The Sea Hawk (1940)

Quite some time back, I purchased an Errol Flynn box set. I noticed I hadn't done a full-length post on The Sea Hawk before, so I watched it over the weekend.

It's the mid 1580s, and in an introductory scene we see Spain's King Philip II (Montagu Love) talking about his plans for world domination. Cut to Spain's ambassador to England Don José (Claude Rains) traveling to England with his niece Doña María (Brenda Marshal) and her personal servant (Una O'Connor). However, the Spanish galleon is waylaid by a ship of English privateers led by Captain Thorpe (Errol Flynn). The Spanish ship is destroyed and José and María are forced to travel to England with Thorpe. Thorpe immediately falls in love with the half-English Maria, and you know the feeling is eventually going to become mutual by a key point in the movie.

José's purpose in London is to keep the English from realizing that Philip is building an armada and its purpose. Thankfully, thanks to the privateers, he's also got a legitimate grievance to press before Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson, who also played Elizabeth in Fire Over England; I think the picture at left is actually from that earlier movie and not The Sea Hawk). Her Majesty is publicly peeved with the privateers, but lets them continue their actions against Spain, as Thorpe proposes to take his men to the New World to seize more gold.

However, the queen has spies in her midst, and one of them, Lord Wolfingham (Henry Daniell) is able to find out where Thorpe is headed, such that when Thorpe and his men do try to get back to their boat to return to England, they find that their boat has been captured by the Spanish, who try them before the Inquisition and sentence them to a life sentence as galley slaves. A fellow galley slave knows about Philip's plan to build an Armada to invade England, but how can Thorpe or any of the rest of them get back to England to warn Elizabeth?

Errol Flynn was a perfect action film star (although they didn't call them action pictures back in those days) for Warner Bros., and it's no surprise that he would be cast as the lead in a movie like this. He fits the part perfectly. As for the rest of the movie, it has all of the professionalism you'd expect from the studio system, and is a rousing entertaining success. The battle scenes are sure to delight and more than make up for some of the land-bound scenes when we want to get back to the derring-do. (One scene involving Thorpe's mapmaker I found particularly irritating.)

Brenda Marshall is nominally the female lead as Flynn's love interest, but she's not given all that much to do since large portions of the movie are set outside England. She and the rest of the cast do well, with Robson and Alan Hale (Sr.) getting particular honors for second place behind Flynn.

I picked up the box set at a cheaper price than Amazon is currently selling it at, but considering the movies on it, it's still not a bad deal. And if you can do the streaming thing, Amazon has it available on streaming too. One caveat is that there was a 1924 silent also called The Sea Hawk, which is a completely different story. It's one worth watching, but just beware.