Because they share the same name, period setting, and certain minor details from Rafael Sabatini's novel, many people believe The Sea Hawk is a remake of the 1924 First National Picture starring popular matinee idol Milton Sills and directed by Frank Lloyd. In fact, the two stories are quite different, the earlier picture is fairly faithful to the novel and the 1940 version is based on the true story of Sir Francis Drake.

Sharp eyes may be able to spot footage from Captain Blood (1935), which is used again to the same rousing effect.

A pirate parody in an episode of the animated TV series The Family Guy quotes Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score from The Sea Hawk.

Queen Elizabeth I of England has been a frequent character in movies and is perhaps the monarch most depicted on screen. She has been played by such actresses as Sarah Bernhardt (1912), Bette Davis (1939 and 1955), Jean Simmons (1953), Glenda Jackson (1971, on TV and film), Cate Blanchett (1998 and 2007), Judi Dench (1998, an Oscar® winner), and Helen Mirren (2005, on TV). Flora Robson played her twice, inThe Sea Hawk and previously in Fire Over England (1937). Some film historians consider Robson's portrayals among the best.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), with Cate Blanchett as the queen, covers mostly the same historical territory in the monarch's conflict with King Philip of Spain and the latter's build-up of the Spanish Armada, a failed naval attempt to invade England and take the throne.

Sections of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for The Sea Hawk were used in the teen comedy Mannequin: On the Move (1991). The aria "Glück das mir verblieb" from his acclaimed 1920 opera Die tote Stadt turned up later as a segment of the anthology film Aria (1987) and in the Coen Brothers comedy The Big Lebowski (1998).

The character of Alan Swann, the hard-drinking, swashbuckling actor portrayed by Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year (1982), was based on Errol Flynn.

Geoffrey Thorpe, the character Errol Flynn plays in The Sea Hawk, is based on the famed English sea captain, privateer, slave trader, and second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada, Sir Francis Drake. Among his many famous exploits, he is perhaps most revered for leading the first English circumnavigation of the globe, from 1577 to 1580, which resulted in his being knighted by Elizabeth I; this angered the Spanish monarchy, who considered Drake a pirate and trespasser in Spanish waters.

It's possible to draw direct lines between the characters in The Sea Hawk and those in the earlier Flynn-Curtiz classic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). In both, Flynn plays an outlaw figure whose "illegal" activities are in the service of the English crown (Richard the Lionhearted in Robin Hood, Elizabeth I here). Brenda Marshall plays the role taken earlier by Olivia de Havilland, that of a noblewoman from the opposing side who falls for Flynn's outlaw and takes up with his cause. Claude Rains virtually repeats his villain role and turns his Prince John from the earlier film into the Spanish ambassador here. As the equivalent of Basil Rathbone's Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Henry Daniell's dastardly Lord Wolfingham likewise dies in the climactic sword fight with Flynn. Una O'Connor plays the heroine's dithering attendant in both films, and Alan Hale is again Flynn's stalwart sidekick. Much of the crew was also the same on both films, including producer Hal Wallis, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, cinematographer Sol Polito, and swordfight coordinator Fred Cavens.

Some glaring anachronisms in The Sea Hawk's script were not unintentional mistakes but deliberate attempts to parallel the story to the war raging in Europe at the time. The use of the word "British" is inaccurate, since in the Elizabethan age there was not yet an official realm called Great Britain. And instead of correctly referring to events at Plymouth, the location was changed to Dover, the British port which received the hundreds of thousands of British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, France, just prior to the film's release.

by Rob Nixon