Captain Blood
Short description
Captain Blood is an adventure film set in the seventeenth century. Peter Blood is a physician who tends to a wounded rebel during a revolt against King James II and is arrested for treason. He is convicted and sent from England to the West Indies, where he is sold into slavery on a plantation. There he draws the enmity of the local governor, Colonel Bishop, and the attention of the colonel's niece, Arabella. When Spanish forces attack the settlement, Blood and several companions seize the invaders' ship and escape, taking up piracy in the Caribbean.
Michael Curtiz directed the film, the sixth of the twenty-five features he made in chronological order, between Doctor X and Black Fury. Casey Robinson wrote the screenplay, and Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead produced it for Warner Bros. Pictures, First National Pictures and Cosmopolitan Productions. Errol Flynn plays Peter Blood opposite Olivia de Havilland as Arabella, with Lionel Atwill as Colonel Bishop, Basil Rathbone as Levasseur, Ross Alexander as Jeremy Pitt and Guy Kibbee as Hagthorpe, among a credited cast of forty-three. Made for about one million dollars, the film earned a critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 from thirty-two reviews, while audiences give it 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb and 7.2 out of 10 on TMDB.
What's left behind the scenes
- Flynn admitted that during filming he often played pranks on his co-star, actress Olivia de Havilland. Some of his jokes were quite malicious—for example, he once hid a dead snake in Olivia’s underwear, which greatly frightened the actress.
- Robert Donat was originally slated to play Captain Blood, but Warner Bros. executives ultimately decided to take a chance and replaced him with Errol Flynn, then an unknown actor from Australia.
- Basil Rathbone, who played Captain Levasseur, disliked Errol Flynn. During a duel scene between their characters, Rathbone distracted his opponent by informing him that he would receive significantly more money for his participation in the film, and intentionally wounded him in the hand.
- The battle scenes did not use real ships, but small-scale models.
- The film is based on the novel of the same name by Rafael Sabatini.
- By his own admission, Flynn often played pranks on Olivia de Havilland during filming. Some of his jokes were quite malicious—once the actor hid a dead snake in Olivia's underwear.
- The film was shown in Soviet cinema under the title 'Island of Suffering'.
- In one scene of the film, Arabella Bishop holds a Pekingese dog in her arms, but this is highly unlikely, as Pekingese dogs only arrived in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, while the events in the film take place at the end of the 17th century.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
