How Errol Flynn Became the Golden Age of Cinema’s Most Irresistible Swashbuckler

Unlike today’s angst-ridden superheroes and antiheroes, the swashbucklers of yore just wanted to have fun. That was certainly the attitude expressed by the dashing Errol Flynn, an Australian import who became the go-to sultan of swagger through much of Hollywood’s golden age. His breakthrough film was 1935’s rousing Captain Blood, from future Casablanca director Michael Curtiz, casting Flynn as a noble Irish doctor who becomes an accidental pirate after being wrongly conscripted into slavery in the West Indies.

Once his course is set on the high seas, Blood issues a mission statement that serves as a template for the genre: “We, the undersigned, are men without a country.