – hired the star of that movie, Robert Donat, to play Captain Blood, in its remake of an old silent.
At that time, Warner were still best known for fast-talking urban pictures aimed at an immigrant audience:
• gangster movies
• backstage musicals
• films about social justice
But America’s tastes were changing, and Hal Wallis, the studio’s new head of production, was particularly drawn to historical epics.
Captain Blood’s script was by Casey Robinson, who became the studio’s expert at adapting novels. He kept the basis of the Rafael Sabatini book – about a physician who becomes a slave and later a pirate – but looked to “humanise” the story, in his words, getting inside the central character, and introducing a theme of man’s injustice to man. And in case that wouldn’t bring in the crowds, he also built up the love story, and introduced a couple of quack doctors for comic relief.
The studio put aside a million dollars for the film – the most they had spent on a picture since the debacle of Noah’s Ark in 1928, a movie that had lost Warner $2m, as well as drowning three extras. Incredibly, they hired the same director, Michael Curtiz, who after that disaster had been relegated to making programmers. While waiting for production to begin, he directed an entry in Warner’s mediocre Perry Mason series, called The Case of the Curious Bride. And, in that film, playing the part of a corpse, later seen in flashback being murdered, while speaking no lines of dialogue, was a 25-year-old Australian bit-part actor called Errol Flynn, making his Hollywood debut. Remember his name, because he’s coming back in a minute.
In the meantime, Warner were having serious problems casting Captain Blood. Robert Donat had dropped out, and the studio’s attempts to replace him with box-office names like Leslie Howard, Fredric March or Clark Gable all failed.
Head producer Hal Wallis had taken to screen-testing everyone in sight. An acerbic memo from studio chief Jack Warner to Wallis on the 16th of April 1935 read: “I noticed that there are 24 reels of tests for Captain Blood accumulated up here in the projection room. I would suggest that instead of you going to Palm Springs for the next weekend that you stay here and run [them].”
Eight weeks later, though, they were still testing. On the 11th of June, Wallis ordered tests of the abysmal George Brent and – fatefully – one Errol Flynn, who had previously read for the part of one of Blood’s crew. Jack Warner compared Flynn’s new test to seeing “a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside”. Wallis said Flynn “leapt from the screen into the projection room with the impact of a bullet.”
Flynn got the gig. But being thrown into a starring role in Warner’s most expensive sound-era movie wasn’t, if you’ll excuse the pun, plain sailing. We have Wallis’s memos from during production, which make this clear. On 9 September, a month into filming, he wrote to Curtiz about Flynn: “The fellow looks like he is scared to death every time he goes into a scene. I don’t know what the hell is the matter.” The good news, though: once he was into a scene, “he plays it charmingly”.
“I worked as hard as I knew how,” Flynn remembered, though he was called onto the carpet once, after becoming drunk, waving his sword about “like a Cossack”, shouting lines that weren’t in the script, and proceeding to almost fall off the boat. For once, though, he may have been blameless. The star claimed that the crew had fed him brandy after he collapsed due to a recurrence of malaria – and, astonishingly, historians believe that he may have been telling the truth.
Flynn was acting opposite the 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had also signed with Warner the previous year, abandoning her original dream of becoming a schoolteacher. She first met Flynn at their costume test. Her reaction: “Oh my! Oh my! Struck dumb. I knew it was what the French call a coup de foudre.”
Love at first sight. A lightning bolt.
“He is the handsomest, most charming, most magnetic, most virile young man in the entire world,” she elaborated.
But as well as being the most virile young man in the entire world, Flynn was also married, to French actor Lili Damita. While his professional partnership with de Havilland would endure for eight movies across six years, and although they had fallen in love, their relationship would never be consummated.
Production on Captain Blood took around 11 weeks. Wallis later called Curtiz, “my favourite director, then and always”, but, during filming, his barrage of complaints, in memo form, was incessant:
• there were too many candlesticks and bowls of fruit in the foreground of shots
• there were too few people in the hold of the slave ship
• the movement of the camera to simulate a rocking boat made him dizzy
• Curtiz kept filming shirtless older pirates with hairy potbellies
The film’s composer was secured at the 11th hour: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had done A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the film in which de Havilland had made her debut. He wrote his extraordinary score for Captain Blood in three weeks, despite only being able to work on it at night. You’ll notice in the credits that his reads, “Musical arrangements by”, even though 98 per cent of the score is original. He’d insisted on that wording, after lifting a short extract from a piece by Liszt for the duel between Flynn and Basil Rathbone – the film’s action highlight.
Keep an eye out too, in the credits, for the name of co-cinematographer Hal Mohr: he’s a good pub-quiz answer, as the only person to ever win an Oscar without being nominated, having received a deluge of write-in votes for his work on, again, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Captain Blood came out in Christmas week, 1935, grossing almost $3m and being nominated for five Oscars, including Picture and Score. It made stars of Flynn and de Havilland, and created a new template for swashbucklers, inspiring
• MGM’s The Prisoner of Zenda
• countless imitations at Fox, including The Mark of Zorro
• and Warner’s own 1940 film, The Sea Hawk
After Captain Blood, Flynn and de Havilland were regularly reteamed. Reflecting decades later, she said: “Errol was a strange mixture. A great athlete of immense charm and evident physical beauty, he stood, legs apart, arms folded defiantly and crowing lustily atop the Hollywood dung heap, but he treated women like toys to be discarded without warning … He was not a kind man, but in those careless days he was fun to be with.”
Though his marriage had been one obstacle to their getting together, there were others: Flynn tended to express his affection through the medium of distressing pranks – putting a dead snake in de Havilland’s underpants during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade – and, certainly, the two looked at the world in different ways.
During rehearsals for Captain Blood, they had found themselves alone on a soundstage. De Havilland recalled: “He sat down and he said to me, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And so I said, ‘Well I want respect for difficult work well done.’ And then I said to him, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And he said, ‘I want success.’ And by that he meant fame and riches, and I thought, ‘That’s not enough.’”
Flynn’s fixation on material treasures is echoed in a key scene in the film, and the real-life dissipation that would prove his downfall is foreshadowed by de Havilland’s line in Captain Blood that the hero has “destroyed himself”. While she would go on to become one of the most respected and powerful actors in Hollywood, he would be dead at 50, something between a legend, a self-parody and a cautionary tale. Flynn called Captain Blood the film that “started me on that road which has so often made the public acquainted with my wicked ways”.
Viewed today – starting in about one minute’s time, in fact – Captain Blood remains rousing entertainment. Flynn is so dashing and commanding in the lead, and Curtiz’s direction is consistently striking, with that roaming camera, his vivid use of shadow, and the artful compositions that drove Wallis up the wall.
And while the film’s excessive sadism panicked supervisor Robert Lord, who worried that women and children would be warned to stay away, the movie also has three unequivocally beautiful scenes, all of which I hope have made the cut in this re-edit:
• the “sail on, little ship” sequence, which even Wallis admired
• the would-be mutiny
• and a glorious moment of romantic revelation, invented by screenwriter Casey Robinson
It has, in addition, more derring-do than you can shake a cutlass at.
So sit back and enjoy the star-making turns of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in… Captain Blood."
