Thu 27 May 2010
ERROL FLYNN —
â— Showdown. Sheridan House, US, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints include: Dell # 351, 1949; Pocket Cardinal, 1960.
It’s been a pretty mixed bag of reading/watching recently, starting with two books by Errol Flynn, Beam Ends (1937) and Showdown (1946) both quite well done and easily enjoyable.
Beam Ends tells the autobiographical tale of a voyage up the coast of Australia from Doney to New Guinea in a ship manifestly unsuited to the task. Flynn was in his early 20s when he launched this bit of adolescent insanity, and in his early 30s when he wrote of it — older but hardly wiser, and the book is suffused with that youthful energy that only comes once in life; somehow we never really appreciate being young and foolish till we get to be old and stupid.
Flynn’s prose is like his acting: hardly deep and not really skillful, but gracefully done and easy on the eyes.
Pity, then, that it took him almost ten years to put out his only other book-length effort (I’m not counting the ghost-written posthumous autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways) a slight novel called Showdown.
But a fun one. Cast almost entirely with stock characters, Showdown tells of a footloose Irish sailor and his run-ins with missionaries, head-hunters, spies and movie stars in the South Seas.
A wild tale, acted out by a cast of characters no deeper than the thickness of pulp-paper, but fast-moving, suspenseful and quite readable. Turning the last page, I again got the feeling one gets from Errol Flynn’s movies: there’s talent here that’s fun to watch, but with a little more work it could have been something really fine.
May 27th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Flynn’s blessing, and his curse, was that easy charm and his looks. I’ve read both these and they read as if you were sitting in a bar being told the tale by Flynn over a good bottle of Scotch — which is no small talent for a writer to possess.
A handful of actors proved to be skillful writers — Sterling Hayden, Dirk Bogarde, and David Niven all proved to be much the same on the printed page as on the big and small screen. All three wrote good non-fiction and novels.
But its fun to read Flynn, and while reading the books I couldn’t help thinking of George Sanders MEMOIRS OF A CAD where he complains that his yacht was anchored next to Flynn’s SIROCCO and his crew kept deserting and joining Flynn’s crew — and Sanders real complaint was as skipper he couldn’t go with them.
Reading these two you feel you at least have had a chance to spend a little time with a really interesting person.
May 28th, 2010 at 10:59 am
I mentioned in a comment on a recent post that I wasn’t a big fan of Barbara Stanwyck when I was younger, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that you can’t go wrong with any movie that she was in.
The same is true of Errol Flynn, though in a different way. I certainly enjoyed all of his movies when I was a kid, but that was far more because of the type of movie he was in (or the ones I watched) rather than the fact that it was he who was in them.
I hope that makes sense.
But as I watch them now, and I’ve been buying box sets of the films he was in like crazy, I see that it was his performances that made those westerns or war and pirate movies so memorable. If he hadn’t been in them, I wouldn’t have remembered them at all, except in the most generic sense.
— Steve
May 28th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Richard Dreyfuss (who it turns out is a huge Flynn fan) had a good comment on Errol Flynn as an actor, pointing out that any actor but Flynn could never have pulled off those rousing speeches in CAPTAIN BLOOD, ADV. OF ROBIN HOOD, and THE SEA HAWK. He was made for those roles.
My single favorite Flynn line is from THE ADV. of DON JUAN when he tells Alan Hale: “There is a little bit of Don Juan in every man. Isn’t natural there should be more in me?”
If you want to see Flynn in a different light FOUR’S A CROWD is a good screwball comedy, FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK features him as an amateur detective in a Thin Man style mystery, and THE SUN ALSO RISES, ROOTS OF HEAVEN, and TOO MUCH TOO SOON all feature fine performances late in his career. He plays John Barrymore in the last film and has a fine Shakespearian speech in one scene just before he drunkenly leaps off a yacht. He’s easily the best thing in SUN and ROOTS, the latter as a coward who redeems himself in a quixotic quest to save the African elephant.
Of his later swashbucklers AGAINST ALL ODDS, KIM, and THE WARRIOR are all good. And while it isn’t really a good film, he plays a private eye in THE BIG BOODLE based on Robert Sylvester’s novel.
Next time it is on see the WW II USO film THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS with Eddie Cantor and Dennis Morgan featuring musical numbers by Flynn singing “That’s What You Jolly Well Get” and Bette Davis singing “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” You may never look at either of them the same again.
Flynn also did a great guest spot as a bum in a Freddie the Freeloader segment of Red Skelton’s series.
And frankly I even like his westerns, from the elaborate productions of DODGE CITY and VIRGINIA CITY to the Alan Lemay scripted SAN ANTONIO to the darker MONTANA, SILVER RIVER, and the underrated ROCKY MOUNTAIN, or as Flynn dubbed himself, ‘the million dollar Roy Rogers.”
I was always a big fan, but in later years I started to notice that he was much better than he gets credit for. GENTLEMAN JIM is a good example of a film that shows not only his charm, but much better acting skills than we tend to associate him with.
And since Stanwcyk is mentioned above, his teaming with her isn’t a bad little suspense/gothic film, CRY WOLF with Richard Basehart.
June 1st, 2010 at 6:20 am
I’m a big big fan of Flynn’s later films, though most of them could be charitably described as deplorable. There’s something genuinely poignant in seeing him try to muster up the old swashbuckling charm one more time… like the aging gunfighters in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. It’s touching to watch and just a shame the films (THE BIG BOODLE, CUBAN REBEL GIRLS, MARA-MARU etc) are so dull.
June 2nd, 2010 at 7:46 pm
[…] the two Errol Flynn books [reviewed here ], I moved on then to a sub-sub-genre known to cineastes as “Re-makes of Old Victor Mature […]
March 31st, 2015 at 9:30 pm
Dan, go easy on “Mara Maru”. Like Richard Dreyfess said, only Flynn could pull it off.