Most critics like Captain Blood, and the praise clusters around Errol Flynn. Six of the seven reviews call the film a success, and nearly all of them credit Flynn’s first leading role for it: his swagger, his physicality, his ease with a joke. The notices from 1935 predict it will make stars of Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and the later ones, writing with hindsight, agree that it did and single out the heat between the two of them. Michael Curtiz’s direction and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s symphonic score come up repeatedly as the other reasons the film still plays.
The reservations are about pace and padding. Several critics find it talky, with too much exposition and supporting characters sketched rather than drawn, and one recent review admits it feels long and creaky now. The spread is narrow apart from a single outlier: The New Yorker, reviewing on release, finds it overdressed and thinks Flynn too gentle for the Caribbean brutalities.