With the exception of the silent-era The Black Pirate (1926), no film did more to establish the swashbuckling pirate movie than Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood. One of the first such films produced by a major studio in the sound era, it benefitted substantially from the inimitable presence of the Australian-born Errol Flynn, who was not a well-known actor at the time. Captain Blood made Flynn's career, introducing him—to borrow from the ballyhoo verbiage of the film's trailer—in a "Blazing Debut for a New Romantic Star. Handsome! Dashing!" Handsome and dashing, indeed, Flynn became one of Hollywood's top stars in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, cementing his leading man status in films such as Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940).

Based on the 1922 novel by Rafael Sabatini, who helped to refine and popularize the swashbuckling pirate-hero archetype in numerous novels early 20th-century novels, Captain Blood is set against the backdrop of the Monmouth Rebellion, in which a group of dissidents tried to depose King James II in 1685. Swept up in the ensuing chaos is Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn), who makes the mistake of sticking to his Hippocratic oath and treating a wounded rebel, which in the eyes of the Crown makes him a collaborator and therefore a traitor. Despite his righteous protestations of innocence, Blood is found guilty and sentenced to slavery on the other side of the world. In Port Royal, he is purchased by Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), the niece of the sniveling military commander Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). Arabella purchases Blood not to own him, but to keep him out of the ownership of a plantation owner even worse than her uncle, although Blood does not feel much gratitude, thus establishing a perennial love-hate relationship that will inevitably burn into romance.

Blood eventually leads a revolt during an attack by the French, during which he and a devoted group of escaped slaves commandeer a British ship. Without country or king, they declare themselves pirates who will forever roam the high seas. Thus, Blood's piracy is not borne out of avarice or cruelty, but rather desperation (he is a good man pushed outside the bounds of society by the genuinely corrupt), which he nonetheless accepts with the grin and wink of a jolly outlaw. He is a pirate, no doubt, but one who is effectively beyond reproach and is all but destined to be brought back into the fold as a national hero, rather than a scoundrel. The scoundrel role is divided between the haughty Colonel Bishop, who spends much of the film hunting Blood for personal reasons of vengeance cloaked in the rhetoric of upholding the law (in this regard he is very much a 17th-century Donald Trump), and Levasseur (Basil Rathbone), a rapacious French pirate with whom Blood ill-advisedly aligns himself. While there is not a great deal of action in the first few reels, the film picks up considerably in the final half hour, featuring one major sword duel and an all-out ship battle that involves blazing cannons, flying splinters of smoldering wood, torrents of shattered stone, and dozens of pirates swinging from one ship to the next, sabers in hand. It is all so familiar that one has to remind oneself that, in 1935, such imagery was strikingly, rapturously new.

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