It is like watching a pirate version of a Bond movie 🙂 But I have to admit that I loved it! In the end he defeats the villains and gets the gold and the girl (or something similar).
Also, somewhere towards the end of the book, the story becomes predictable – the hero Captain Blood is put through impossible situations and he uses his fine intelligence and daredevilry to come out of them unscathed every time. A strong lady like her would have carried the story on her shoulders, and would have been responsible for a few twists and turns, if she had been given more space by the author. (In the MGR movie, the heroine has quite a strong role). Though she plays an important role in the story, she comes in only a few scenes. The other thing which I have a complaint about is the part given to the heroine, Arabella Bishop. Maybe one can forgive the author for that, because one can’t analyse an early 20th century novel with one’s early 21st century values. Alexandre Dumas does better in this aspect, because in a typical Dumas story, there are good and bad characters from all nationalities. If I have to mention a few minor issues with the story it will be these. Spaniards are depicted as ruthless people in the story, while there are good and bad characters among people from other nationalities. On a recent visit to the bookshop, I renewed my attempts to get hold of this book, and this time my efforts bore fruit. I searched for this Sabatini book for years, but it was difficult to get and so I gave up hope. I have never read a book by Sabatini before (It is surprising because he has such a beautiful name – ‘Rafael’ which sounds similar to the name of Italian Renaissance painter ‘Raphael’, and ‘Sabatini’ which has a musical ring to it and is also the second name of one of my favourite tennis players of yesteryears, ‘Gabriela Sabatini’). I was very disappointed when I got to know that, but this revelation also piqued my curiosity. I discovered that it was based on an English novel ‘Captain Blood’ by Rafael Sabatini. Later, I discovered that this was not so. I thought that the movie was based on an original story and a screenplay, written especially for MGR. The movie was a big hit when it was released and has been popular among young movie goers for generations (I saw it a few decades after it was first released). Later, circumstances make him a pirate, albeit of the noble kind. He falls in love with the island chieftain’s daughter (played by Jayalalitha), but it is an impossible love between a slave and a princess. In the movie, MGR plays the role of a doctor living in a fictitious country and he is arrested for treason and deported to an island as a slave.
It was a pirate movie starring two Tamil movie icons of yesteryears – MGR and Jayalalitha. One of my favourite movies when I was in school was a Tamil movie called ‘Aayirathil Oruvan’ (‘One in a thousand’ – released in 1965).
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