6/10/23
Newsletter #363
The Crack of Dawn
This isn’t a story; it’s a “for your information.” It took me years to finally figure this out. The great, great character actor, George Sanders, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for All About Eve (1950), had a younger brother named Tom Conway, who was in a lot of movies, and looked and sounded a lot like his brother. George starred in The Saint series, and Tom starred in The Falcon series. For the longest time I didn’t realize that there were two of them.
The same thing is true of actor Barry Fitzgerald. Barry Fitzgerald was terrific character actor who appeared in a lot of movies. He won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Going My Way (1944). He too had an actor brother, Arthur Shields, who appeared in a lot of movies and looked and sounded an enormous amount like his brother. And for years I didn’t know that there were two of them.
As I found this out, life started to make more sense.
Erroll Flynn didn’t have a twin brother, but he was an amazing character. He wrote a scandalous, bestselling autobiography near the end of his life, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1957), that I read when I was about 14, and thought, “Man, that’s the life for me.” I didn’t realize at 14 that unless you’re born severely handsome, most of these things would never happen.
Errol Flynn was born in Tasmania, where his father was a professor of biology at the University of Tasmania. What was so interesting to me as a kid was that most of his crazy, exciting, wicked life was lived before he got to Hollywood. He had worked on ships and traveled the world. He had been an overseer on a plantation in Indonesia, and when the native workers gave him trouble, he shot and killed one to let them know he was serious. He had a theory that he used all over the world: when he ran out of money he would go to the very best restaurant, order the most expensive meal, with the costliest wine, consume it, then see what happened. In many cases it led to interesting turns of event, like him starring in a low-budget Australian version of Mutiny on the Bounty, called In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), which was two years before the big Hollywood production with Clark Gable.
Errol Flynn, for whom the term, “In like Flynn,” was coined, sort of fucked his way to Hollywood in 1935 at the age of 26. He had one extra part, playing a dead body, then got the fucking lead in Warner Brothers’ biggest movie of the year, Captain Blood (1935), with their new find, 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland. Beyond the fact that it was a smash success, and is, in my opinion, the best of all the swashbuckler movies, it is rare if ever to have two huge movie stars explode on the screen in their very first parts. Both of them act like they own the studio. And dare I say it, I think it’s Basil Rathbone’s best movie, playing the pirate LeVasseur. And I met Ralph Faulkner who doubled Flynn in the fencing scenes in that movie.
Errol Flynn’s starring Hollywood career was really 10 years long, 1935 to 1945. And if you honestly get down to it, he didn’t make all that many good movies. But the good movies he made, were all great: Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940), They Died With Their Boots On (1941), Gentleman Jim (1942). But by the end of WWII Errol Flynn was a relic of an earlier era. He never stopped working and drinking, making one crummy picture after another until he ended up in the B-minus, Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), where he hung out with Fidel during shooting. Flynn died at the age of 50, having lived at least three distinctly different lives.
The sun has also risen.