SYNOPSIS

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe is a "sea hawk," the best and most famous of the privateers who roam the seas in the service of Queen and Country, but without her official blessing. (The character is based on the real-life historical figure of Sir Francis Drake, a privateer who eventually became Elizabeth's second-in-command against the infamous, and ultimately defeated, Spanish Armada). While trying to keep her kingdom from going to war with Spain, Elizabeth I must publicly condemn Thorpe's raids on Spanish ships while secretly supporting his attempts to foil King Philip's plans to raise an armada against England. When they are betrayed by a duplicitous minister of the Queen, Thorpe and his men are captured in the New World and forced into servitude as galley slaves...but they soon turn the tables on their captors.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Screenplay: Howard Koch, Seton I. Miller
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Editing: George Amy
Art Direction: Anton Grot
Original Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Cast: Errol Flynn (Captain Geoffrey Thorpe), Brenda Marshall (Doña Maria Alvarez de Cordoba), Claude Rains (Don José Alvarez de Cordoba), Donald Crisp (Admiral Sir John Burleson), Flora Robson (Queen Elizabeth), Alan Hale (Carl Pitt), Henry Daniell (Lord Wolfingham).
BW-128m. Closed Captioning.

Why THE SEA HAWK is Essential

There were certain contentious yet productive combinations among the film industry's most famous personnel that, for all their mutual antagonism, somehow fueled each other to make motion pictures that stand as hallmarks in both their careers. Often it's an abrasive producer-director combo: Darryl Zanuck and John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940; My Darling Clementine, 1946) or Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946). A director and actor can have the same effect on each other. In the 12 films they made together at Warner Brothers between the mid-30s and the early 40s, director Michael Curtiz and star Errol Flynn feuded constantly. An impatient and demanding taskmaster, Curtiz hated Flynn's casual attitude toward his work. In particular, the actor's often late arrival on his sets, showing up ill-prepared and often worse for wear thanks to his wild private life, made Curtiz furious. Flynn, like many who worked with the director, found Curtiz callous and arrogant. It's fairly safe to say the two despised each other, yet their work together produced not only many of Warners' biggest hits but some of the most entertaining films of their time; among them were such enduring classics as Captain Blood (1935), the film that made Flynn a star; The Charge of the Light Brigade, (1936); The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), a movie Curtiz was brought in to complete after William Keighley failed to effectively capture on screen Flynn's charisma and appeal; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), which added Bette Davis's dislike of both director and co-star to the mix; and Santa Fe Trail (1940).

It could easily be argued that the qualities each found objectionable in the other are exactly what makes The Sea Hawk work so well. Errol Flynn more or less fell into filmmaking, stumbled into stardom (after Robert Donat bowed out of Captain Blood), and stumbled out of more than one party and night club. He never took himself or his screen image very seriously, and although his acting range may have been limited, his cavalier tone, the off-handed casualness of his demeanor, playful sense of humor and daring athletic feats made for an easy charm and appealing heroism. For Curtiz's part, it took a director with his drive and dynamism to manage a production as mammoth as The Sea Hawk, despite frequent run-ins with studio bosses (notably production chief Hal B. Wallis). Although he was never considered among the top artists of cinema, Curtiz knew exactly how to deliver a formula film with everything needed for a real crowd-pleaser.

Opening with a rousing battle at sea and climaxing in a tense and energetic swordfight, The Sea Hawk contains all the elements that made the Flynn-Curtiz action cycle so popular: the richly detailed (if frequently anachronistic) period setting, lavish sets and special effects, a noble cause, an at-first reluctant then ardent fair maiden, dastardly villains, and the one man best equipped to fight their tyranny, the studio's top male star of the time. Flynn made movies with other directors, but outside of Raoul Walsh, none had such a grasp of the essential mix of humor, romance, and action as Curtiz.

As important to the formula as Curtiz and Flynn is the musical scoring of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. An acclaimed composer of the late Romantic period with a background in opera and serious orchestral music, the Austrian's first film work was on Captain Blood. Although he won a well-deserved Academy Award® for The Adventures of Robin Hood, many consider his score for The Sea Hawk to be his best. Far more complex than mere thunderous background for action sequences, his music incorporates a number of motifs that define and amplify character and setting.

As much as they were purely popular entertainments, the Flynn-Curtiz adventures occasionally took on a certain gravity from the times in which they were made. Flynn's Robin Hood, a defender of the poor and disenfranchised against the rich and powerful few, gained resonance from the Great Depression and the desperate times so many were living through. The Sea Hawk makes an even stronger and more intentional analogy. At the time of its release, Europe was at war, and as one country after another fell to Germany, England remained the single challenge to––and biggest target of––the Nazi juggernaut. In this story, Hitler is embodied in the coldly imperialistic King Philip of Spain, plotting the invasion of this "puny rock-bound island" with the launch of the Armada, just as Germany was embarking on its relentless air raids over Great Britain. In case anyone missed the comparison, screenwriters Howard Koch (who would later be partly responsible for the directly anti-Nazi storyline of Casablanca, 1942) and Seton Miller gave Philip a map of the world on which to plot his vision of total conquest. He also wrote a stirring speech for Robson's Queen Elizabeth about standing up to the "ruthless ambition" of a single man that Winston Churchill himself would have envied (and, reportedly did). Although much of the anti-isolationist sentiment was toned down prior to the final shooting script, The Sea Hawk's message of support for the stalwart little island nation could not have been lost on an American public increasingly drawn into the conflict.

The Sea Hawkrepresents the apex of the sound-era swashbuckling action-adventure movie and a remarkable technical collaboration between Warner Brothers top artists and craftspeople, engineered by Michael Curtiz and given life by Errol Flynn. It is a supreme example of the Hollywood factory production and of the lush, large-scale action picture Warners moved into in the mid-to-late 1930s, a genre as identified with the studio as the gritty crime dramas with which it began the sound era.

by Rob Nixon