Errol Flynn, man in tights

Like John Wayne, another notable Hollywood non-combatant, Flynn won World War II in his movies, again never looking less than capable than when in uniform. In the propaganda war film Desperate Journey (1942), Flynn plays an Australian airman whose bomber is shot down deep in enemy territory. Flynn’s last line in Desperate Journey, having made an impossible escape from the heart of the Reich, is “Now for Australia and a crack at the Japs”. In Objective, Burma! (1945), the Flynn character does get to fight the Japanese, albeit in the guise of an American paratrooper dropped into the Burmese jungle behind enemy lines. Leading a small group of soldiers, he succeeds in paving the way for a full-scale invasion of Burma.

Throughout the war, the studio continued to maintain the fiction of the rude health and virility of their major star. Suspicious of the real reason for Flynn’s absence from the military, FBI boss J.Edgar Hoover commissioned a secret report which revealed that he had an enlarged heart.

Ultimately the camera does not lie. Indeed rarely, if ever, have the movies tracked with such precision the dissipation of a star so natural, so uninhibited, so artless, and, as it turned out, so vulnerable to the moral and physical diseases associated with celebrity.

Viewed chronologically, Flynn’s film career suggests that movie stardom has nothing to do with acting, and for Flynn the tights soon became more mental than physical. Flynn was in his Hollywood heyday one of the most lusted-after and admired people on earth, but within he soon developed a self-loathing that knew no bounds.

Though Flynn would have never have been permitted to play an outright villain, the studio was happy to exploit his well-deserved notoriety as a roué. In Gentleman Jim, there is one such exploitative scene. After being kissed by Corbett, his girlfriend teases: “Fine way for a gentleman to behave.” He replies: “Oh, darling, that gentleman stuff never fooled you, did it? I'm no gentleman.” “In that case,” she responds saucily, “I'm no lady”.

When it came time for Flynn to play Don Juan in 1949, the script became an ironic commentary on Flynn himself. In one scene, a crowd of women gathers just to admire his physique, thus disrupting a serious fencing lesson being given by the master swordsman. Don’s international reputation as a rake precedes him wherever he goes, leading one fellow Spaniard to comment: “Columbus extended the world but for you it grows smaller”.

True to the Hollywood formula, Don Juan wins the climactic sword fight at the end of the film against a less than athletic opponent but this time the hero collapses in exhaustion, the first sign in an Errol Flynn film of vitality on the wane. In the scene where Don parts from the Queen of Spain, who like Elisabeth cannot resist his manly charms, Flynn reveals that he is tired of the whole business of being a fantasy figure. “You’ve become a hero of the people,” the Queen assures him. “Have I? Well then it must be easy to become a hero.” When he says he must leave her, she asks him where he will go. “Who knows?” he shrugs. “Into oblivion I suppose, where most legends go”.

Flynn was already well on the way to oblivion when he uttered those lines, having being drunk throughout the filming of The Adventures of Don Juan. But the dark side of heroism, that readiness on the part of the hero to collude in his own destruction, was part of the Flynn persona even in the early, relatively sober days.

Flynn once wrote: “I have a zest for living, yet twice an urge to die”. So do several of his characters. Even the all-action Captain Blood, in a rare moment of reflection, wonders why he took all those risks in becoming a pirate: “I never quite knew. Some urge that drove me on”. The petulant Earl of Essex refuses to save himself from execution as a traitor to Bette Davis’s Elizabeth, despite being given the chance to live, simply because he can’t have his way and be king.

Even the more conventionally heroic self-sacrificing deaths in films such as The Dawn Patrol (1938) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) manifest suicidal tendencies. In Charge he can’t get the girl he wants so is happy to ride towards a certain death. In The Dawn Patrol, Flynn tells a raw new recruit who has just joined his World War I fighter squadron about the madness of war:

Do you remember my father used to be professor of biology at Queen’s? He always used to say, man is a savage animal, who periodically, to relieve his nervous tension, tries to destroy himself.

There is a surprising biographical resonance in these lines, not just because Flynn’s own father had for a time been a professor at Queen’s University, Belfast. Flynn’s character takes the parental injunction literally when he abandons his command and takes the place of his best friend on what he knows to be a suicidal solo bombing mission.