Errol Flynn, man in tights

After The Adventures of Don Juan, and as his physical decline could no longer be concealed, Flynn in the late swashbucklers Against All Flags (1952) and The Master of Ballantrae (1953) is grim faced, desperate and no longer invincible. In Against All Flags, the tights have been swapped for corduroys, in Master for a comfortable tartan.

Such victories as the Flynn character has in these films are hard won at considerable physical cost. Prematurely middle-aged in these films, Flynn’s frame and face have thickened, his eyes have become dull and suspicious and his movements are weary. The rousing speeches are gone. In The Master of Ballantrae, Flynn takes charge of a pirate vessel without ceremony, and certainly no rhetoric about patriotism or the brotherhood of buccaneers: “Alright men, get aloft and shake the wrinkles out of those sails. Get ’em up, come on. I said get aloft!” The crew is unmoved by the order and only starts obeying after Flynn strikes one of them with the flat of his sword.

Captain Blood could sweet talk his men into anything, no matter how risky, and emerges on the winning side in the wider conflict in English politics, but in The Master of Ballantrae Flynn’s character backs the loser in a doomed Scottish rebellion and in the end he must simply run away into exile.

After The Master of Ballantrae, there were no more Hollywood action films for Flynn and not many Hollywood films of any kind. In his last big budget Hollywood film, The Sun Also Rises (1957), Flynn gained a measure of critical respect - he had long since ceased to be good box office - simply for being what he was by then, a sad drunk. At one point Flynn’s character Mike Campbell, a bankrupt Scottish aristocrat and faded war hero, wonders aloud why the drink waiters ignore him. “The service around this town is getting worse and worse every night. Perhaps it's me. As a matter of fact, I'm afraid it is me. Nobody seems to pay much attention to me anymore.”

I have been suggesting that Flynn didn’t need to act like a hero, lover or indeed drunk in order to be convincing on the big screen. Flynn’s singularity as a screen presence is marked by the fact that his accent hardly wavered. Flynn left Australia in 1932 and never returned, taking American citizenship in 1942.  He played characters identified as Australian only twice in more than 50 films but nevertheless is recognisably Australian in every role he took, whether he is playing the Earl of Essex, General George Armstrong Custer in They Died With Their Boots On (1942), Mahibub Ali in Kim (1951) or the fugitive French pickpocket Jean Picard in Uncertain Glory (1944).

And despite the stubborn accent, Flynn is the only non-American actor to become a major success appearing in Westerns. “Wouldn’t you like to be protected, just a little?” importunes Flynn as roguish cattleman Clay Hardin, when commencing to woo saloon singer Alexis Smith in San Antonio (1945). “Is it a Western custom to push yourself in on other people?” she replies. The response is suitably matter-of-fact. “Yes ma’am. That’s how the West was settled.”

Perhaps Flynn wasn’t identified as an Australian, despite the accent, simply because the vast majority among the audience for his films really didn’t know what an Australian sounded like. Flynn’s persona still exerts an influence over the cultural perception of Australian masculinity as physical rather than intellectual, rebellious and devil-may-care.

It is an image that in Flynn moreover is highly sexualised. When Hugh Jackman, playing the larrikin drover, strips to the waist and soaps himself by an outback fireside in the up-market chick flick Australia, it is an entirely Flynn-like gesture. Self-consciously retro in its obeisance to Hollywood’s golden age, Australia itself could easily have been a Flynn vehicle.

Flynn remains the greatest screen swashbuckler, partly because he is also in many ways the most troubling. He defies comparison except with the characters he portrayed. A hundred years after his birth, what movie lovers remember most fondly about Errol Flynn can be summed up in the words of Captain Blood: “Heroic, was it? Bedad, it was epic!”