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England, the 1700's: Peter Blood (Errol Flynn), a former adventurer,
wants nothing but a quiet life, and wants to atone for the sins he might
have committed while travelling the world by having become a physician,
healing whoever needs healing. That gets him into trouble when he treats a
rebel against King James II (Vernon Steele), who presently has fallen out
of favour with many of his subjects. Blood is condemned to a hanging with
many of the rebels against the kind, but on one of the king's whims, they
are all sent to Jamaica as slaves instead. Once there, Blood and his
friends are soon bought by Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill), and since Blood
has caught the attention of Bishop's niece Arabella (Olivia de Havilland),
he is soon made the personal physician of the local gouvernor (George
Hassell) and allowed to move relatively freely on the island. Still, Blood
doesn't forget his friends, and thus he uses his relative freedom to get
his hands on a ship for them all to escape. Then the Spanish attack the
island and sink Blood's ship ... which enrages him and his fellow slaves
to such an extent that they board and take over the attacking Spanish
boat, thisw way defeating the Spaniards. After they have gotten their
hands on a ship, they leave Jamaica to become pirates ... but with a code
of honour. For some reason, Blood teams up with French pirate Levasseur
(Basil Rathbone), who even agrees to follow Blood's code of honour, but
soon enough, Levasseur proves to be a right little scoundrel - and then,
after attacking a British vessel without first confering with Blood, he
takes captive Arabella and one of the King's emmissary's, Willoughby
(Henry Stephenson). Naturally, Blood has long fallen in love with
Arabella, and now he fights for her and her honour, and kills Levasseur in
a fencing duel. Even though he has risked his life for her, Arabella
resents Blood (at least she pretends to), so he agrees to return her to
Jamaica, even if that means walking into a trap as Colonel Bishop, the new
gouvernor of the island, is sure to await Blood and his crew, prepared to
kill on sight. Of course, when Blood and crew approach Jamaica, they find
the island under attack from two French battleships with Bishop's defense
lines nowhere in sight - he has gone off pirate-hunting. Blood is prepared
to turn and leave Jamaica to its fate, but this is when Willoughby tells
him that James II is no longer king and Blood and his men are pardoned by
the new king should they be willing to enter the Royal Navy - which all of
them do at the drop of a hat, and they attack and defeat the French in no
time, even if it means losing their own ship ... and in the end, Blood is
made the gouvernor of Jamaica, with Bishop, upon his return, being left at
his mercy ... An escapist pirate flick that is about as free of
historical accuracies as you might have come to expect, and it's pretty
much as cheesy as it is predictable - but all of this are the genre's
inherent qualities rather than its shortcomings, at least to a point,
right? The one aspect where Captain Blood really seems to fail is
providing a good lead villain, and that's despite having both Basil
Rathbone and Lionel Atwill in the cast - but Rathbone's screentime is all
too brief, and he is killed in a fencing duel (his only one in the film)
all too soon, and Atwill is kept out of the picture for much too long to
create any sort of real menace. Now if one of these actors was given a
bigger, meatier role, this one could have been a great genre piece, but as
it is, it might still be escapist fun but nothing out of the ordinary. At
least it has a great final sea battle though, but this one was apparently
lifted from the 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk.
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