Watch The Sea Hawk For Free

Wow! Such a good movie.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

One of the best pirate movies you'll ever see (though not quite as good as Captain Blood (1935), in my opinion). One of the many director Michael Curtiz-actor Errol Flynn collaborations which also features great (of course) performances by Claude Rains, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Henry Daniell, Una O'Connor, J. M. Kerrigan, James Stephenson and Brenda Marshall. Howard Koch and Seton Miller wrote the screenplay; the title was taken from the Rafael Sabatini novel (and 1924 film). Received Oscar nominations for Art Direction, Special Effects, Sound and Score.Flynn plays the titled pirate from England - Geoffrey Thorpe; Hale, Stephenson and Crisp (?) are members of his crew. In one of his raids, freeing British slaves held by Spain, he meets and falls for a Spanish beauty, Dona Maria Alvarez de Cordoba (Marshall, whose uncle is Rains) but, naturally, she wants nothing to do with him. However, when she finds he has returned her jewels, her opinion of him begins to change. Eventually he is "hired" by his Queen, Elizabeth I (Robson), to disrupt Spain's ships, and battles Lord Wolfingham (Daniell).

. . . requires a different skill set than winning a beauty pageant. Helen Mirren is typecast as the present Queen Elizabeth, and Cate Blanchett made her career playing the first one. Michelle Pfeiffer has not portrayed either Elizabeth on screen. Ms. Blanchett has been cast as Bob Dylan, and I think that Ms. Mirren played a dude in RED or RED 2. Flora Robson certainly fits the mannish Elizabethan mold as the British monarch in THE SEA HAWK. One of the few facts about QEI that I remember from my school days is that she died NOT with her boots on, but with an INCH of make-up caked up over the decades on her face. Since the current queen has now lived far longer than her namesake, getting up close and personal with her is quite a frightening thought. One of the main things I've learned about English law and cuisine is that only the queen can eat swans. I see swans daily near my home, and more often than not, I half expect to see QEII emerge from the bushes and come running after them with a bib tied around her neck, fork and knife in hand!

"The Sea Hawk" was one of a number of historical swashbucklers which Errol Flynn made with director Michael Curtiz in the late thirties and early forties; others included "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Dodge City" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood". The "Sea Hawk" of the title is Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a sea-captain in Elizabethan England loosely based upon Francis Drake. (The identification of Thorpe with Drake is supported by the fact that Drake is never referred to in the film, although his real-life contemporaries John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher both appeal briefly). Thorpe has various adventures at sea fighting against the Spaniards, including at one time being captured as a galley slave, while still finding time to romance Maria, the beautiful niece of the Spanish Ambassador. Unusually, Maria is not played by Olivia de Havilland, Flynn's normal leading lady during this stage of his career. She, apparently, wanted a break from historical dramas, so Brenda Marshall stepped into the breach. Brenda only made a handful of films, and is perhaps best remembered as the wife who nearly lost William Holden to Audrey Hepburn- Audrey ended their romance when she discovered Holden was unable to have children- but she was a striking beauty in her youth and does enough here to show that she could have become a major star. Flynn himself was one of those actors who had a limited dramatic range but who could be very good within those limits, and here he gives one of his best performances as Thorpe. There are also good contributions from Montagu Love as Philip, Claude Rains as his ambassador to England and Henry Daniell as Lord Wolfingham, a pro-Spanish English aristocrat. The other striking feature of the film is the rousing musical score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, which fits perfectly with the mood of heroic adventure. Korngold, who had also scored "The Adventures of Robin Hood", was an Austrian classical composer who, after moving to America to escape the Nazis, wrote a number of film scores; this is often quoted as one of his best. Despite their historical setting, Flynn's swashbucklers often had a contemporary political significance. "The Adventures of Robin Hood", for example, contained plenty of rhetoric about liberty and justice, highly relevant to the international political situation in 1938, although King Richard's lines about not getting involved in foreign wars in future might have been a sop to those Americans who supported an isolationist foreign policy. "They Died with Their Boots On" from 1941, a biography of General Custer, may have been made with the intention of winning support for entry into the War in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor by providing Americans with a highly-romanticised picture of a figure from their own military past. "The Sea Hawk", made at a time when Britain had declared war upon Hitler but America had not, draws even more obvious parallels between past and present. King Philip II of Spain is portrayed as a megalomaniac with dreams of world conquest and England as the only power standing between him and the realisation of these dreams. The discussions between Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers about whether England can afford to build a major fleet to oppose the Spaniards reflect the debate in Britain, France and America during the 1930s about rearmament in the face of the Nazi threat. The treacherous Lord Wolfingham who opposes building the fleet (because he is secretly in league with Philip) may have been intended as an unflattering portrait of Neville Chamberlain and other advocates of appeasement. The Queen's final speech, made as the Armada approaches English shores, is not the "body of a weak and feeble woman" speech traditionally attributed to her, but a Churchillian oration about the duty of all free men to defend liberty against the ambitions of tyrants. Fortunately, both Curtiz and Flynn were experienced enough to realise that, even in 1940, audiences wanted to be entertained rather than preached to, so the film is made with a light touch, primarily a swashbuckling adventure with political overtones rather than an anti- Fascist sermon. Like "Robin Hood" it can still be enjoyed as such even more than seventy years after it was made. 8/10

This is yet another vintage film that I'm only just catching up with, some 70 years after its initial release and this probably has a lot to do with how indifferent I feel about it. Whilst I've always found Errol Flynn charming with great charisma I sensed a strain on both here. Brenda Marshall is wooden in the extreme and there is absolutely no chemistry between her and Flynn. Claude Rains, too, seems oddly ill-at-ease possibly because unlike his Captain Renault in Casablanca he is not permitted to display the impish side of his character and come on as more of a lovable rogue than black-as-night villain. Even the swordplay was lacklustre and it's too easy to say that Henry Daniell is a poor substitute for Basil Rathbone. I've given it five out of ten whereas had I seen it earlier I may have gone to seven or eight.