You’re the first to say that that I ever heard, and I can see it on some level. I compared the Wiki articles one for the book and one for the movie and found I agreed with each. Here I offer you a book review from a blog called “booklearned”. Notice how because of the movie he expected a “dime novel melodrama” but was pleasantly surprised when he read the book.
https://booklearned.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/book-review-captain-blood/
This is what I am used to. I have found that people who enjoy the movie are not inclined to take the book seriously. They both “work” in their respective spheres except today people are less inclined to be impressed by such a melodrama as Captain Blood. It was a remake of a silent film, which worked very well in its time, there was a radio adaptation with Erroll Flynn reprising his role, which was very good too.
Have you read any other Sabatini works?
I have read them all and many of them twice or three times.
I have read three Jack Reacher books, meh okay don’ need no more. I read two lawyer “page turners” by Grisham, had enough of that.
Our english teacher at the Christian School used a collection of Sabatinin novels as a reward for the boys in his classes. If you performed better than expected on a test or paper you were granted the privilege of borrowing one of his Sabatinis.
The only one I have read was Captain Blood. I did really enjoy it, and thought it had a bit more depth than the film; but the film really did cover a lot of the plot of the novel and even had some of the dialog. I read the book before I ever saw the film. I liked Flynn in the film (I'm a Flynn fan), even though he did not have black hair as described in the novel. The filmmakers may have thought a 17th century curled hairstyle would have looked too effete in 1935. Still it is remarkable how good Flynn is in his debut in a major Hollywood film. In his next film The Charge of the Light Brigade he is even more self assured than he was as Peter Blood.
At the time I read Captain Blood I also bought a couple of paperbacks of other Blood stories - Captain Blood Returns and The Fortunes of Captain Blood. I never got around to reading them and I believe they are not really sequels, but "other untold previous adventures".
I have never read Scaramouche but have seen the silent film version with Ramon Novarro and the color remake with Stewart Granger. I got the impression that the silent version was a bit more faithful to the novel. Recently I came across a French film known variously as On Guard and Le Bossu (The Hunchback). It appears to have much of the same plot as Scaramouche in which a man seeks revenge on the man who killed his friend. He trains to be a swordsman and at times disguises himself as a hunchback to escape detection. Turns out Le Bossu was written at around the time Dumas was writing his swashbucklers and that Sabatini seems to have "borrowed" some plot elements.