My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn

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.

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

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.

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.

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!