Michael Curtiz | Captain Blood / 1935

gay pirate land

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini), Michael Curtiz (director), Captain Blood / 1935

 

Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) is an Irish doctor in 1685 who is summoned to aid Lord Gildoy (Dennis D. Auburn), a rebel against involved in the Monmouth Rebellion, a protestant protest attempting to dispose the Catholic King, James II. Arrested even while he is trying to save a man’s life, Blood is sentenced to death by the notoriously unforgiving Judge Jeffreys. Yet by a simple, almost accidental royal decree, Blood and the surviving rebels are taken from their cells and put upon a ship to the West Indies to be sold into slavery.

    In Port Royal in southeastern Jamaica, Blood is noticed by, Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), the beautiful niece of the local military commander Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill), who purchases him and attempts to contain his now quite rebellious nature by recommending him as the physician to the colony’s governor Steed (George Hassell), who is suffering from a highly painful version of gout. Blood not only does he temporarily relieves Governor Steed’s condition, but is declared the royal physician, replacing the governor’s previous incompetent doctors, Dr. Bronson (Hobart Cavanaugh) and Dr. Whacker (Donald Meek).

     So begins the intense relationship between Blood, outwardly resentful of Arabella’s notion that she might simply purchase another human being, with Arabella who he finds attractive despite his dismissals of her attempt to play the lady bountiful.

     Observing the sentencing of a ship’s carpenter—warned to not attempt escape—who explains that as a slave without a ship there is no hope of escape, Blood concocts a plan. Meanwhile, he explains to Arabella that he cannot allow himself to serve a society that treats the two rebels against an unfair tyrant to suffering, while he was snoring in his bed. Indeed, his sentencing has turned him into a radical beyond what the true rebels ever imagined.

      Blood visits the two doctors—who oddly enough live together and are now both suffering from a lack of customers—playing into their desperation. These two men, Bronson and Whacker, are the reason that this film visits these pages. For they are quite obviously gay lovers in a time when Joseph I. Breen and the Hays Code Board had utterly banned gay figures from film. Yet here they are again, bumbling prissy outsiders, performing as a duo sharing a living and working space when there was every reason in Hollywood logic to refuse such a scene.

      His conversation with them concerns the possibility of leaving, which he implants in their conversation by suggesting their own departure, only to allow them to turn it on its head as they attempt to find a way that he might depart and their careers as island doctors be restored. I repeat the dialogue to make sense of all that happens after.

 

          “Come in.”

          “Good afternoon colleagues, Dr. Bronson, Dr. Whacker. Well, how is business

                 my friends?”

          “Terrible.” (Bronson)

          “Good.”  (Whacker)

          “Terribly good.” (Bronson)

          “Great, that relieves me. I had heard that things were not altogether…well idle 

                  gossip obviously. You intend to remain here?

          “Remain here? Why not?”

          “It’s queer. There are you free to come and go as you please. And you choose to 

                stay here. While I, who hate this pestilential island…Such are the quirks of 

                circumstance.”

           Blood pauses, stands, and announces “I must be running along now gentleman.”

 

    It is queer indeed, as this couple of quacks brings him back into the room to discuss the possible purchase of a ship which might take him away from their isolated island of operation. The moment he is out the door, they begin to plot how they will gossip their way out of the situation, only to have Blood return to remind them that he is the now beloved Royal Governor’s special physician and as such in still able to destroy their careers if they might reveal his attempt to escape.

     So does Dr. Blood become the swashbuckling hero which the movie is really interested in talking about, even it he finds entry into that subject through two silly gay sissies.

     But then, we also must ask ourselves what is the world the handsome Blood is now committing to. Pirates, as we know, ship to sea with their own kind and sex basically for the rest of their lives, without women unless they in their plundering of cities they rape them, carry them off and enjoy their just desserts—something we know that the moral pirate Blood would never engage in. But his statement of commitment to his men and them to him, reads strangely like a statement of male bonding that might have appeared in a local New York Village gay bar in 1970:

 

“We, the undersigned, are men without a country. Outlaws in our own land and homeless outcasts in any other. Desperate men, we go to seek a desperate fortune. Therefore we do band out ourselves into a brotherhood of buccaneers to practice the trade of piracy on the high seas. We, the hunted, will now hunt.”

 

     Hunting is what we know all desperate, homeless outcast gay males do in their nightly visits to the gay bars of New York City. And Blood further joins up with the far more treacherous French buccaneer, Captain Levasseur (Basil Rathbone), the actor whom Flynn biographer David Bret in his book Satan’s Angel claims Flynn, “who preferred male sexual encounters,” had a sexual relationship. But few of Rathbone’s aficionado’s such Marci Jessen give this account any credence. And it appears the Rathbone spoke quite often as a homophobe. For my purposes it doesn’t actually matter. The characters are already in a gay pirate land that exists only in Hollywood movies. Captain Hook and Johnny Depp can attest to that!

   Of course, the fiction of the film must return us to a heteronormative reality if it wanted to survive the censors. Arabella’s uncle, Colonel Bishop, now the appointed governor is determined to destroy Blood, sending Arabella back to England to protect her.

     Three years later, however, upon returning, her boat is captured, along with the royal emissary Lord Willoughby by Lavesseur’s ship. This time, turning the tables so to speak, Blood buys Arabella’s freedom from Lavesseur, making her as resentful as he had been previously when she had purchased him. Offering her valuable jewelry Blood has acquired in his adventures, he discovers that his new mistress dismisses the jewels and her would-be admirer. But despite that he orders his men to return to Port Royal to deliver her up to her Uncle, certain death for them all.

      What they soon discover, however, is that, in fact, King James has been usurped and has fled to France, which explains why England is now at war with France and two French warships can now be seen outside the Jamaican city on attack. Willoughby has been sent by William III to offer Blood and his pirate crew parsons and commissions in the Royal Navy.

       Pretending the fly the French flag, Blood’s vessels move near the two assaulters, quickly switching to the British Union Jack. The attack first the one ship and, destroying it, turn to the other (which quite inexplicably has continued it sights on the city instead of the destroying ship),

destroying it as well, but losing their own ship in the battle.

      Bishop apparently has abandoned the city in his attempts to find and disarm Blood’ pirate ship.

And in reward for saving the city, Blood is appointed the new governor of the city. Arabella confesses the she loves Blood, and the former pirate makes it clear that the feeling is mutual. By the time Bishop returns, now on trial for having abandoned his post, the new Governor is there to wish him the greeting, “Good morning, Uncle.”

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).