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10
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8 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Guest
Review by Rod
Barnett |
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"Faith,
but it’s an uncertain world entirely."
This
was Errol Flynn's first leading role in a film and it turned
him into a star. Seventy years later it's still easy to see
why. Captain Blood has daring heroics,
amazing swordplay, big action sequences, strong characters and
a great romance with one of the most beautiful women to ever
make movies. Flynn's handsome, graceful but masculine onscreen
presence made both men and women flock to his movies for escapist
fun for nearly twenty years. Captain Blood
is as good an example of perfect filmmaking as I can imagine.
It's one of the greatest pirate films ever made and my own favorite
movie of all time.
Flynn plays
Doctor Peter Blood who in 1685 is arrested and sentenced to
slavery for treating rebels wounded in battle against the British
crown. Shipped to the town of Port Royal in Jamaica he is bought
in a fit of pique by Arabella Bishop (Olivia De Havilland),
the niece of one of the island's major landowners, Colonel Bishop
(Lionel Atwill). Unsure what to do with her impulse purchase
she drops the doctor into the regular slave population working
her uncle's plantation. Using his medical skills to treat the
island governor's gout, Blood gains some privileges and secretly
arranges to buy a boat for an escape attempt. Instead, fate
intervenes when a Spanish attack on the colony enables him to
steal a full-sized ship and make an escape with his fellow liberated
slaves as crew. Turning to piracy, Blood spends the next few
years plundering any and all vessels that come under his sword
until a partnership with flamboyant French pirate captain Levasseur
(Basil Rathbone) goes badly. Having captured the ship bringing
Miss Bishop back to the Caribbean from England, Levasseur plans
to ransom her but Blood, emotionally torn about this beautiful,
kind woman, tries to buy her away. When this fails the two captains
fight to the death and Blood walks away with the lady his prisoner.
At first relishing the turn of slave to master he ultimately
cannot treat her cruelly and stubbornly sets out to return her
to Port Royal even though he'll most likely be caught there
and hanged by her uncle, who has become Jamaica's new governor.
But there's a surprise or two at the island for Blood and his
crew that will test their loyalties and their fighting abilities.
The film is
so remarkably faithful an adaptation of the Raphael Sabatini
novel that when I finally read the book I was shocked by its
fidelity. I expected the usual monkeying typical of the movies
but clearly Warner Brothers saw a great adventure story with
exactly what Hollywood needed and stuck to it. In fact, like
most novels of its time the story seems to have something for
nearly everyone — political villainy, explosive sea battles,
a noble hero, a classic swordfight, a smart romance and plenty
of pirate action. Often with adventure movies there is little
time for smaller moments but Captain Blood
has sharply drawn minor characters and even the dialog is clever
with dozens of smart, quotable lines that linger long after
the fun is over. A movie with so many elements could have easily
flown out of control but as directed by the great Michael Curtiz
(Casablanca) it never feels frantic,
but rather moves so smoothly it seems to be a much shorter film
than it really is. Indeed, what at first glance seems to be
an episodic story of a man's fall from respected citizen to
"thief and pirate" and his serendipitous return to
grace reveals itself in hindsight to be a remarkably linear
tale of overcoming unjust, oppressive authority. Of course,
none of that would matter if the film wasn't fun and on that
front it succeeds admirably. This is two of the most entertaining
hours I've ever spent watching a film and I never tire of introducing
new people to this classic. Sadly, seeing Captain
Blood in its original form hasn't always been easy. When
I first saw and fell in love with it on commercial TV and its
first VHS release the running time was 99 minutes. To accommodate
the necessities of a two-hour time slot on television a full
20 minutes of character and detail had been snipped out; for
decades that was the only version of the movie available. Some
have argued that these cuts didn't hurt the film, that at full
length it's overcrowded and too busy. Ridiculous! These are
the types of folks that would look at a gourmet banquet and
complain that their plate was too small. Luckily in the late
1980s Ted Turner's TBS cable station started showing a beautiful
uncut print... but only colorized! Mon dieu! But then
in 1993 the 119 minute cut was released on tape (and later Laser
Disc) with a banner on the cover that made Flynn fan hearts
flutter: "In Glorious Black & White". The long overdue
DVD release of Captain Blood puts
one more sword thrust into the shorter edit, relegating it to
a reference book footnote.
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The
DVD of Captain Blood is almost everything
one could hope for. The film looks slightly better than previous
versions even if there are still a fair number of scratches and
lots of wear in evidence. I was hoping for a less worn print but
I guess there is only so much possible with a film this old. Still,
it looks very good and if this is going to be the way most of
a new generation experiences this movie then that's fine. Also,
I wish the soundtrack with its rousing, omnipresent Erich Wolfgang
Korngold score had been brought up just a little but this seems
to be the standard now for DVD.
Warner has thrown
a package of extras onto the disc only some of which actually
have anything to do with the film. Firstly they have revived a
pretty neat feature initially used on some of their early clamshell
VHS releases called Warner Night at the Movies. This allows
the viewer to recreate a special night at the Bijoux circa 1935,
with Captain Blood being the main
feature. Film critic Leonard Maltin is on hand for brief explanation
of this extra but it's really not necessary. Starting with a vintage
Newsreel there follows a musical short (Johnny Green and his Orchestra),
a comedy short (All-American Drawback), a silly cartoon
(Billboard Frolics) and a couple of trailers for coming
attractions. Each of these pieces can be accessed individually
as well as playing sequentially as the entertaining lead up to
a viewing of the movie. As someone that loves occasionally seeing
some of these sorts of short films wedged in between movies on
cable movie channels, having a few of them added to a disc I wanted
any way is a nice bonus. WB can keep this up as long as they want.
Hell, I'd even pop for a DVD or two of nothing but hours of these
shorts to construct my own nights at the movies (hint, hint).
Of the two extras actually related to the film, the first is an
excellent 20-minute talking head piece with several movie historians.
They discuss the riskiness of casting two unknowns in the lead
roles for such an expensive film, give a number of production
tales and speak to the qualities of the movie.
The final bonus
is the hour-long radio production of Captain Blood (1937)
that reunited Flynn, de Havilland, Rathbone and several other
cast members. As a fan of old radio shows I was thrilled to be
able to hear this; even if you've never listened to one you might
very well enjoy it.
8/23/05 |
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