Errol Flynn: O Preço da Fama

If you are an Errol Flynn fan you'll see what's missing in this and all the other films that pigeon hole him. I doubt one could be made that would capture his true essence. The guy was wonderful. Full of life. Unusual. Unique individualist. Acting was just another adventure for him. Seems like he did each part using what was within himself to make each character dynamic. Not some static pre-thought out intellectual playing of a part. He was full of life and took it wherever it lead. Most of all, he was not a phoney. This is why he is so hard to capture in a biopic. I'll watch it anyway!

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.

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.

Like most Hollywood bio-pics, this one makes agreeable wallpaper - a more-or-less truthful chronicling of a filmstar's career against an evocative period backdrop, that does not enable great dramatic effects.

The opening words are symptomatic of the limp script: "I was just 26 years old when I arrived on the rugged shores of California...The year was 1935." They should have binned that quite needless footnote and cut straight to "Are you Flynn? We're all waiting for you. The director's mad as hell!", referencing his eternal upsetting of other people's lives, while always able to charm his way through.

Flynn is played by an enthusiastic Duncan Regehr, tall and handsome enough to carry the part, but lacking the aggression and the devilish guile of the original, so for example the fight scenes are embarrassingly artificial, as are the attempts at replicating the drunken carousing. More convincing by far is Hal Linden as studio boss Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers), locked in a constant elbow-game with Flynn over money. And Lee Purcell makes a remarkably lifelike and suitably demure Olivia de Havilland.

Less well-cast is Barbara Hershey as Flynn's French wife Lily Damita, while other figures like Bette Davis and Raoul Walsh have little more than walk-ons. And it gets irritating to hear about "a new bandleader called Benny Goodman" or the mention of Clark Gable winning the part of Rhett Butler.

One early glimpse of Flynn's health problems is significant (in a rather hammy collapse into a chair), as we learn that he is malarial as well as helplessly alcoholic and a chain-smoker, having to be rejected for war service at thirty. It is one irony of his career that his genuine swashbuckling days were long behind him by the time he reached Hollywood, and it was the camera, not Flynn, that had to be quick and nimble enough to create the famous effects.

Finally, they just had to feature the old story of John Barrymore's corpse being left propped up in Flynn's house, to frighten him when he got home from a bender. Proved apocryphal, on investigation.

Duncan Regehr deserves a lot of credit in this role. He has a lot of the same gifts as Errol Flynn - the intelligence, artistic flair, athletic ability, grace, height, charm, convincing romantic heroism and handsome good looks. He did an excellent job. I believe Flynn's daughter actually chose him for this role. He went on to become Zorro in the New World Zorro series on the Family Channel for 4 seasons, and did a superb job. Very few actors have the physical grace, perception and personality to effectively and compellingly portray heroes such as Robin Hood, Zorro, and so forth. Both Flynn and Regehr do. Very few actors could assay the role of Flynn himself. Actually, no one else even comes to mind. Regehr should have gotten an award, at least I can give him 5 stars in this review.