The Sea Hawk is a 1940 American adventure film from Warner Bros. that stars Errol Flynn as an English privateer who defends his nation's interests on the eve of the launch of the Spanish Armada.

King Philip II of Spain declares his intention to destroy England as a first step to world conquest, eager to make his empire reach from Northern Europe to China and India.

The "Sea Hawks", a group of English privateers who raid Spanish merchant shipping, appear before the queen, who scolds them (at least publicly) for their activities and for endangering the peace with Spain.

Captain Thorpe proposes in private a plan to seize a Spanish treasure fleet coming back from Spain's colonies in the Americas.

Adaptations of the novel were written by Richard Neville and Delmer Daves before Seton I. Miller wrote a basically new story titled Beggars of the Sea based on Sir Francis Drake.

A complete re-recording was issued in 2007 by the Naxos label, recorded with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Chorus led by William T. Stromberg [it] and reconstructed by John W. Morgan [it].

[9] Although The Sea Hawk was primarily an adventure film and a period piece about Elizabethan England's struggles with Spain, it was also intended to help build British morale during World War II and to influence the American public into having a more pro-British outlook.

King Philip of Spain was presented as an allegorical Hitler,[10] and the queen's speech at the close of the film was meant to inspire the British audience, which was already in the grip of the war.

Suggestions that it was the duty of all free men to defend liberty, and that the world did not belong to any one man (an obvious reference to Hitler's conquest of much of Europe), were intended to be rousing.

(The same theme had been visited in Alexander Korda's film Fire Over England, released three years earlier, before World War II started).

[11] Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, Of course, [the film] is all historically cockeyed, and the amazing exploits of Mr. Flynn, accomplished by him in the most casual and expressionless manner, are quite as incredible as the adventures of Dick Tracy.

But Flora Robson makes an interesting Queen Elizabeth, Claude Rains and Henry Daniell play a couple of villainous conspirators handsomely, there is a lot of brocaded scenery and rich Elizabethan costumes and, of course, there is Brenda Marshall to shed a bit of romantic light.

It cost $1,700,000, exhibits Errol Flynn and 3,000 other cinemactors performing every imaginable feat of spectacular derring-do, and lasts two hours and seven minutes...Produced by Warner's Hal Wallis with a splendor that would set parsimonious Queen Bess's teeth on edge, constructed of the most tried-&-true cinema materials available, The Sea Hawk is a handsome, shipshape picture.

For Hungarian Director Michael Curtiz, who took Flynn from bit-player ranks to make Captain Blood and has made nine pictures with him since, it should prove a high point in their profitable relationship.