if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

All right, I want to add a few things. First of all there are 2 films, not 2 film versions. The 1924 silent version adheres to the book, which I bought and read many years ago. I see that some battles scenes were lifted from this version. For a silent film it is very good. The 1940 version is very good as well. It's political sea drama between England and Spain. There is a galley and escape scene. There are sea battles with sound (which would not be hard updating the silent film.I believe that Raphael Sabatini's version deserves to be remade. If you read Captain Blood, it reads like a film. The book The Seahawk is a great read. Check it out for yourself.

Long thought lost or incomplete the Sea Hawk survives much the way i was seen in 1924. A long costume film about pirates it was directed by the dependable Frank Lloyd and stars Milton Sills. My only complaint with the DVD is that the film has been bathed in re-tint & re-tone. The color at times can be so rich one can't see details in the film. I'd much rather have seen the movie in pure black & white. At times this movie can remind one of Ben-Hur released a year later, especially in the at-sea sequences. As far as the filmmaking, everything is top notch but it is still 1924. That camera will not move but the pictorial capture is beautiful. Lloyd is dependable and like many Hollywood directors he won't give anything more than dependability. Kind of like Harry Beaumont directing Beau Brummel that same year. Lloyd, at least at this time, won't think of panning the camera or a deep soft focus as would King Vidor or Alan Crosland. But what he gives us is exquisite & exciting. I was glad to finally see this film after so many years. dir. Frank Lloyd, First National.

This particular adaption of Rafael Sabatini's swashbuckling novel remains faithful to the original story. For those of us who are fans of the Errol Flynn version of The Sea Hawk and I consider it his best film, it has no resemblance to this silent film whatsoever.In a way that's good because both versions can truly stand on their own merits. Milton Sills is the lead in this version, playing Sir Oliver Tressilian, prosperous landowner in Cornwall. He's looking to wed Enid Bennett who is the daughter of an adjacent estate, but Sills has two problems, her brother Wallace McDonald who doesn't think Sills's family is good enough and Sills's half brother Lloyd Hughes who wants Bennett for himself.After this The Sea Hawk becomes a mixed version of The Master of Ballantrae and Ben-Hur. Sills is framed for McDonald's murder and captured by pirates who sell him to the Spaniards as a galley slave and then he gets rescued by the Moors.When Sills gets rescued by the Moors it's his good fortune that the Pasha of Algiers takes a liking to him and he becomes their top pirate with the fearsome name of Sakr El-Bahr, The Sea Hawk. The rest of the film follows a similar path of Sabatini's other work Captain Blood.Warner Brothers when they remade The Sea Hawk though they didn't use the story certainly did retain several of the battle scenes which the viewer will immediately recognize. This version is every bit as grand and grandiose as the better known sound film. Sills and Bennett do indeed remind one of Errol Flynn and Brenda Marshall. And Sills in treading on territory that Douglas Fairbanks staked out delivers a fine performance, though without the flair for dramatics that Fairbanks had.I'm definitely glad this silent classic is not lost.

As swashbuckling a pirate movie as you can imagine, spanning 3 continents, as many cultures and 2 religions, it is also a charming historical piece. I won't be discussing the entire plot of the movie, just touching on a few things.Though we often train ourselves to think that our forbears were stuffy and conservative while we are open-minded and liberal, this film, as so many silent films do, shows us differently. There are open statements about the falseness of Christianity *as practiced by the Christians as depicted in this movie*, and Islam is shown as a valid and equal alternative - you certainly wouldn't see any of that today! And it is the portrayal of Islam in the movie that prompted me to write, if only as a segment on a larger theme: historical accuracy. I'm not sure which was more interesting, the things they got right or those they got wrong.I was amazed to see how very realistic the costumes looked - one of the men even looked as though taken out of a portrait of the Earl of Leicester (Queen Elizabeth's "boyfriend") in old age, right down to the dark streak in the middle of his rather oval beard. I'm not used to silent movies getting it right, costume-wise. But my "faith" was restored at the first sight of the heroine. She was laughably dressed in a hodge-podge of Tudor, Elizabethan and 20's shaped clothes. It's only her beauty that keeps you (okay, maybe just me) from laughing outright. Though her outfits do improve somewhat, they never reach anywhere near the accuracy of the men's, nor do any of the women's. Oh well; they're costumed enough so you get the general feel of what they are supposed to portray; I suppose I shouldn't try to demand more! I am not nearly as much of an expert on period Arabian clothes, but I do believe they got the armor (the helmets, for sure) correct. They certainly looked like what most people expect - sometimes a director has to go for that. But when it came to Islam, and the customs of the surrounding culture, they were either amazingly accurate - like the marriage by declaration, and a married woman having to be veiled - or hysterically wrong. For instance, a young villain is said to be "harem-born & woman raised". It was silly to mention the first part - all babies are born where their mothers are - but the latter part would never have happened: boys were taken from their mothers by around age 7, especially boys of a ruling family; they would need to be trained in the arts of war and leadership. Then there was the amazingly convenient bit about how "Muslim law demands the captives be sold in the market place." Oh sure, tell us anything, what do we know? And the name "Fenzileh"?? Who comes up with these things? Same guy who came up with "Allahkibollah!" as an exclamation, I guess! :-) But I must stress that these errors are minor, and do not in any way detract from the movie as a whole. If anything, they add a bit of comic relief - if not as superb as that delivered by Wallace Beery, who amply demonstrates here how he came to be a lasting fixture in Hollywood. He is a stand out among the more usual posturing/gesturing done by most of the other players - none of whom can be truly faulted. I am sure that had not Milton Sills died so tragically young(ish), he would have been a major star for years to come.