Swashbucklers seem to cycle their way back into the popular culture every couple of years. Pirate movies, musketeer movies, and really anything with fencing or duels qualifies. And then there are the echoes of the genre that pop up in so many other adventure films - the lightsaber duels in the "Star Wars" films, and the recent slew of Disney live-action fairy tale films that all lean heavily on action spectacle. You can trace all of it back to the lighthearted adventure stories and movies that were popular from the 1920s through the early 1950s.
And if there's any actor synonymous with the swashbuckler genre, it's Errol Flynn. I'd seen "The Adventures of Robin Hood" as a child, and recognized him as sort of a broad caricature of himself from movies about Golden Age Hollywood like "The Aviator" and "The Rocketeer." However, I hadn't actually watched his films. So, while I was catching up on director Michael Curtiz's filmography, I watched the two famous Errol Flynn pirate films that helped cement many of the tropes of swashbuckler and adventure films that are still around to this day. "Captain Blood" was the picture that brought Flynn and his leading lady, Olivia de Havilland, to stardom in 1935. "The Sea Hawk," five years later, copied the same model of big budget action, source material from novelist Rafael Sabatini, and a rousing score from Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
It was a great surprise to discover how entertaining these films still are. And it's no wonder Flynn became an icon - he's wildly charismatic, and such a delight to watch onscreen. In both films he ends up in chains and miserable servitude, before fighting his way to freedom and glory, and it's impossible not to root for him every step of the way. Seeing his antics immediately recontextualized a couple of later pieces of cinema for me, namely "The Princess Bride'' and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. Cary Elwes and Orlando Bloom were clearly cast based on their physical similarity to Flynn, and the Dread Pirate Roberts is transparently a sendup of Flynn's dashing, chivalrous screen persona. So much of those films are homages and gentle lampoons of "Captain Blood'' and "The Sea Hawk." I mean, they visit Tortuga and Port Royal in "Captain Blood!" Everyone gets stuck in a deadly swamp in "The Sea Hawk!"
The Curtiz films, of course, have much more sincere and melodramatic stories, with less humor and no irony whatsoever. "Captain Blood" follows the travails of an Irish doctor who is unjustly transported to the Caribbean for helping a wounded man, sold into slavery, and eventually transformed into a principled pirate who is the bane of his former masters. "The Sea Hawk" sees Flynn play a privateer under the command of Queen Elizabeth I, who has an instrumental role in helping her prevail over the Spanish armada. The stories are more epic in scope, and the stunts and effects work may be more rudimentary, but they're also more impressive considering their era. "Captain Blood" notably is only a few years removed from the silent era, sporting intertitles and German expressionist flourishes.
Flynn himself cultivated a scandalous reputation that probably affected those later screen depictions of him - most famously the crackpot version played by Peter O'Toole in "My Favorite Year." However, in "Captain Blood," he's brand new, alongside a sparkling nineteen year-old Olivia de Havilland. He swordfights, fistfights, and performs acrobatics with ease. Part of me wants to seek out his other films - Flynn and de Havilland were paired for a total of eight pictures - and part of me knows that I've probably already seen his best work. Flynn was an action star, one of the first, and never displayed much range.
They do, however, make me feel less trepidation about exploring this era of filmmaking. After slogging through so many maudlin melodramas and nihilistic noir films of the '50s, I'd almost forgotten how much fun older films could be. Maybe I just needed a change of pace - and a change in genre.
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