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Your brave hosts face the music of the night in the 1943 adaptation of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA starring Claude Rains, Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster, and Edgar Barrier. We loved the first Phantom, and we love Claude Rains, so what could go wrong?

The film won Academy Awards for Art Direction and Cinematography, so director Arthur Lubin delivers a delightfully pleasant musical! But... is it horror? Listen for more!

Captain Blood (1935)

The Hollywood swashbuckler is among the oldest subgenres of action/adventure cinema around. With its humble beginnings in the silent era to its modern, self-serious incarnations, there has always been a degree of heroic grinning as the protagonist leaps into danger, a languid season of newfound romance between dissimilar individuals who happen to find themselves in peculiar predicaments. As the senior Douglas Fairbanks (1920′s The Mark of Zorro and 1924′s The Thief of Bagdad) encountered difficulties in the transition from the silent to talkie eras, in came Warner Bros.’ Errol Flynn. The Australian actor had just signed a contract with Warner Bros. in 1934, and the Warners had little clue what to do with the inexperienced actor.

Thus, for sheer experimentation, Warner Bros. placed Flynn as the titular Captain Blood and would never regret that fortuitous decision. For what followed for Warner Bros., for Flynn, co-stars Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone, and numerous craftspersons behind the camera was a film and subsequent swashbucklers that launched some of the most illustrious careers in Studio System Hollywood. With Michael Curtiz directing – a star-making director – Captain Blood represents film as a wonderful piece of entertainment.

It is 1685 in England, Irish Doctor Peter Blood (Flynn) is accused and arrested for treason for treating a patient that has been participating in the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II. The punishment for Dr. Blood and the rebels is to be bound and shackled in a slave galley sailing for Port Royal in Jamaica. In Jamaica, Blood is spotted by Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), whose attraction for the outspoken Blood is instantaneous – you can see it in her eyes and devilish smile. Arabella purchases Blood, protecting him from the influence of her uncle, Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). Blood is allowed to treat a governor’s gout instead of toiling in the mines, but he loathes slavery and concocts a daring, impromptu escape with his fellow slaves when a Spanish ship attacks the city. This motley band of slaves captures the Spanish ship, sets sail, outlines a pirate’s code with Blood as captain, and proceeds to pillage and plunder European settlements in the Caribbean. But Blood has left Arabella behind at Port Royal. He had only just begun to realize her feelings for her.

Also starring in this film is Basil Rathbone as a French privateer named Levasseur. Rathbone embarrasses himself with a disastrous French accent, but it establishes a brief period of villainous typecasting before he would later be typecast as Sherlock Holmes-like characters in the late 1930s-40s. Ross Alexander is also here as Blood’s best friend, Jeremy Pitt; Guy Kibbee is crewman Henry Hagthorpe; and J. Carrol Naish is Cahusac, Levasseur’s crony.

Before Curtiz would establish the likes of Doris Day and Bette Davis as marquee, top-billed movie stars, he would do just that for Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. For Flynn, that combination of a beautiful, wide smile and an aura of bent-armed, hands-to-hips aura of self-confidence can never fail to charm audiences even when the characters in the film are struggling to make sense of cinematic chaos. Like in so many of his later swashbucklers – especially in the career-defining The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) – that personality lifts the performances surrounding Flynn. Many more technically gifted actors worked in Hollywood in the mid-1930s, but no one could combine raw physicality and cornball optimism and moral purity like Flynn. A ridiculous script with a risible ending requires a ridiculous, risible performance. And it takes specific skills to make an audience care in such a scenario – Flynn achieves this brilliantly (and this is not even his greatest performance).

For stage-trained Olivia de Havilland, she too had signed a contract for Warner Bros. in 1934. But, according to the late Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host Robert Osborne, this did not serve her long-term career well as Warner Bros. concentrated on making darker, grittier motion pictures rather than stage-based and prestige productions de Havilland yearned for. Despite these later frustrations, de Havilland prospered in her early swashbuckling works with Flynn. Here, a 19-year-old de Havilland is allowed to demonstrate a sexuality uncommon in post-Hays Code Hollywood. Her character’s freedom of decision – thanks to Rafael Sabatini’s novel and Casey Robinson’s adapted screenplay – is an immense contribution to the chemistry between her and Flynn. More substantial roles would come, but it is an assured performance by de Havilland in this, her fourth film and first starring role.

Did I mention that Captain Blood is incredible fun? Though it might lack the savage wit of The Adventures of Robin Hood and rely too heavily on coincidence at times, but its action scenes are downright thrilling. The first duel between Flynn and Rathbone – they would spar again down the years – is a beautiful piece of swordsmanship and tropical scenery. Okay, that scenery was shot at the picturesque Three Arch Bay in Laguna Beach, California, but it looks anything but a public beach for that scene where crashing, foamy waves elevate the stakes of this swordfight. And that first Flynn-Rathbone bout, built upon the mass one-versus-dozens swordfights Douglas Fairbanks was familiar with, established swashbuckling precedents to be followed by later Warner Bros. swashbucklers and the multitudes of movies following it. 

The climactic battle sequence employed over 2,500 extras with zero real sailing ships used during filming. This final scene, along with the earlier skirmish where the Spanish attack Port Royal – which is almost an hour in, but it never feels like that – employed process shots, numerous miniatures, and archived footage from 1924′s The Sea Hawk. Though some of the models are obvious if one has seen enough action films employing miniatures, there are some split-seconds where things are far more artificial than they appear. From the wooden chunks blown off these ships, with ropes and pulleys and masts tumbling after cannon fire, this is some of the most convincing visual effects work in films during the mid-1930s.

Composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold had never worked on a film before. The Austrian immigrant was a youth sensation in Europe, having composed for ballets, concerts, and operas. Convinced by his friend Max Reinhardt’s (a theatrical and film director) stories of working in America and considering the dangers an insurgent Nazi Party posed, Korngold came to the United States to compose an adaptation score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) for Warner Bros. Soon after, Warner Bros. asked Korngold if he would like to compose for a swashbuckler. He initially declined, believing that such a job would be beneath him, but changed his mind when he was attracted to Flynn and de Havilland’s performances and the filmmaking.

With only three weeks to finish the composition, the final product is not as technically complex as Korngold’s future scores for The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Sea Hawk (1940). There is a lack of character-driven motifs that would become more developed in those later works; instead, the motivic structure is action- and film-driven. However, Korngold’s work on Captain Blood – along with the contemporary works of Alfred Newman at the 20th Century Fox and fellow Warner Bros. contractee max Steiner – established the precedent of original film scores influenced by the later romantic period of classical music. Where earlier 1930s films might incorporate existing classical pieces to respond to what is on screen, Korngold’s music is implicit, reinforcing adventure or intimacy rather than distracting from it or being a dramatic redundancy. Trained listeners will notice that about five or ten percent of the score include Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem, Prometheus – Korngold, who only learned of his rapidly-approaching deadline only after he accepted the job was forced to borrow out of necessity. Korngold also, at first, rejected Hugo Friedhofer’s assistance as orchestrator (orchestration is the process in choosing the instrumentation that will play a piece), but soon realized that Friedhofer’s help was necessary, and the two became close colleagues. Their work becames one of the great original scores to come from early Hollywood.

Captain Blood is unsure how to balance its tones in the first half, and it never settles on a primary antagonist. But as a star-making vehicle for its two central actors and for being a platform for further, greater success for other artisans never appearing on-screen, it is an essential for those looking into this era of Hollywood. For being a swashbuckler film shot on a scale never associated with such films, it is as rollicking a time as you might have on the open seas. 

My rating: 9.5/10

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)  | dir. Max Reinhardt , William Dieterle