Flynn · 1935
Errol Flynn in Captain Blood
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lead at the recommendation of the Curtiz casting-and-direction team only after the Warner first-choice Robert Donat had withdrawn from the production at the late-September pre-production stage on the strength of his asthma.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 single 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.
A film star is rarely launched by a casting accident in the second week of October. Robert Donat had been the Warner first-choice for Captain Blood since June 1935; he was the leading British contract-player of the Korda London Films studio and the obvious choice for the seventeenth-century Irish-physician-turned-pirate-captain. His asthma had been troubling him through the summer; by the third week of September the Warner pre-production was within six weeks of the principal photography start-date and Donat had not signed the standard contract-loan from London Films. Curtiz the director and Hal Wallis the producer needed a decision. They had had Flynn on the Burbank lot for nine months at one hundred and fifty dollars per week with no significant work to show for it, and on the recommendation of the Warner casting agent Solly Baiano they made the unusual decision to put a twenty-six-year-old unknown in the Captain Blood lead.
THE HOBART YEARS
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born in Hobart, Tasmania, on the twentieth of June 1909, only child of Theodore Thomson Flynn, an Irish-Carlow-Flynn-descent Lecturer in Biology at the University of Tasmania who had emigrated from Cork to Hobart in 1907 on the new university chair, and Lily Mary Young of Wellington, New South Wales. He was raised in the small Hobart academic-and-naval community on the Derwent estuary, was schooled at South Friars' School at Hobart and (after the family moved to England in 1923) at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School in New South Wales, and at the South-West London College in England. He left formal schooling at fifteen, returned to the southern hemisphere in 1926, and through his late teens and early twenties worked at a series of small commercial and adventure-trade jobs across the Pacific south: gold-prospector at the Wau goldfield in Papua-New-Guinea, tobacco-plantation manager at Laloki, schooner-master on the New Guinea coastal trade, and small-pearl-fisheries operator in the Coral Sea.
He drifted into amateur acting at Sydney in 1932 in his twenty-third year on a small Sydney university theatrical-society production of John Henry Mackay's In the Wake of the Bounty, on the strength of which the small Australian production company hired him for the title-role in the 1933 feature-length Wake of the Bounty. The film was a small Australian release (it never reached the American market) but secured him the introduction to the small London-and-Hollywood Australian-actor expatriate network that took him to London in early 1933.
THE BURBANK LOT
He worked at the Northampton Repertory Company at the Royal Theatre, Northampton, in 1933 and 1934 on the standard British provincial-repertory contract, took the small uncredited featured-extra role in the Tom Walls comedy Murder at Monte Carlo at the Warner Teddington Studios in November 1934 (the role that put him in the small reel-of-screen-test footage that the Warner Burbank casting agent Solly Baiano took back to Los Angeles in January 1935), and on the strength of the Baiano screen-test was offered the standard Warner Bros. seven-year junior-stock-company contract at one hundred and fifty dollars per week. He sailed from Southampton for New York on the SS Berengaria on the eleventh of January 1935, arrived in Los Angeles on the twentieth of February, and reported for duty at the Warner Burbank lot on the twenty-eighth of February 1935 in his twenty-sixth year.
He worked across March-to-September 1935 at the standard junior-contract-player rotation: the small uncredited Burbank-extra roles in two Warner pictures (Murder at Monte Carlo, in which his earlier Teddington role was retained; The Case of the Curious Bride, in which he played the second-male-lead Gregory Moxley), the standard contract-player publicity-stills sessions, the studio fan-magazine introductions and the small stock-company training-class with the Warner senior actors. He met the seventeen-year-old contract-actress Olivia de Havilland at the Burbank lot in the spring of 1935 in the casual junior-stock-company introductions; the meeting became the central single pairing of his subsequent decade at Warner.
THE CAPTAIN BLOOD PRODUCTION
Hal Wallis and Michael Curtiz selected him for the Captain Blood lead on the eighth of September 1935 on the standard Burbank-conference recommendation from Solly Baiano. The full Captain Blood production budget was approximately one million dollars, which was substantially below the standard Warner A-picture budget of one and a half million for a swashbuckling-adventure feature of the period, on the calculation that the unknown-Flynn lead would carry the picture on the strength of the Sabatini-novel pre-sold market rather than on a high-cost star draw. The principal photography ran across August-to-November 1935 at the Burbank lot and on location at the Warner Newport beach pirate-ship set (the Spanish-galleon set built across the summer for the Burbank-and-Newport production rotation).
Flynn worked through the eleven-week principal photography under the Curtiz direction at the pace and the physical demands of the standard swashbuckling-action production: the famous sword-fights with the Spanish villain Basil Rathbone, the rigging-climbing scenes on the Spanish-galleon set, the swimming-and-running pirate-island sequences, the central romantic scenes with the seventeen-year-old Olivia de Havilland as the colonial-governor's-daughter Arabella Bishop. Curtiz, by the standard contemporary Warner-production reports, had been initially sceptical of Flynn's casting in the lead and worked him hard across the first three weeks of the production; by the end of the third week Curtiz had recognised that Flynn was carrying the picture on the strength of the physical-presence-and-charm that was the central single Flynn screen-quality, and the production proceeded on the recognition.
THE BOXING DAY OPENING
Warner Bros. opened the Captain Blood release on the Boxing Day evening of the twenty-sixth of December 1935 at the Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York City. The opening-night audience of approximately one thousand five hundred (the Strand Theatre capacity) was the standard Warner Boxing Day holiday-release audience of the period. The film ran two hours and nineteen minutes. The opening-night critical reception (the New York Times review on the twenty-seventh of December and the Variety review of the same morning) recognised that Warner had produced an unexpectedly strong swashbuckling-adventure feature on the strength of the unknown-Flynn lead-performance.
The Captain Blood national release across January-to-March 1936 grossed $1.5 million on the standard Warner Bros. domestic-and-international distribution, made it the third-highest-grossing Warner picture of 1935-36 release, and produced the Academy Award nomination for Best Picture at the March 1936 ceremony. Flynn was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award by the Academy in February 1936 (the youngest nominee on the slate); he was renominated to the Warner senior-contract-class on the strength of the Captain Blood performance, was paid the substantially-increased rate of one thousand dollars per week from January 1936, and entered the standing Warner-contract A-picture rotation that produced across the next twelve years the central body of his sustained swashbuckling-and-action filmography: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, the central single Flynn-Curtiz-De Havilland Warner production), Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Gentleman Jim (1942), Northern Pursuit (1943), Objective, Burma! (1945), and the closing San Antonio (1945).
The Captain Blood opening of the twenty-sixth of December 1935 is the central single launch-night of the Hollywood swashbuckling-actor tradition. Flynn's eight Warner Bros. films with Olivia de Havilland across 1935 to 1941 became the central pairing of the Golden Age studio system. Flynn died at Vancouver, British Columbia, on the fourteenth of October 1959, fifty years old, and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The Flynn name in modern Hollywood-history carries the weight of the Boxing-Day evening at the Strand Theatre on Broadway on the twenty-sixth of December 1935.