Rhapsodies

For this weeks selection, I went back to one of my favorite genres, swashbuckling pirates, but decided to go way back with the vintage stuff. And when I say that I’m talking the real vintage stuff like the stuff that you only know about because it was mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article about the history of Motion Pictures.

I’d read, or more accurately tried to read Rafael Sabatini,’s Captain Blood sometime in my early teens. At least tried to read it. I didn’t get much farther than the bit when Captain Blood becomes a pirate and made his oppressor walk the plank.

So while I was aware of Micheal Curtiz’s Captain Blood starring Errol Flynn I had never had enough an interest in it to track it down, despite being a fan of Flynn’s work.

Flynn plays Peter Blood an Irish Doctor working in England during the Monmouth Rebellion. He’s arrested for giving a rebel medical treatment and promptly transported to the West Indies as a slave. He eventually escapes and with his fellow slaves becomes the terror of the Caribbean, Captain Blood.

This was mostly a fun film. It’s mostly carried by Flynn’s charm. The rest of it is okay. There wasn’t quite as much action as I thought there would be, through the fight between Flynn and Basil Rathbone was pretty good.

For the most part, it felt like a lot of comic book movies where too much time is spent on the origin story and then the main plot is virtually an afterthought. (Even though this is an adaption of a book rather than the start of a franchise. )

For my second film was Albert Parker’s silent classic, The Black Pirate starring Douglas Fairbanks. This tells the story of a band of cutthroat pirates who have a habit of killing their victims so there won’t be any witnesses. In their latest venture, there are two survivors a young man and his father. When his father dies soon after the son vows revenge on the pirates. He does this by infiltrating the band as The Black Pirate and quickly taking over. Then biding his time while waiting for an opportunity to deal with. This opportunity soon comes when he persuades the pirates to hold the next ship they capture (including beautiful princess, played by Billie Dove, who the Black Pirate immediately falls in love with) for ransom rather than kill them outright.

I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t watched many silent films. Or more accurately silent films besides the comedy classics. So it’s a pleasure to see just how good many of them are. It had an incredibly large budget film with phenomenal stuntwork.  (Most notably Fairbanks riding his dagger down a ship’s sail, cutting it in the process) It’s also one of the first color films with its technique giving it this wonderful pastel quality… All the better for Fairbanks to show off his thighs to the ladies as one of the few Hollywood action heroes, I’m aware of, to wear shorts for that purpose.