The Sea Hawk (1940)

Mark Dischinger

This 1940 Warner Brothers swashbuckler set in 1585 opens with King Philip plotting world domination, laughing that all world maps will soon read simply “Spain” – once England is out of the way, of course. The Spanish Ambassador departs to England to escort his niece to Queen Elizabeth's court, but in a spectacular sea battle the Spanish Galley is soundly damaged, boarded, raided and sunk by a group of pirates led by Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a Sir Walter Raleigh stand-in played by Erroll Flynn. Thorpe rescues the galley slaves – they row the boat – and spares the crew, taking them aboard and delivering them to England. The jewels and other bounty (or a portion thereof) are a gift to the Queen. His crew is part of a noble privateer coalition – the Sea Hawks – who justify their piracy as reclamation of English goods (and enslaved sailors) from the Spanish behemoth. The political fallout from Thorpe's abduction of the Ambassador forces Elizabeth to outlaw the Sea Hawks, including an official denial (and private approval) of his mission to Panama to steal a shipment of Aztec gold. The Spanish – with the help of the treacherous Lord Wolfingham – capture and arrest Thorpe, and the Inquisition sentences him to galley slavery – ironically, he's chained to a boat and forced to row. Naturally he escapes, uncovers the scheming traitor, and restores honor to himself, Queen and country.

The film is black and white, with a switch to sepia in the New World segment, further setting the action in an alien world. The overocean journey is accomplished with water superimposed on Thorpe's charts, giving the contemporary viewer familiar with the Indiana Jones franchise a sense of reverse deja vu. The seafighting is more convincing than the romance between the leads, which never escapes its sense of inevitability. That said, there's one nice exchange between Flynn and Brenda Marshall aboard the ship where they debate the definition of thief (and Dona Maria discovers Thorpe has returned her jewels, demonstrating that he's more honorable than the Spanish Empire).

What's most striking are Queen Elizabeth's closing remarks. Flora Robinson as Elizabeth delivers a soliloquy mirroring events of 1940: we must not, she says, stand idly by while one man seeks to rule all of Europe and later the world. We do not hate the Spanish or Spaniards, she says, but rather the one man who's led their government into dreams of conquest. She knights Thorpe (Raleigh, incidentally, was knighted in 1585) and dispatches the English fleet to meet the Spanish Armada – a battle the audience, safely in the future, knows was won handily by our heroes. One imagines that the audience looked for this much confidence in the battle to come.

The anti-fascist sentiment could be directed at Franco, but it's probably the German tyrant – who, just two months after the release of The Sea Hawk (into its third run, probably), would begin bombing England. The anti-Nazi seal had been broken in Hollywood the previous year, but to dedicate more words to this relatively short concluding speech is to insinuate that The Sea Hawk is a propaganda picture in its entirety. The fact that King Philip seeks to destroy England, and Thorpe's mission is to alert the English to the threat before it's too late is eerily prescient and a reflection of the times – a quality Hollywood always claimed – but reading the film's thematic elements as more than swashbuckling against a backdrop of political intrigue is to do it a disservice. The essence of The Sea Hawk is in the spectacle, from the large-scale sea battles to the swinging ropes, from the deadly ambush in Panama to the twenty-foot candlelit shadows of the climactic swordfight. It's an action movie with a suave star and a beautiful leading lady. And a monkey in a fez. Who doesn't like that?