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The title refers to 16th-century English privateers, so named because "they're on you before you see them," the ship's moniker adds a Baudelairean wrinkle. "A reckoning with England" is key to the conquering vision of Spain's King Phillip (Montagu Love), his shadow falls on a world map Mabuse-style. The galleon carrying the ambassador (Claude Rains) is seized by a noble pirate (Errol Flynn), his crew cheers the ensuing cannonade: "It would be just like that Spaniard to surrender and spoil our fun." (The whirl of swords and muskets and grappling hooks and splintering wood is merely the first of Michael Curtiz's monumental action constructions.) Also aboard is the diplomat's niece (Brenda Marshall), a demure beauty who gets the rogue tongue-tied. "Him what's taken fleets of ships can't trade words with a slip of a girl." His chemistry is more relaxed with Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson), her mounting worry over the Armada on the horizon scarcely rules out a bit of flirting with the dashing outlaw she's secretly condoning. Captain Blood recomposed for a rearmament allegory, history bent to accommodate stand-ins for Chamberlain and Hitler, Hollywood's spectacle-propaganda machinery firing on all cylinders. The Isthmus of Panama is tinted copper for tropical heat, a trap compared to a jungle orchid and capped with a superb overhead view of a suspiciously vacant vessel. (The sequence clinches Curtiz's film as Herzog's main object of corrosion in Aguirre.) The Inquisition court is between El Greco and Ivan the Terrible, the escape of the galley slaves is a blade among chains. "Have you nine lives, Captain? Surely by now most of them must be used up." The traitorous lord (Henry Daniell) earns a deadly fencing lesson, the royal peroration brings a tear to Churchill's eye. With Alan Hale, Donald Crisp, Una O'Connor, James Stephenson, Gilbert Roland, William Lundigan, Julien Mitchell, J.M. Kerrigan, David Bruce, Clifford Brooke, and Pedro de Córdoba. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |