My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn

I have a soft spot for this movie, if for nothing else it was filmed in the eighties and the subject is Errol Flynn, one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history. Whenever I think of Flynn I think of that line in "My Favorite Year" where the character Alan Swann says: "I'm not an actor, I'm a star!". Of course the character is a take off on Flynn, who did indeed show on a similar show, see the movie if your a Flynn Fan.

But unfortunately, this film is pretty badly done. It's not the actors fault, one can see some effort on their part, though Barbara Hershey is abysmal as Errol's wife. The flick needed far more money, to make the scenes in the thirties and forties believable, and the director seemed to settle for first or second takes, because a lot of the scenes were pretty dreadful.

The problem with the movie is that it failed to capture the true lust for life that Errol Flynn obviously had--anyone who's read the book, the first tell all by a major star, can't help but be disappointed. Perhaps someday some quick witted director will try again, we can only hope. Flynn is the one actor who can truly say that his private life was more interesting than his life on screen.

Perhaps the most egregious sin of this effort was the fact that they sliced off two of the more interesting parts of Flynn's life--the first and the last: It makes no mention of his real life swashbuckling days in tasmania and New Guinea and on the waning part of his life, they leave off after the late forties, and forget a major part of his life. He died, after all, at only fifty. There are so many stories they didn't tell--and though time is a constraint, of course, they pumped up parts of the story that they basically invented. It really is too bad, this man's life is worthy of a bio film far more serious than this one. But one has to love this, if one is a fan of Flynn, simply because it is about him. And perhaps that's enough on one level. But the true love of life, and wickedness, and intensity, needs a better movie. Flynn is a complicated character--though very lovable in his ways, he was also someone who made other people unhappy because of his selfishness.

But altogether, this movie isn't worthy of the magnitude of this guy's personality, his intense life, and the stories that he has to tell.

The recent documentary "The Adventures of Errol Flynn" is an in-depth look at the Ultimate Hollywood Hero. Bogart,Cagney, Wayne and the like were basically blue collar types in their screen images but Flynn was an aristocrat in his style and manner, the younger son out to carve out his own fiefdom for a sword,thunder and romance analogy that ironically he found himself trapped in. If he hadn't been under contract to Warner Bros. he would've of been perfect in the Cary Grant role in Suspicion: the good looking charmer whose 1000 watt smile blinds one to the fact that he's a predator. And he could've starred with his best leading ladies sister Joan Fontaine. That was Flynn's trouble he was the Ultimate Screen Hero until his own habits and bad timing caught up with him. Grant and Flynn in a way are similar but Flynn was the more macho of the two;it is possible to see Grant as Captain Blood but Flynn in The Philadelphia Story Mr. Blanding Builds his Dream House,or Monkey Business,or Operation Petticoat would've turned those roles on their collective ears because he's too damn sure on his feet and the sexual tension he would've brought naturally would've made the story lines wobbly. But this wobbly biography is just a plasticized view of Flynn and his era. There are times when I half expected a laugh track or an audience to go "Ahhh" at some point. It doesn't go deeply into Flynn's life just the screen magazine view. It also doesn't delve into his struggle to be considered more than a derring-doer. Like the cleaned up biographies of Lon Chaney( the father,not the Wolfman,or Lenny"Of Mice and Men) and Buster Keaton done in the '50's this is just a time killing piece of fluff

Errol Flynn shows up in Hollywood with a $125/week contract and already the women are swooning. He plays a sweaty corpse for Michael Curtiz, is cast as Captain Blood because Robert Donat wants 50,000 pounds and to shoot it in Spain, and he's off and running.

And drinking. And wenching. Duncan Regehr plays Flynn in a light sepia wash in this TV-movie adaptation of Flynn's memoirs. It certainly lives up to the second half of its title, portraying a Flynn as a fellow who never thinks further ahead than the length of time to finish the drink in his hand. There's a succession of skilled actors and actresses playing people they look nothing like. Hal Linden is positively clownish as Jack L. Warner, Barbara Hershey does assume a French accent for her part of Lily Damita, Flynn's first wife, and so forth. But it soon grows tiresome to watch the leap up the ladder of success, and then the subsequent crash, which was nowhere as disastrous as the movie implies.

Flynn certainly lived a roistering, incoherent life. But a TV movie, no matter its 143-minute length is not a place to tell a story that should be R-rated.

If you read Errol Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, you will see that this film is full of poetic licence. Not that that makes much of a difference, because Errol Flynn was pretty generous with poetic licence in the autobiography anyway. No need to worry about spoilers, since there is nothing there to spoil.

To me it would seem more sensible to use the story about a fictitious Hollywood actor; then you could go out and find a better actor than Duncan Regehr to play him, and you wouldn't have to worry about the audience saying things like: "But he didn't have a moustache in Captain Blood." Another failing of this film is that it shows Flynn as a two-dimensional character. Flynn was an intelligent man, well educated, well read. This film only concentrates on his funster image.

Regehr is a disaster. The rest of the cast struggle with their scripts. Hal Linden is OK as Warner, and Barbara Hershey makes a believable Damita, although Lili Damita herself did not think so.

The best thing to do with this film is to forget about it and let it gently slip away to oblivion. So what I am writing this for, I can't imagine.

Like most biopics, this one concentrates only on a part of the subject's life, while all the essentials are left out, that is first of all his stormy and adventurous youth, before he was cast in the first film version of the Bounty epic (the Australian "In the Wake of the Bounty", 1933, where he played Fletcher Christian), while "Captain Blood", which this films begins with, was his eigth film. It then reveals his life in Hollywood, exploiting fully his first marriage with all its turns and complications, to end with the death of his two best friends, the stunt man Billy Welch and John Barrymore, and his trial for rape, which definitely checked his career, whereupon he ceased to be a living legend to just become a legend. He was then at the age of 33, a crucial age in many career shifits, and he would probably himself have said about the rest of his life, "the less said about it, the better", but he wrote his biography just before he died, and it is a masterpiece of film literature, very enjoyable and interesting, just like David Niven's autobiographies later on. "My Wicked Wicked Ways" is actually most remarkable among autobiographies for its clear detachment of the writer to himself - it's like a confession, where he reveals all his wicked ways in an apologetic way, which only makes him the more human and likeable. The film which thus only comprises nine years of his life, less than a fifth, is very well made though and of almost as great interest as the book, especially for Duncan Regehr's performance, who succeeds in identifying with Flynn and showing great likeness - he was also 33 when it was made. The portrait of John Barrymore is equally convincing and also gripping, while only Olivia de Havilland is less convincing - she died recently at 103. His one son Sean from his first marriage died in the Vietnam war 1970 (in Cambodia) and his body was never found, but also he had a son called Sean. When Flynn died in Vancouver at 50, his coroner said his body was like that of a 85 year old man and was puzzled by the state of his liver, stating, that "with such a liver he should have been dead ten years ago". In brief, the film is higly recommended and worth watching especially for anyone interested in life in Hollywood in its golden age of the 30s until the war.