Captain Blood (1935) on Netflix
In 1685, Irish doctor Peter Blood treats a wounded rebel and is tried for treason against King James II. Shipped to Jamaica as a slave, he looks for a way out.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.7/1017,643 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
In England in 1685, Peter Blood, an Irish physician, is called to treat Lord Gildoy, a wounded supporter of the Monmouth Rebellion. Soldiers arrest him at the bedside, and Judge Jeffreys hands down a death sentence for treason against King James II. On Lord Sunderland's advice, the king spares him and transports him with the other surviving rebels to the West Indies to be sold. In Port Royal, Jamaica, Arabella Bishop buys the doctor and recommends him to Governor Steed, who suffers from gout. Colonel Bishop, her uncle, owns a large plantation where the prisoners labor. Blood wants his freedom and works out an escape with his comrades, while the colonel grows suspicious of them and has one man, Jeremy Pitt, flogged and questioned. Then a Spanish warship attacks the town.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Captain Blood (1935)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peter Blood was first offered to Robert Donat, fresh from The Count of Monte Cristo, but Donat was asthmatic and feared the action scenes would be too strenuous. Screen tests then landed the part with an unknown Australian, Errol Flynn.
- Jean Muir was originally set to play the female lead opposite Donat. When she turned it down, Warner Bros. turned to 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had already made three films that year including Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Errol Flynn collapsed during the shoot from a bout of malaria he had picked up in New Guinea before he ever reached Hollywood.
- The sword duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone was staged on a Caribbean-looking stretch of Laguna Beach, California, while the closing sea battle against the French needed 2,500 extras and one of the largest technical crews yet assembled for a film.
- Not all the naval spectacle was new: parts of the sea-battle footage were lifted from the 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk.
- Erich Wolfgang Korngold had to write more than an hour of symphonic music in three weeks, so he borrowed from symphonic poems by Franz Liszt for roughly a tenth of the score, and then refused composer credit, insisting it read musical arrangement instead.
- Captain Blood was Korngold's first fully symphonic film score, and it made him the first composer of international standing to sign a contract with a film studio.
- Michael Curtiz was never nominated for Best Director, yet he collected the second-highest vote total in that category as a write-in candidate; Erich Wolfgang Korngold and writer Casey Robinson, also unnominated, drew more write-in votes than most official nominees.
