The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (144 page)

Errol Flynn
(Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn) (1909–59), b. Hobart, Tasmania
In 1992, with a three-year-old son, I had occasion to see
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(38, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley) some twenty times or so. That the movie stands up to such regular inspection is not just because of rippling action, the stained-glass Technicolor, or the fabulous Korngold score. It is because of Errol Flynn, an actor previously so confined to my bad books that I had stopped seeing him. Flynn does not deal in depth, but he has a freshness, a galvanizing energy, a cheerful gaiety (in the old sense) made to inspire boys. Chaucer knew Flynn: he is “a verray parfit gentle knight” and “as fresh as is the month of May.” Of course, the zest faded: scandal, booze, nymphets, and the rapid mottling of age made for undeniable sadness. He became a bad joke, and he looked ten or fifteen years more than his real age. But we should not forget the vivacity of the late thirties and early forties, when his sword flashed and he was the true heir to Douglas Fairbanks.

He had had a variety of jobs around the Pacific before appearing as Fletcher Christian in the documentarylike
In the Wake of the Bounty
(32). This encouraged him to go to England, to repertory theatre and a British film,
Murder at Monte Carlo
(34, Ralph Ince). Warners shipped him to the United States and, after
The Case of the Curious Bride
(35, Michael Curtiz) and
Don’t Bet on Blondes
(35, Robert Florey), they elected to make him a swashbuckler. The trick worked, but it is of interest to note how. Of his next thirty-one movies (until 1948), nineteen were directed by Curtiz or Raoul Walsh. Having quarreled with Curtiz (his most compatible director), Flynn was more than lucky to find Walsh at Warners, though Walsh had a more searching view of heroism than Curtiz, who adored surface action. Still, these are very graceful adventures—travesties of history, but lovely, expert routines that needed speed, music, and such regulars as Olivia de Havilland (his partner seven times, wide-eyed and won over), such adversaries as Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, sundry Spaniards, savages, and Japanese,
and
his mustache—he could look naked and a little wolfish without it.

Here is the list of films. With Curtiz:
Captain Blood
(35);
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(36)—Flynn was a Remington bronze on horseback, though he often fell off and broke brittle bones;
The Perfect Specimen
(37);
Robin Hood
(38);
Four’s a Crowd
(38)—a modern comedy; the Australian twang insouciant at court in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(39)—he and Bette Davis were under consideration for Rhett and Scarlett;
Dodge City
(39);
Virginia City
(40);
The Sea Hawk
(40); as cavalry genius Jeb Stuart in
Santa Fe Trail
(40); and
Dive Bomber
(41). And for Walsh: a longhair Custer in
They Died With Their Boots On
(41);
Desperate Journey
(42); wonderful as both pugilist and man of honor playing James J. Corbett in
Gentleman Jim
(42), probably his best acting;
Northern Pursuit
(43);
Uncertain Glory
(44);
Objective Burma
(45), a war picture that aroused British and Australian anger for seeming to make victory an American trick; and
Silver River
(48).

Along the way, Flynn had become notorious. In 1942, he was charged with raping two eighteen-year-old girls. The grand jury cleared him, but the authorities decided to prosecute anyway. Flynn was eventually acquitted, but only after the extent of his sexual appetite had been made clear. “In like Flynn” became a battle cry for hopeful ladykillers. Today, I doubt if a star (like Tom Cruise) could suffer such charges and keep his career going.

Flynn had made films without costume, swords, and carefree action, and he had looked ordinary:
Green Light
(37, Frank Borzage);
Another Dawn
(37, William Dieterle);
The Sisters
(38, Anatole Litvak);
The Dawn Patrol
(38, Edmund Goulding);
Footsteps in the Dark
(41, Lloyd Bacon);
Edge of Darkness
(43, Lewis Milestone)—a somber story of the Norwegian resistance; and
Cry Wolf
(47, Peter Godfrey).

Close to forty, he was going out of fashion—and he had neither the grin nor the leaping power of the new Burt Lancaster. He was awful as a composer in
Escape Me Never
(47, Godfrey);
The Adventures of Don Juan
(48, Vincent Sherman) tried to exploit his reputation, but the picture had no flourish, and Flynn seemed sadder and slower. He was Soames in
That Forsyte Woman
(49, Compton Bennett), but he was better in
Kim
(50, Victor Saville).

His tide went out fast:
Montana
(50, Ray Enright);
Adventures of Captain Fabian
(51, William Marshall);
Against All Flags
(52, George Sherman);
Mara Maru
(52, Gordon Douglas); in a lamentable
The Master of Ballantrae
(53, William Keighley); and the dreadful
William Tell
(54). Near bankruptcy, he squired Anna Neagle in two Herbert Wilcox films—
Lilacs in Spring
(54) and
King’s Rhapsody
(55). His drinking was so bad that he ended up having to play drunks. Thus, after
The Warriors
(55, Henry Levin) and
The Big Boodle
(57, Richard Wilson), he finished with
The Sun Also Rises
(57, Henry King); as John Barrymore in
Too Much, Too Soon
(58, Art Napoleon);
The Roots of Heaven
(58, John Huston); and
Cuban Rebel Girls
(59, Barry Mahon), in which he played with his last girlfriend, the sixteen-year-old Beverly Aadland. After his death, a mild autobiography,
My Wicked, Wicked Ways
, was published.

James Foley
, b. New York
1984:
Reckless
. 1985:
At Close Range
. 1987:
Who’s That Girl?
1990:
After Dark, My Sweet
. 1992:
Glengarry Glen Ross
. 1995:
Two Bits
. 1996:
Fear; The Chamber
. 1999:
The Corruptor
. 2003:
Confidence
. 2007:
Perfect Stranger
.

Is there a dull Foley film? No, though
Who’s That Girl?
keeps one going out of a wish to see just what inanity will fulfill Madonna next. The same sort of glee keeps one attuned to Al Pacino’s old man in
Two Bits
. Then there’s
Glengarry Glen Ross
, which I found riveting yet absolutely without resonance or reason or interest. How can that be? Put it down to Mamet’s intimidation of attention at the expense of all other responses. But then you have to allow that
After Dark, My Sweet
is well worthwhile, just as the confrontations between Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in
At Close Range
are impossible to forget. What does it all mean? Well, in part, that it’s possible to possess quite an intense notion of movie without any capacity to make a coherent film. But you could put together a montage of scenes by Foley that might convince anyone that he was—and is—a very hot director.

Henry Fonda
(1905–82), b. Grand Island, Nebraska
Educated at the University of Minnesota, he joined the Omaha Community Players and Joshua Logan’s University Players. He edged his way on to the Broadway stage, was briefly married to Margaret Sullavan, and in 1934 he signed a contract with Walter Wanger.

Having done
The Farmer Takes a Wife
(35, Victor Fleming) on the stage, Fonda was put in the movie opposite Janet Gaynor. Tall (if gangling), handsome (in a boyish way), and gentle spoken (with only a hint of whine), Fonda was first used as a romantic lead to bend fondly over star actresses. But after the remake of
Way Down East
(35, Henry King) and
I Dream Too Much
(35, John Cromwell), he made his first venture into American epic in
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
(36, Henry Hathaway).

It is difficult now not to see a ponderous relevance in the title: for there is something of assumed solitariness about the soulful way Fonda became the repository of honesty and decency. Even in his late sixties, voice, looks, and bearing sustained this image. Only the glimpses of a much harsher man in private (a difficult husband and tempestuous father to Peter and Jane) detract from the feeling of typicality and dreamy vision.

He made
Spendthrift
(36, Raoul Walsh) before his first major role as the doomed but undiminished fugitive in
You Only Live Once
(37, Fritz Lang). He alternated romances and adventure pictures:
That Certain Woman
(37, Edmund Goulding), solacing Bette Davis;
I Met My Love Again
(38, Joshua Logan and Arthur Ripley); with Davis again in
Jezebel
(38, William Wyler), just avoiding priggishness;
Blockade
(38, William Dieterle), a muffled Spanish Civil War story cherished by Wanger;
Spawn of the North
(38, Hathaway); and brother Frank in
Jesse James
(39, King).

After playing support in
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
(39, Irving Cummings), Fonda found his most suitable director, John Ford. Fonda’s statuesque gentleness, with politeness only reluctantly giving way to anger, was very close to Ford’s conception of a prairie Galahad. They made three films in a row that established Fonda’s nobility:
Young Mr. Lincoln
(39);
Drums Along the Mohawk
(39); Tom Joad in
Grapes of Wrath
(40), a part that admirably identified the rural twang and lope that Fonda never lost. As Lincoln, especially, he captured a dreamy political calm, torn between peach and apple pie, but drawn to justice unfailingly.

But Fonda’s time with Wanger had now elapsed and he signed a seven-year contract with Fox that was not always to his liking. In fact, the next few years did not live up to his early success: opposite Alice Faye in
Lillian Russell
(40, Cummings);
The Return of Frank James
(40, Lang); and
Chad Hanna
(40, King). Paramount borrowed him to be a marvelous learned stooge for Stanwyck in
The Lady Eve
(41, Preston Sturges), virtually the only good comedy that Fonda ever made, tribute to Stanwyck’s wit, to Sturges’s grace, and to Fonda’s own solemnity. He continued in a run of dull or modest films:
Wild Geese Calling
(41, John Brahm);
The Male Animal
(42, Elliott Nugent);
The Big Street
(42, Irving Reis);
Rings on Her Fingers
(42, Rouben Mamoulian);
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Julien Duvivier), with Ginger Rogers; and
The Magnificent Dope
(42, Walter Lang). Then two films restored Fonda as the emblem of liberal conscience:
The Immortal Sergeant
(42, John M. Stahl) and
The Ox-Bow Incident
(43, William Wellman). At which point he joined the navy and saw active service in the Pacific.

Back from the war, Fonda edged deeper into the American myth as Wyatt Earp, sat precariously on a veranda, his feet propped up on a post, in
My Darling Clementine
(46, Ford). He followed this with the husband in
Daisy Kenyon
(47, Otto Preminger), an underrated film that uses the stubbornness in Fonda cleverly. He played the Jean Gabin part in Anatole Litvak’s awful
The Long Night
(47) and then had his one failure with Ford, the priest in an attempt at Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
called
The Fugitive
(47). He was in an episode of
On Our Merry Way
and then rather eclipsed by John Wayne in
Fort Apache
(48, Ford) in which he played a stiff-backed disciplinarian.

He returned to the theatre and had great success in
Mister Roberts, Point of No Return
, and
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
. Hollywood lured him back only in 1955 for the film of
Mister Roberts
. Ford began the project, but he and Fonda quarreled and Mervyn Le Roy took over when Ford fell ill. Once back, Fonda carried on as if he had never been away, falling into new idioms remarkably well. After playing Pierre in
War and Peace
(56, King Vidor), he was at his very best, harrowed into resignation, as the bass player wrongly charged with robbery in Hitchcock’s
The Wrong Man
(57)—it is a performance of simplicity and intensity from a man instinctively aware of the camera. But it was his next film that really brought Fonda back into public attention: as the white-coated voice of reason amid
Twelve Angry Men
(57, Sidney Lumet). The technical skill and glib liberalism of that film were built around Fonda and he was once more revealed as Hollywood’s statue of liberty. He was lordly in
Stage Struck
(58, Lumet) and a less than robust bounty hunter in
The Tin Star
(57, Anthony Mann). What was most remarkable was the way his persona was used in political subjects: a presidential candidate in
Advise and Consent
(61, Preminger) and
The Best Man
(64, Franklin Schaffner), eventually too pure for the hurly-burly; and the president himself, tortured by imminent holocaust in
Fail-Safe
(63, Lumet).

After Kennedy, so honorable a figure went out of fashion. Vietnam and Watergate made
The Best Man
seem rather virginal. Is it possible, too, that as Peter and Jane Fonda became personalities in their own right, so Henry was spoken of as something less than the nicest guy in town? Whatever the answer, stodginess set in during his last years. A turgid TV series,
The Deputy
, showed the stolid father figure, as did
Madigan
(68, Don Siegel) and
The Boston Strangler
(68, Richard Fleischer). Fonda tried to discover a more mischievous, warped character, especially in subcomic Westerns—but with mixed success:
A Big Hand for the Little Lady
(66, Fielder Cook);
Welcome to Hard Times
(67, Burt Kennedy);
Firecreek
(67, Vincent McEveety); very good as the villain in
Once Upon a Time in the West
(69, Sergio Leone);
The Cheyenne Social Club
(70, Gene Kelly);
There Was a Crooked Man
(70, Joseph Mankiewicz);
Sometimes a Great Notion
(71, Paul Newman);
Le Serpent
(73, Henri Verneuil);
Ash Wednesday
(73, Larry Pierce);
My Name Is Nobody
(73, Tonino Valerii);
The Red Pony
(73, Robert Totten); as Admiral Nimitz in
Midway
(76, Jack Smight);
Tentacles
(76, Oliver Hellman);
Rollercoaster
(77, James Goldstone); and
The Swarm
(78, Irwin Allen).