A Special Centenary – Errol Flynn

 

Two legends - you can bet your bottom franc that isn't lemonade in that glass

by Allan Fish

It had been my intention to commemorate numerous centenaries and anniversaries on WitD over the last months, yet time did not permit it.  The centenaries of Burgess Meredith, Dana Andrews, Joseph L.Mankiewicz and James Mason.  I should perhaps mention that of Marcel Carné which falls on 18th August coming.  It’s Mason I regret not paying tribute to, however, in that he was of similar stock, a Northerner, a Yorkshireman from Huddersfield (South Yorkshire, but Yorkshire nonetheless), who indeed spent a few years at school on the shores of Lake Windermere not 10 miles from where I write.  James, above all, if you’re listening, I apologise for the oversight.

This morning, however (well actually as I write the anniversary is coming to an end), is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the son of a Tasmanian University professor, Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn.  I remember Leslie Halliwell entering him rightly in the Hall of Fame for “living several lives in half of one and almost getting away with it.”  Indeed, he only made it halfway to his centenary, dying at the age of 50 but, as the coroner observed, with the body of a man twenty years older.  Through all the charges of statutory rape (rightly dismissed), being a Nazi sympathiser (absolute rubbish!), all the abuses to his body – drink, drugs, women, anything else you care to name, it was perhaps a miracle that he lived even to see 50. 

He’s not got a reputation for being much of an actor, and yet can one see anyone else in the roles he evinced so well?  Among swashbucklers he was supreme.  Old Doug Fairbanks Snr may have had more energy, more death-defying stunts, while Ty Power was more polished with a sword, and yet Flynn always wins the polls on the subject, and rightly so.  Yet how many swashbucklers did he actually make?  Despite the reputation, it’s not as many as you might think.  When he left Warners in 1949, he’d only brandished a sword in five films.  A few more would follow as he did work around other studios and countries to finance his other passions, but he was barely in a fit state to hold the sword much of the time, let alone fight with one. 

He’d become a star almost by chance.  The role of Peter Blood, the surgeon who inadvertently becomes a pirate when sent unjustly to the West Indies for supporting the Jacobite rebellion had, like many other roles, been offered to Robert Donat.  Donat had only made one film in Hollywood, a classic swashbuckler of his own, The Count of Monte Cristo, but his eventually terminal asthma simply couldn’t allow him to spend long periods in the sun of California.  Flynn was chosen, partly because he was a cheap option, and when one looks at the production of Blood, though it seems opulent, there’s not actually much budget shown on screen when it comes down to it.  It made Flynn a star overnight, and his duel to the death with Basil Rathbone set Basil on a path to playing numerous period villains for years to come.  Accompanied as if from Flynn’s own soul by the Boys Own music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Flynn set sail to glory and not a little infamy. 

The Charge of the Light Brigade cemented his stardom, and though he only appears halfway in, he got top billin for The Prince and the Pauper, not really a swashbuckler, but at least an opportunity to run someone through with a sword (ironically Alan Hale, a regular cohort of Flynn in other films).  It was the following year that screen immortality beckoned, however, taking the role of the legendary outlaw in The Adventures of Robin Hood, the first fully formed masterpiece in Technicolor, the greatest swashbukling adventure of all time.  Fairbanks’ silent version was a classic in itself, with its Merry Men launching themselves from tree to wall to battlements like Jonathan Edwards doing an impression of the Lost Boys, and Korngold’s music would prove to be the nearest the screen ever got to operatic accompaniment.  It was his best film and his trademark role. 

The same year, however, came the first exhibit for the defence against charges of not being able to act; The Dawn Patrol.  Edmund Goulding had a reputation for making seeming non-actors find their feet – look at Ty Power in Nightmare Alley a decade down the line – and Flynn perfectly captured the spirit of Courtney, the fatalistic leader of ‘A’ Flight above the trenches and barren desert of No Man’s Land.  That his friend and drinking partner David Niven was on set was obviously a help – their chemistry makes one mourn they never appeared together afterwards – but his performance is filled with a sense of self-loathing, of despair, mixed with a “who cares about tomorrow?” attitude exemplified in the drinking song beginning “stand by your glasses” and ends with the immortal line “hurrah for the next man who dies.”  Yet notice the chemistry between Flynn and Rathbone, here in a rare sympathetic role aside from the detective from Baker Street.  Both are at their very best. 

He got away with his best western Dodge City, but wasn’t right for Essex in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and the film was in every respect, a bit of a mess, but returned to familiar ground with The Sea Hawk, another classic swashbuckler, another fantastic hit.  The only surprising things being that regular co-star Olivia de Havilland was replaced by the somewhat insipid Brenda Marshall and that Rathbone was usurped by Henry Daniell (still relishable) as the one to be done in in the fateful final duel. 

Another great role followed, much underrated as Custer in They Died with Their Boots On, especially poignant as he says goodbye to de Havilland in what would prove the last pairing for the couple.  Arguably his best role at Warners then came in the form of 2nd World Heavyweight Champion James J Corbett in Gentleman Jim.  It’s a rather whitewashed biopic, but Flynn – though no heavyweight by any means – is perfect, and amongst all the jokey Irish baloney, there’s a magnificent scene towards the end centring around the handing over of a belt with Ward Bond that is arguably the best thing either Bond or Flynn ever did on screen. 

Sadly, however, the need for wartime propaganda resulted in a string of entertaining but disposable pieces – Desperate Journey, Edge of Darkness, etc – culminating in what was still one of the best platoon in peril war films of the period, Objective Burma!  OK, it’s no masterpiece, but Flynn put a lot into the part, and when it was decried in Britain for making what was, to all intents and purposes, a British campaign out to be one won by the Americans, it hurt him deeply.  For the next three years his dissolution with his profession and contempt and battles with Jack Warner, resulted in the release of mediocrity after mediocrity.  The Adventures of Don Juan aimed to bring him back to the top and, in its self-mocking stance, and with a wonderful Korngold-esque score by Max Steiner, it should have been a bigger success than it was, and Flynn was allowed to go to rivals MGM for a string of largely worthless films at the turn of the 1950s. 

The one exception was That Forsyte Woman, an earlier adaptation of part of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, later immortalided by the BBC.  With Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, it was a stodgy disposable affair, with little of the social insight of the later BBC series.  Flynn was its one saving grace, so magnificent as Soames, so starchy, reserved and faintly sinister, it made one wonder all the more what could have been achieved if he’d actually given himself a chance – or perhaps been given a chance by Jack Warner – more often. 

It would be another decade before he’s get such a chance again, as failure upon failure, including the catastrophic personal and financial debacle of the unfinished William Tell, took its toll on him, as recalled by his friend, the immortal cinematographer Jack Cardiff.  It was his immersion in the role of Mike Campbell, the irretrievable drunk of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, that was enough to have given him an Oscar nomination, had they been able to see it as the uncanny performance it was.  He was equally good the following year as his idol John Barrymore in Too Much Too Soon, returning to Warners for the last time.  Again it was criminally overlooked by awarding bodies who drew scorn on Flynn for his lifestyle and dissolution, and again refused to see a very clever, and deeply layered performance – no mere impersonation – of another man who’d drunk his best years away. 

The end was nigh, and when he died in 1959, it was not greeted with shock so much as with apathy, as if it was as expected as it had been with Bobbie Newton a few years earlier.  Ironically Ty Power, that other swashbuckler and co-star in The Sun Also Rises, had beaten Flynn into the undiscovered country, despite living a relative healthy lifestyle.  When your time is up, it’s up, and Flynn always had the impression of a man who would look Bengt Ekerot’s Death in the face, and, while, admiring his own reflection in the shine on his scythe, offer the cloaked one a drink and, grinning, admit “it’s a fair cop, sport!”

All of which brings one back to a sense of what might have been, and that in turn brings us back to James Mason.  Mason and Flynn never appeared together, and yet when one thinks of Mason, one of the roles one cannot help but recall is his Humbert Humbert, the role that, had the fates been different, might have been Flynn’s.  Kubrick had thought of Flynn in the early days of planning in the late fifties, before he accepted Kirk Douglas’ SOS on Spartacus, and it’s interesting to think what might have been had he turned down the Roman epic and proceeded with Lolita a few years earlier, with Flynn and reportedly Tuesday Weld.  Like Dirk Bogarde in Victim, there would have been a sense of art imitating life, but Flynn would doubtless have relished it, and though Mason was magnificent as Humbert, one cannot help but wonder…  And Flynn’s story is full of what ifs.  I always wondered how the near masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt may have been an actual masterpiece had Flynn played Uncle Charlie.  Joe Cotten was undeninably superb, but one couldn’t really see him as an oily creep who insinuates himself into widows’ affections.  Flynn was born for the role, and he would have brought out even more of the incestuous subtext that even Cotten hinted at.  it would never have happened – he’d never have been loaned by Jack Warner in 1942, but you can dream.

For now, let’s look ahead to next year, and another Robin Hood on the horizon.  Russell Crowe, another antipodean with a reputation for giving good copy to the gossip-mongerers, would seem ideal casting, but Russell is canny and modest enough, in his more personal moments, to know that he’s no Flynn and wouldn’t attempt to be.  He’s more robust, more earthy.  I wish the project success, despite knowing that it will almost certainly never come close to Flynn’s magnum opus.  Let’s raise a glass – you know he’d want us to – to the most devilishly handsome of all Hollywood leading men, who every woman wanted to sleep with and who every man wished he had the courage to be, the Earl of Rochester of his day, Errol Flynn, who’s doubtless in the bar at the big cinema in the sky, regaling Ollie Reed, Richard Harris, Bobbie Newton et al with tales of how he had sex with a starlet against the wall of his dressing room when his father walked on and how he told him “sit down, this won’t take a minute!”  A legend.