grantss Great naval adventure, set at the time of the Spanish Armada. Entertaining, with a solid plot and great, and quite realistic, action scenes. Considering this was made in 1940, the recreations and special effects are amazing. No CGI, good old fashioned real ships.Errol Flynn was perfect for the lead role: dashing, swashbuckling, charming. Easily his best movie. Good support from Brenda Marshall and Flora Robson (as Queen Elizabeth I).A classic.

utgard14 English privateer Errol Flynn is betrayed by a traitorous countryman and captured by the Spanish, who don't take kindly to his acts of piracy against their ships. Flynn still finds time for romance, though, with pretty Spanish royal Brenda Marshall. Another great teaming of Errol Flynn and director Michael Curtiz. This may not rank up there with Robin Hood or Captain Blood, but it's still very entertaining. Brenda Marshall is very pretty but no Olivia de Havilland. Flora Robson is fun as Queen Elizabeth. Claude Rains is never bad. The rest of the cast is made up of reliable WB contract players like Alan Hale and Donald Crisp. Really good lineup. Solid swashbuckler that fans of Errol Flynn should love.

richard-1787 This movie is so wonderful in so many ways.But, having watched it again for the nth time tonight on TCM, it is still the opening sea battle that most gets my adrenaline going. Everything works. The action. The direction. Very definitely Korngold's masterful score. It is a spell-binding scene.The rest of the movie is wonderful as well, of course. Flynn is magnificent as the swashbuckling, never-too-serious privateer. His duel with Henry Daniell near the end is actually very good, though it still falls short of the superb one between Flynn and Basil Rathbone at the end of Robin Hood.Brenda Marshall is certainly very beautiful, but she doesn't have the personality of Olivia de Havilland.Everything works here. Every actor is perfect. So is the script. And the score. The Star Wars movies come right out of this, but as good as they are, they never get this good.This is truly a masterpiece!

eyesour Brenda is not Olivia, and Henry quite definitely is not Philip St.John Basil Rathbone, MC. Sorry, folks, but with ersatz ingredients, the cake just doesn't taste quite right, although millions were spent in baking it. Flynn does his very best; he looks good, moves well, speaks well, flaunts his gear as if ladled into it, and he was an absolutely great swasher, but somehow I didn't feel his heart was truly into this buckler. The ship models were annoyingly unrealistic; Henry Daniell was such a pathetic pussy he had to have a blatantly obvious double in the fencing scenes, besides which Elizabeth's Walsingham should sue him for character assassination and outright defamation. Robson was a sight better than Bette Davis, but there have been several better Elizabeths since. Also, this film is too long, and it starts to drag about half way through, when they get to sepia-tinted Panama. There's too much talk, as well. And that monkey was robbed of its Oscar. Never mind, it's all good anti-German fun: there are definite parallels between the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition. Korngold ratchets up the sound. Time Magazine reviewed the performance with its usual inaccuracy, calling Flynn "the Irish Cinemactor". I often wonder about these WW2 movies: do they show this in Argentina nowadays ? Do they show Henry V in France ?