EXTRACTS: Pirates! Illustrators Special Edition © 2020 The Book Palace (128 PAGES in Full edition)

121 Captain Blood Movie Poster (1935) There has been a debate regarding who really did this half-sheet poster for the 1935 film starring Errol Flynn as Rafael Sabatini’s immortal swashbuckling pirate hero ‘Captain Blood’. The film, as the book, concerns a doctor wrongly accused of having participated in the Monmouth Rebellion and is enslaved for it. But Doctor Blood and his fellow prisoners escape their cruel island imprisonment and become pirates in the West Indies. The movie was distributed by Warner Bros and became a huge hit when released in 1935. Although there were many different posters done for the film, the one in question here is a half- sheet poster attributed to Alex Raymond. It seemed pretty logical that he was chosen to do the poster, as the film was produced by Cosmopolitan Productions, a film company that newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst created primarily as vehicle for actress (and lover) Marion Davies. Hearst was also head of King Features Syndicate, where Alex Raymond worked on the Sunday page comic strip ‘Flash Gordon’. So it would only be natural for Hearst to ask his star artist to do the poster for his upcoming production of the Errol Flynn film. Furthermore, when an employee at Warner, the distributor, was asked some years later who had done that unsigned poster, he said, “the guy who drew the Flash Gordon strip.” Need we say more? Now, here is where things get complicated. Raymond was a huge fan of Errol Flynn, yet members of his family deny he ever did any drawings of Flynn, let alone a poster for any of his films. “Alex was a big fan of Errol Flynn. Do you think that if he had ever done anything related to him, he wouldn’t have told us?” a family member said. So, who was this mysterious artist that drew this poster, in a style very reminiscent of Raymond’s? Well, look no further than the person who replaced him for the Flash Gordon strip when Raymond was enlisted, Austin Briggs. In an interview for the Saturday Evening Post many years later, Briggs said that he had actually done various movie posters. Could he have been the artist behind this one? You decide. Images courtesy of Heritage Auctions