A Film Canon

The Sea Hawk explicates swashbuckling as inspirational nationalism, concluding with Elizabeth's exhortation to the British Armada: "A great duty confronts us all - to prepare our nation for a war that none of us wants." For this reason, piracy is legitimised as privateering, while the relationship between the centre and periphery of the nascent British Empire is replaced with the relationship between that Empire and the Spanish one, whose ambition is to reduce the entire world to peripheries of its Continental base; or, figuratively, to the equivalent of the West Indies, around which most of the narrative revolves. To this end, privateer Geoffrey Thorpe (Errol Flynn) - a rough version of Francis Drake - embarks upon a mission of plunder to ensure that all the world's waterways become extensions of the English Channel. In doing so, he gains a qualified gesture of permission from Elizabeth, which not only consummates their flirtatious rapport, but clarifies the privateer as a charismatic diplomat, paving the way for his eventual knighthood: "If you undertook such a venture, you would do so without the approval of the Queen of England. But you would take with you the grateful affection of Elizabeth." This diplomatic imperative may explain Flynn's relative restraint - or, alternatively, the complete transference of charisma from his body to his personality - which finds clearest expression in his stately government of his ship and her booty, and ensures that even the most dramatic moments of physical bravura never move beyond their immediate political imperative to become pleasurable for their own sake, as they seem to do in his other films. Hence the culminative chase and sword fight, whose role is merely to trace a path from the palace gates to the throne room, as well as Thorpe's romantic interest in Dona Maria (Brenda Marshall), whose fusion of Spanish and English blood is much more conspicuous as a political than a sexual presence.