Last Sunday morning I stumbled upon Footsteps in the Dark playing on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />TCM and hadn’t seen it in decades. The production files reveal how into this concept Flynn was, and he shows it onscreen too. He’s having a heck of a time, playing it for all he’s worth, because he wanted to break out of the action stereotype and become a younger, better-looking William Powell. In Footsteps in the Dark, Flynn portrays Francis Warren, an investment counselor by day and the mysterious, best-selling mystery writer F.X. Pettyjohn by night. Pettyjohn becomes involved in a murder case that the cops can’t solve. His poor wife Rita has no notion what her husband is up to, and begins to suspect the worst—that he’s fooling around. Rita’s mother is certain that’s what’s going on because of past indiscretions by her late husband. This leads to a good deal of sly adult humor that manages to slide by the Hays Office. All this comes off as great fun in the Thin Man vein, with Flynn unencumbered by the tights and the sword and the horses and just seeming to enjoy himself. It was no coincidence that his health broke down on the more strenuous action pictures, but he sailed through this one; this was a walk in the park following one tough production after another, every one pressure-packed for a star who had no love of hard work and was forced to produce six days a week, and through long hours at that.
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As Rita Warren, Brenda Marshall doesn’t have a lot more to do than react to the proceedings, which suits her much better than playing a heroine, as she had done in The Sea Hawk a year earlier. She just wasn’t soft or skillful enough to pull off the heroine role. There was a hardness to Marshall, and some on the soundstage would say a bitchiness to her, that couldn’t work in a romantic period piece but was in sync with a modern, harried society housewife.
The A-production values gave Flynn lots of support from a remarkable, veteran group of character performers, including Ralph Bellamy, Alan Hale, Lucille Watson, Allen Jenkins, William Frawley, Roscoe Karns, and Lee Patrick, all of them seeming to have as much fun as the star. Why was this agreeable little picture a turning point for Flynn? Because it went nowhere. At fade out Rita has caught on to the fact that her husband is about to join the cops to work on another murder case, and there is dialogue to the effect that they are embarking on a grand adventure together, but there wasn’t enough return to justify coming back for a sequel. Jack Warner was a pragmatic man, and Flynn only worked in costume, whether it was a Western getup or a 16th century rig or a Navy uniform. The numbers were always iffy on his modern titles. Case in point: Four’s a Crowd, which paired Flynn with Olivia de Havilland, netted only $15,000, even though it was quite a modest production in terms of cost. It tanked overseas and became the lowest-grossing picture starring Flynn and de Havilland of the eight they made together because the public identified with Flynn the hero, not Flynn the fellow in the fedora and bow tie.
Being forced into action pictures after Footsteps in the Dark doomed Flynn. It deepened his cynicism and endangered his health—as proven by his hospitalization during summer 1941 production of the Manassas scenes in They Died with Their Boots On, and the in-the-ring collapse during Gentleman Jim the next year. Oh, it’s probably true that if there had been a Footsteps series, he would have continued to display his self-destructive, wicked tendencies, and he probably still would have gotten fingered for statutory rape. Or would he? Maybe he would have taken his career more seriously if he had felt a personal investment in his pictures and not merely shown up for work to draw his paychecks to pay for his Mulholland mansion and his yachts. That became his M.O.—not caring about the parts he was given and just looking for the paycheck. And in some cases drawing paychecks for pictures not yet made. He loved to do that. Maybe he would have taken another path if his mystery series had panned out, but we’ll never know now. Which is where I came in, looking at Footsteps in the Dark on a Sunday morning and seeing a tidy little Warner Brothers mystery that could have been the start of something big but ended up as nothing more than a pre-war one-off that would never be re-released; a curio collecting dust on the shelves of the vault; and a source of personal pain for its star, discontented and disillusioned Errol Flynn.
— Robert Matzen
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