By David in TN
Monday, April 4, 2022 at 1:57:00 A.M. EDT
April’s TCM Star of the Month is Erroll Flynn (1909-1969). It began on Monday at 8 p.m. ET with Captain Blood (1935), followed by The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and several more swashbucklers.
Of interest are two Flynn westerns, Rocky Mountain (1950) at 10 a.m. ET and Montana (1950) at 11:30 a.m. ET. Rocky Mountain was one of Flynn's best later roles.
Update: This coming Monday, April 11th, the Flynn features, both directed by Michael Curtiz, Warners’ biggest director, are:
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) 1h 56m, 8 p.m.
Two brothers love the same woman at a perilous Indian outpost.
Cast
Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Patric Knowles, et al.; and
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1hr 46m, 10:15 p.m.,
Starring
Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
Apparently, TCM seeks to limit viewership, as although it published a shallow biographical essay on Flynn, as star of the month, it does not link to any list of the Flynn vehicles that the channel is broadcasting, and I could not find any link to such a list on TCM’s main page. Thus, one must go to the monthly schedule, and search under the star’s name.
2 comments:
I first saw The Charge of the Light Brigade on TV at age seven. I talked my mother into letting me stay up for the late show, might have been a school night. The Charge, of course, made the biggest impression.
I had gotten a set of The World Book Encyclopedia for Christmas a few months previously. The Robert Barrat character, who was a Russian Count commanding the batteries at Balaclava, reminded me of Stalin, whose entry I read in The World Book. The Russians were really the enemy then.
The Charge of the Light brigade is on TCM at 8pm ET Monday night.
TCM continues its focus on Star of the Month Errol Flynn on Monday Night starting at 8 pm ET with Dodge City (1939). Following are two other films co-starring Olivia De Haviland, Santa Fe Trail (1940) at 10 pm ET and They Died With Their Boots On (1941) at Midnight ET.
The latter two are disparaged nowadays. Santa Fe Trail's villain is John Brown (Raymond Massey) and They Die With Their Boots On has Flynn playing Custer. Neither, Santa Fe Trail in particular, is historically accurate but Santa Fe Trail is very entertaining.
The next day (Tuesday) TCM shows Flynn's WWII movies, of which he made five. By far the best was Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945) at 2:30 pm ET. Flynn played the commander of an American paratrooper unit dropped into Burma to destroy a Japanese radar station. They are based on the American unit Merrill's Marauders whose real-life actions were not unlike the fictional Objective Burma.
Two communists, Alvah Bessie and Lester Cole, were involved in the writing, but they mostly reworked Northwest Passage (1940).
Flynn gave perhaps his best performance, restrained, and a completely different characterization from Captain Blood and Robin Hood.
Flynn was hooted at for not serving in the war, but according to biographer Tony Thomas; "was medically fourth-rate, which in itself was an embarrassment. Neither he nor his studio wanted the public to learn that he had developed a heart condition, that he had recurrent malaria, that he had tuberculosis and that back in New Guinea he had suffered from gonorrhea. Even at the peak of his fame, Flynn sometimes collapsed on the set from overexertion. And this was a man who performed beautifully on the tennis courts and in the water--a total contradiction."
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