Flynn: A Touch of Color in a Prosaic World
Posted by moirafinne June 24, 2009/ MovieMorlocks.com - TCM
“Maybe all that I am in this world and all that I have been and done comes down to nothing more than being a touch of color in a prosaic world. Even that is something.” ~ Errol Flynn, writing in My Wicked,
Well, no. It can’t be possible. Errol Flynn at 100 is unimaginable. Yet, as of Saturday, June 20th, the great swashbuckler of the sound era passed the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909 in
In his fifty years on earth, Flynn the wandering movie star who sailed the seven seas on screen and off, visited civil wars and cannibals, became a thief of hearts and diamonds, fathered four children in three marriages, seemed determined to set out in a fatalistic nose dive toward oblivion for much of his adult life. He lived as much as a dozen other men, even if half of his lively exaggerations in his memoirs are true. He left those of us who only knew him in movies breathless with the exuberance and zest he showed in his many dashing roles, such as Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940). In a few, such as The Dawn Patrol (1938), Edge of Darkness (1943), and the little known Uncertain Glory (1944), he impressed with his too often hidden, introspective side, (something that sings out from some of his writing and accounts of the rather quiet father recalled by his children, of whom, Rory and Deidre Flynn are still living).
He brought a poignant, tattered gallantry and even some dignity to flawed films such as The Sun Also Rises (1957), The Roots of Heaven (1957) and Too Much, Too Soon (1958), after he’d become a shadow of his former athletic self. The rollicking boy was gone for good, but something a bit darker and occasionally deeper was left in his place. Despite the abuse that showed on his face, there seemed to be an actor looking for some self-respect too. That hardworking, caring artist can occasionally be glimpsed inside the falling movie star and world-class roisterer. This is especially clear when he had a chance to play his friend, mentor and boon companion in the dissipation sweepstakes, John Barrymore, in Too Much, Too Soon, based on the tragic Diana Barrymore’s scandalous memoir. When he came closest to creating a memorable Hemingway character etched in alcohol on screen, playing Mike Campbell quite brilliantly in an misbegotten version of The Sun Also Rises, he was said to have been a serious candidate for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Despite good critical notices and praise from his peers in private, no prestigious public award was ever to come his way.
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Errol Flynn was often better than he would admit to himself, especially in his earlier movies. Feeling miscast in many films, (particularly Westerns, in which his accent and posh manner is continuously being explained away as Irish or Australian). The miscasting and typecasting made him feel trapped, but he believed that he could not get out of his contract, claiming that “this was impossible to point out to producers when the pictures were so highly successful. It was most frustrating, it stopped my trying to act…I walked through my roles…My heart wasn’t in it, only my limbs.”
Often at odds with his most effective director, Michael Curtiz, who guided him through such blockbusters as Robin Hood and eleven other films, (a relationship that may have been complicated by the fact that Flynn’s first wife, actress Lili Damita, was also an ex-wife of the director Michael Curtiz), Flynn sought to forge a stronger creative alliance with a more compatible Raoul Walsh, with whom he made They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and Gentleman Jim (1942), and seven other movies.
Despite his own disparagement of his roles, he is also one of the reasons why classic movies still speak to people to this day. Some of us can trace our love for movies directly to him and his movies.
“Living I have done, enormously, like a gourmand eating the world, and I don’t suppose it is egotism, but only fact, to suggest that few others alive in the present century have taken into their maw more of the world than I. On the sea, beneath it, in the air, and in all the parts of most of the lands, I have gone a-hunting n quest neither of fame nor of fortune, but the vindication of the act of living.” ~ Flynn, laying it on a bit thick in My Wicked,
Making just over 60 films and television appearances, the thought of of him brings alive memories of Flynn as the personification of the recklessness of youth, boyish mischief, the spirit of adventure and the simple, unalloyed joy in breathing. Thank goodness it was captured on film for a time, even though it couldn’t possibly last within one gifted person for very long on earth. Acting may have been his best known professional activity, but a sailor, a man with a serious interest in marine biology (his father was a very well known professor), he also had revolutionary sympathies and ambitions as a journalist, plantation owner and hotelier, as well as a film producer. He found, unfortunately, that he was only well paid for the acting.
Errol Flynn’s Tasmanian birthplace of Hobart in Australia had the good sense to honor their most famous former resident in the days leading up to what would have been his hundredth birthday. Whether he liked it or not, the community that he left at age 18–where he was already well known as a sketchy character from a well known family, celebrated his life and career with a ten day festival.
The Errol Flynn Centenary celebration came after many years when the community (and Flynn) seemed to express mixed feelings about their native son. Though the man looked back on himself as “a devil in boy’s clothing” in the period when he lived there, the events during the festival featured memorabilia being presented at a local museum by Rory Flynn, the unveiling of a plaque at the State Theater where Errol watched silent films as a boy, and a galaxy of his movies on display in the local movie house.
Most of these were corkers like those mentioned earlier in this piece, reflecting a love of colorful “Olde Englande” and a lingering anglophilia for the Empire in status-mad
Btw, some biographies imply that the publicity department at Warner Brothers was responsible for claiming Irish birth for Flynn. Other sources indicate that, for all his iconoclastic personal history, as an ambitious young actor trying to make a rapid transition from a colonial subject to an actor in British repertory and then to a place in the
Somewhere, I hope that Errol Flynn might be chuckling a bit. Two other events also took place during the festival week , both of which I suspect might have appealed to the actor, who was also a great animal lover. One was the naming of a small creature who is one of an endangered species, an actual Tasmanian Devil at
The other incident that occurred at the same festival was one that I would like to think that Flynn might find a bit funny. One of the modest honors accorded to one of
<!--[endif]-->In 2003, according to news reports in the Australian media, the council named a dog park Errol Flynn Reserve. The state, however, has declined to follow through, in part because some residents still cannot overlook
In Errol Flynn’s well-written, if occasionally far-fetched books, the boyish fictionalized adventure Beam Ends, his 1937 picaresque novel chronicling a fictionalized account of his early adventures in the South Seas, and My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a memoir he wrote mostly for money just before his end in 1959, I was impressed with his surprisingly vivid prose. Both books are filled with the exuberant voice of a man who kept his constant, wearying quest for experience of all types alive as long as he could, though self-disgust and world-weariness come through near the end of the latter book. In that, he describes one particular encounter, not with a nubile young woman, but with a fan confined to a wheelchair. Stopping him as he left a theater, Flynn was deeply embarrased that she wanted to tell him how much happiness he had given her. “I walked off thinking, Maybe I haven’t been such a loss after all. Anybody who can bring a few moments of happiness to another human life certainly can’t be wasting his time in an otherwise fear-ridden and very often drab world. Maybe it hasn’t all been so futile. Maybe it wasn’t all a waste.”
The lithe, jaunty figure who can be seen in an uncharacteristic moment singing and dancing in the wartime musical, Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) is inconceivable as one who might ever be bowed with age. And, of course, thanks to the fact that the man had almost every gift but self-restraint and longevity, he wore himself out by fifty, a very old fifty. When his inevitable early death came at a time when he was still trying “to find himself”. Thank goodness for us that the movies captured something. Here is a moment, with Flynn answering some of those unspoken questions we all might ask as he sings the refrain “I can see the question in your eyes, I can see the twitching of your ears. Now it’s not to be repeated, but gentlemen be seated, and I’ll tell you where I’ve been for all these years…I was out on the blue Pacific…”