Captain Blood (1935 film) Captain Blood (1935 film) Captain Blood is a 1935 American black-and-white swashbuckling pirate film from First National Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead (with Hal B. Wallis as executive producer), directed by Michael Curtiz, that stars Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Ross Alexander. The film is based on the 1922 novel "Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini, with a screenplay by Casey Robinson, and concerns an enslaved doctor and his fellow prisoners who escape their cruel island imprisonment and become pirates in the West Indies. An earlier 1924 silent film version
Captain Blood (1935 film) and the French ships used one of the largest technical crews assembled for a film, requiring 2500 extras. For sea-battle footage, Curtiz used a combination of process shots, miniatures, and footage taken from "The Sea Hawk" (1924). During filming Flynn collapsed from a bout of malaria, which he had first contracted in New Guinea. The film was a big hit making Warner Bros a profit of $1.462 million. According to Warner Bros it earned $1,087,000 domestically and $1,388,000 foreign. "Captain Blood" had its premiere on December 26, 1935 at the Mark Strand Theatre in New York City and was released