The Sea Hawk--the sound film

The 1940 version of The Sea Hawk really was supposed to be a remake of the silent film and also based closely on the original novel. It really was. But somewhere in the rewriting process, the story was altered into something original.

It's still set in the Elizabethan Era and the main character is an expert pirate--ur, I mean privateer. But other than that, it really has no connection with Sabatini's novel. But the original intent and the fact that Sabatini's name was heavily used in the promotional materials means I'm including it in my mini-series covering the novel and its film adaptations.

Also, that gives me an excuse to watch it again, which is never a bad thing. The Sea Hawk is a magnificent swashbuckler.

Errol Flynn is Captain Thorpe, one of Queen Elizabeth's Sea Hawks (actually called Sea Dogs in real life)--the privateers who essentially did black ops missions, robbing the Spanish to contribute to the English treasury, thus allowing Queen Bess to build a navy large enough to defend against the Armada.

The movie starts off with a bang, with Thorpe's ship Albatross capturing a Spanish galley, looting it and freeing the Englishmen who were slaves at the galley's oars. This is where Thorpe gets a chance to meet Maria, the half-English niece of the new Spanish ambassador to England.

Soon after, Thorpe comes up with a plan to rob the Spanish gold caravans crossing Panama. But the Spanish find out about it (I like the Sherlockian investigation the Spanish ambassador pulls off to figure out Thorpe's plans), leading to the capture of Thorpe and his men.

Thorpe now has to engineer and escape from a galley AND get back to England in time to warn the Queen about an impending invasion. But a mole for the Spanish in the English court could make that task difficult.

It's great stuff, filmed in lush black-and-white, with Erich Korngold's score arguably surpassing even his work on The Adventures of Robin Hood.

In fact, it's more worthwhile comparing the film to Robin Hood than to Sabatini's novel. Both films were directed by Michael Curtiz (though Curtiz replaced someone else on Robin Hood) and both star Flynn as the swashbuckling hero, Alan Hale as his number 2 man, and Claude Rains as the villain. Una O'Connor again plays the maid of Flynn's love interest and again falls for one of Flynn's men.

Heck, Maria (nicely played by the nice-to-gaze-upon Brenda Marshall) follows a similar character arc to Olivia DeHavilland's Maid Marian. She is contemptuous of Thorpe at first, but is soon won over. Just as part of this process with Maid Marian was seeing some of the victims of Norman oppression in Robin Hood, Maria's change-of-heart begins when she sees some of the weak, emaciated galley slaves freed after Thorpe captures the ship on which she was passenger.

The Robin Hood vibe was obviously deliberate--Warner Brothers would have wanted to capitalize on the success of that earlier film. But The Sea Hawk still has a personality of its own. Thorpe, for instance, is a more stern and military-like leader than was Robin, while parallels to the then-current war in Europe are here that were absent from the pre-war Robin Hood. This last bit, though, was done well, making the parallels a natural part of the story.

Claude Rains, by the way, plays the Spanish ambassador with the same sort of calm villainy he gave Prince John in Robin Hood. This time, he's backed up by Henry Daniell as the Spanish mole in England. That actually leads to one departure from the Robin Hood template. In that film, Prince John is backed up by two co-villains--Sir Guy and the Sheriff--who each have distinctive personalities. But here, both villains have the same calm-but-evil vibe. One might consider this a fault, but both Rains and Daniell are so good at being calm-but-evil, the lack of variety in the villiany does not hurt the story at all.

There's a lot of atmosphere in The Sea Hawk. When it should be exciting and fast-paced, it is. When it needs to be tense and even a little creepy (see the scene I'm embedding below), it manages to do that equally well. The tone of the story shifts with the various plot twists, but with a smoothness that makes the movie as a whole work so well in terms of basic storytelling and plot construction.

Finally, you can't talk about The Sea Hawk without mentioning Flora Robeson as Queen Elizabeth. She exudes strength, intelligence and determination--you completely accept her as a capable leader who inspires absolute loyalty in her subjects.

So that's it--over the past couple of weeks, we have looked at a brilliantly written adventure novel followed by a magnificent and faithful silent film adaptation, followed by a sound film that morphed into something different but still gave us one of the best swashbucklers ever produced.

The Sea Hawk--the Silent Film

Rafael Sabatini's novels always depended on his ability to construct smoothly ornate sentences and cool dialogue. So, though silent film is an art form that is perfect for many types of film, it would superficially seem that Sabatini's novels would lose something vital in the translation to the screen. This would be especially true of a novel such as The Sea Hawk. As I wrote last week, it's a novel that depends largely on perfectly constructed conversations between the characters to generate excitement and suspense.

But a silent film depends on title cards, so dialogue has to be pared down to the essentials. So what happens when you produce a faithful version of The Sea Hawk in terms of story and character arcs, but have to leave out a lot of the awesome wordplay? Can it still be a great movie?

Astonishingly, the answer is "yes." Directer Frank Lloyd and screenwriter J.G. Hawks do a magnificent job turning the novel into a film. They are, of course, helped along by Milton Sills' effective portrayal of the film's protagonist. (Walter Anthony, who wrote the inter-titles, also deserves credit.) Sills is great in the title role; remember that acting in the silents meant walking a fine line between being expressive enough to make up for the lack of spoken dialogue AND being subtle enough to be believable. Sills strikes that balance nicely, helping ground the film in a world in which we can believe.

(Sills, by the way, died in 1930, so never got a chance to show what he might have done in the sound era.)

The dialogue is indeed boiled down the the essentials, but the story is kept remarkably intact. Sir Oliver still covers for his brother Lionel when Lionel kills Peter Godolphin. Lionel still double-crosses his brother and sells him into slavery. Oliver still ends up becoming a Barbary pirate chief. Character interactions and motivations are all made clear to us.

Even the plots and counterplots involving Oliver, Asad-ed-Din and Fenzileh are also still there, though one disappointment for anyone familiar with the novel is Fenzileh's reduced presence in the film. She is awesomely villainous in prose, so its too bad she only gets a minute or two of screen time.

But the story as a whole is unharmed by the transition to a new medium--still exciting; still suspenseful. The Sea Hawk is a true epic of a swashbuckler.

Wallace Beery is the sea captain who is hired to kidnap Sir Oliver and who is later forced by circumstances to work for him. Beery was an enormously entertaining actor and he's obviously having fun in his role--perhaps making his character even more memorable than he was in the book.



Enid Bennett (who played Maid Marian in Fairbanks' Robin Hood two years before) is also very good as Rosamund Godolphin. And, by golly, she is pretty enough to make us believe that at least three different male characters want her. What is it about the 1920s that produced such a unique form of classy female prettiness that seems to have since faded away forever?

The film looks great. I'm all for modern CGI in films like the Avengers, which couldn't exist without CGI. But watching real ships crewed by hundreds of real actors and extras will always have its own unique appeal. In fact, the ship combat scenes were so good that some of the footage was used again in 1935's Captain Blood.

16 years after this film was made, with the silents long gone, Warner Brothers would remake The Sea Hawk with Errol Flynn in the starring role. Well, they would sort of remake it. It would have the same title and still be a swashbuckler set during the Elizabethan era. But otherwise, it would be an original story. All the same, we'll take a look at it next week.

The Sea Hawk--the Novel

Rafael Sabatini was good at action scenes. For example, the final battle in his novel Captain Blood is so good you pretty much have to jump back and read it a second time as soon as you're done.

But Sabatini was also good at plot construction and dialogue. Boy, was he ever good at dialogue. In fact, he was a master at using dialogue to build up suspense and generate a palpable sense of danger.

His 1915 novel The Sea Hawk is perhaps the best example of this. The protagonist is Sir Oliver Tressilian, a former privateer who (around 1590 or so) is living on his Cornwall estate and is kept busy wooing Rosamund Godolphin. But Rosamund's annoying brother Peter objects to this and is causing trouble. 

When Sir Oliver's half-brother Lionel kills Peter, Sir Oliver is blamed for the crime. This doesn't help his wooing prospects with Rosamund, who fully believes Oliver killed her brother. Oliver refuses to narc out his brother, so he can't prove his own innocence. 

Lionel doesn't trust Oliver to remain quiet forever and arranges a kidnapping. And so Oliver ends up as a galley slave on a Spanish ship. When that ship is captured by Barbary pirates, the embittered man switches sides. Five years later, Oliver is now known as Sakr-el-Bahr ("The Hawk of the Sea) and is the most feared of the Barbary pirates. Circumstances give him a chance to capture both Lionel and Rosamund.

Up to now, the novel has been great--Sabatini's prose is "just a little bit flowery, giving it a rhythm that seems appropriate to the subject matter and forming passages that often beg to be read aloud." (quoted from my book Storytelling the in Pulps, Comics and Radio)

But it is at this point that The Sea Hawk becomes impossible to put down. Oliver's current boss is Asad-ed-Din, the Basha of Algiers. He falls for Rosamund himself and wants to add her to his harem. But Oliver, in the meantime, is beginning to appreciate just how much of a villain he's become and now wants to get Rosamund to safety. On top of this, Asad's favorite wife--a Sicilian woman named Fenzilah--and her son Marzak are also plotting against Oliver. It's only his success as a pirate, which has brought a lot of wealth and slaves to Algiers, that keeps Oliver's head on his shoulders.

So he has to plot and counter-plot, trying to keep on Asad's good side while keeping Rosamund safe and fending off the efforts of Fenzilah to discredit him. All this takes up the bulk of the second half of the book. There's very little action--most of this is driven by dialogue and Sabatini's wonderful prose. 

It's notable that no action is needed. The fluid and dangerous situation plus the sharp dialogue is enough to generate all the tension the story needs to keep you on the edge of your seat. It really does beg to be read aloud. 

Also, Oliver's character arc is fascinating. His pirate activities are not romanticized or justified in any way--he really does become a bad guy for a time. But we understand the circumstances that drove him to this and we find ourselves rooting for him when he finally decides to redeem himself. 

The final few chapters might stretch themselves just a bit too far to tie up all the plot threads a little too neatly, but that's a minor criticism. Sabatini's best ever book is Captain Blood, but The Sea Hawk is near the top of the list as well.

About a year ago, I wrote a post about Sabatini's novel The Black Swan, then followed that up a week later with a post about the movie adaptation. I promised to do the same with The Sea Hawk within "the next few months." Well, I'm finally getting around to that. Next week, we'll look at the 1924 silent movie adaptation. In two weeks, we'll examine the 1940 Errol Flynn version. So we'll be buckling our swashes for a little while yet.

You can read The Sea Hawk online HERE.