Movie Review: The Sea Hawk (1940)

The movie stars Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Brenda Marshall, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp and Alan Hale.

I don't watch pirate movies very often. But, my daughter and I wanted to watch a movie together last night and I decided a film from this genre would be a nice change of pace from our typical Friday night horror film.

I ended up picking "The Sea Hawk" because my daughter is familiar with Claude Rains from "The Invisible Man" and some other films we've watched together. And, for the most part, it ended up being better than I expected.

I'm actually not much of an Errol Flynn fan. I've seen plenty of his other movies and he always seems to play his characters with an over-the-top arrogance that just doesn't quite work for me. However, he does manage to keep things toned down quite a bit in this film and, as a result of that, I did think he did an excellent job in his role of the hero Thorpe.

The person that really impressed me, however, was Robson, who, in my opinion at least, really stood out as Queen Elizabeth. She managed to be charming yet firm and even a little scary, pretty much everything I would expect to see from the legendary queen. Brenda Marshall might have played Thorpe's love interest Dona Maria. But, Robson was much more memorable.

While there are some exciting sea battles in this movie, including one early on in the film, the movie does tend to drag on at times. This includes what I thought was a pretty dragged out scene with the queen (in an effort to keep up appearances) publicly chastising her privateers. After seeing the sea battle prior to that, it was a little bit of a let down, at least until the film started picking up toward the end.

I also thought some parts of the movie, including the love story between Thorpe and Dona Maria, were kind of predictable. It wasn't anything that made me dislike the movie in general. But, it would have been nice to see at least an effort to be a little more unique

I'm still not about to watch pirate movies exclusively. However, this film turned out to be worth watching, both because of some exciting sea battles and because of surprisingly decent acting from Flynn and his supporting cast. This is a movie I would recommend taking the time to watch as a result of that.

My Grade: B