Captain Blood

They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Even though it doesn’t have the trillion dollar special effects or celebrity power, we liked Captain Blood a lot more than the recent Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. In Pirates, you get the macabre mixed with Johnny Depp’s rockstar bravado.  Captain Blood is manned by Errol Flynn, who always has a playboy aristocrat aura to him.  For people who like Depp for whatever reason, it is worth giving Flynn a try.

But we don’t care much about that celebrity gaga stuff, so on to the brief analysis.  Captain Blood is basically the Joseph story cloaked in a 17th century English colonial setting.  And boy, does King James II really get thwacked.  Captain Blood is actually Peter Blood, an English doctor who aids rebels who subvert James II.  Blood is caught in the act of giving medical attention to a rebel, and eventually sentenced to banishment from England and slavery in the Caribbean.  Blood is rightfully indignant about this, as we the audience are supposed to be.

Once in Jamaica, Blood conspires with his fellow slaves to escape.  The plot is all over the place from here.  You will run into Spanish marauders and French pirates, with escapes and swordfights and a titanic fight at sea to end the movie, complete with pirates swinging from ropes from one sinking ship to another. The movie implicitly praises Blood as a pirate for awhile — i.e., as a thief — but this is complicated by Blood’s final choice in the movie.  The moral stance is clear here: anti-slavery and pro-individualism, with a historical stance firmly in favor of the Glorious Revolution that put William of Orange on England’s throne.  But it is really swashbuckling with a smile.  If you have time to kill, this one is pretty fun.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 7