Flynn

On the evening of Tuesday the twenty-sixth of December 1935, at the Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York City, the Warner Bros. swashbuckling-adventure feature Captain Blood opened on the holiday-week release schedule with the twenty-six-year-old completely-unknown Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn in the title role of Peter Blood, the seventeenth-century Irish-physician-turned-pirate-captain of Rafael Sabatini's 1922 historical novel. Flynn had been signed by Warner Bros. nine months earlier in March 1935 to the standard junior-stock-company seven-year contract at one hundred and fifty dollars per week on the strength of a single screen-test at the Warner Burbank lot, had been a contract-player extra in two minor Warner pictures across the spring of 1935 (a small uncredited role in Murder at Monte Carlo and the second-male-lead in The Case of the Curious Bride), and had been cast in the Captain Blood lead at the recommendation of the Curtiz casting-and-direction team only after the Warner first-choice Robert Donat had withdrawn from the production at the late pre-production stage because of his asthma. Flynn was the second-or-third-choice replacement, was effectively unknown to the December 1935 American audience, and walked on to the Strand Theatre screen on the Boxing Day evening with no advance reputation. By the end of the two-hour-and-nineteen-minute Curtiz-directed Captain Blood the audience at the Strand had recognised the central American Hollywood swashbuckling lead of the next decade. The film grossed $1.5 million on its release (the third-highest Warner Bros. gross of 1935), made Flynn an instant Hollywood star, established the Flynn-De Havilland on-screen pairing that would carry across the next nine films through Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and the rest of the Flynn-Warner contract.

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