Reeling Backward: "Rocky Mountain" (1950)

By 1950 Errol Flynn had become dissolute, both in his personal life and Hollywood career. Barely 40 years of age, he'd been through two painful divorces, seen his good looks diminish from drink and wanton lifestyle, and watched studio honchos and producers who'd once begged for his services turn the other way.

Having read Flynn's autobiography, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," I know that he had grown indifferent to the roles he was being offered around this time and considered giving up acting entirely. His performance in "Rocky Mountain" seems to mirror this mindset -- Flynn gives a stern, perfunctory turn as if peeved at having to be there.

(Incidentally, I recently discovered that Guy Pearce played Flynn in an eponymous 1996 movie about Errol's early rapscallion days. And Kevin Kline is set to star in a new biopic about his final years, "The Last of Robin Hood." Look forward to seeing both of them.)

Westerns were not Flynn's preferred cinematic hunting grounds, either. He never looked as comfortable in chaps and holding a six-shooter as he did in a tuxedo or wielding a rapier. But I don't lay the entirety of the blame for the lackluster "Rocky Mountain" at Flynn's feet.

 Ploddingly plotted, indifferently acted and shot in confoundedly a murky palette, "Rocky Mountain" was so certainly no feather in the cap of director William Keighley. He had previously teamed up with Flynn on the phenomenally successful "The Adventures of Robin Hood." The action scenes are clumsily staged, and entire sections of the night sequences are so obscured in inky blackness it's virtually impossible to even tell what's happening.

Screenwriters Alan Le May and Winston Miller, working from Le May's novel "Ghost Mountain," begin the story curiously with a modern (for 1950) car pulling up to a historical marker dedicated to the bravery of a band of Confederate soldiers. Their unlikely mission, undertaken in the dying days of the Civil War, was to raise an army of raiders in California and wreak havoc, forcing the Union to open up a second front.

The transition to 1865 is abrupt and clumsy -- since we already know the mission was a failure, it takes some oomph out of the proceedings. The story is notable, though, for portraying Confederate soldiers in a  heroic light, without making the "bluebellies" the villains. (American Indians get to play that role.)

The plot is simple to the point of spareness, and even at 83 minutes the movie feels stretched out. Captain Lafe Barstow (Flynn) is ordered to meet up with Cole Smith (Howard Petrie), who's supposed to raise an army for the South. But the band of eight soldiers saves a woman, Johanna Carter (Patrice Wymore), from an Indian attack. She's the fiancee of a stalwart Union lieutenant (Scott Forbes) who comes looking for her and gets captured by Barstow's crew. Then the Indians trap them on top of the mountain, a heroic dash is made to divert attention and save the woman, and all the Rebs are killed.

Petrie, who also had a notable career in radio, is an interesting presence as the scurrilous raider, who at first passes himself off as another man so he can assess his new allies. He decides they're much too heroic for his liking. With his icy gaze and condescending demeanor, he's easily the onscreen equal of Flynn's Barstow.

Slim Pickens also shows up as one of the Confederates, a rangy, peevish scout named Plank. As someone whose childhood association with Pickens cemented him in my mind as a clownish, pot-bellied idjit, it's nice to see him as a lean and whip-mean cuss.

Barstow doesn't come across as a particularly crafty or inspiring leader. Once it's clear the Indians have got them cornered, he essentially decides to squat on top of the mountain and hope Cole Smith returns with reinforcements. Not a very good Plan B, or Plan A for that matter. Certainly Flynn's phoning-it-in demeanor doesn't help the audience root for him.

While it isn't a terrible film, "Rocky Mountain" is a prime example of mid-century Hollywood drek, the sort of B-pictures they churned out at an astonishing rate on smaller budgets and even more modest expectations. By 1950, this was the best Errol Flynn could hope for.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Gentleman Jim" (1942)

"Gentleman Jim" is a Hollywood hooey version of the life of "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, one of boxing's early heavyweight champions and a key figure in turning the backroom bloodletting into a legitimate sport. It was a star vehicle for Errol Flynn at the height of his fame, and everything about the iconic fighter's life is subject to be twisted around to align with Flynn's star persona, rather than Flynn trying to capture the man.

It's another example of the classic axiom about the difference between character actors and movie stars: Stars always play themselves.

For example, the central dynamic of the story (screenplay by Horace McCoy and Vincent Lawrence) is that Jim is a scrappy underclass Irishman who continually struggles to ingratiate himself with the San Francisco bluebloods, represented by the hoity-toity Olympic Club. They admit him as a charity chase to help legitimize boxing, but are irked by his overpowering personality and presumptuous behavior. They pick well-known boxers to give him a thrashing and wager heavily against him.

In fact, Gentleman Jim was a darling of the Olympic Club and worked there as an athletic instructor. Corbett was famous for his "scientific" approach to boxing, which involved fancy footwork and wearing down his opponent with quick jabs, rather than the bullrushing haymakers that were the standard of the time.

That standard, of course, was set by the current champion, John L. Sullivan. As played by Ward Bond, Sullivan is a towering, charismatic figure who's constantly the center of attention, shaking hands and buying drinks. "I can lick any man in the world!" he boasts repeatedly, until of course ... he doesn't.

Ward Bond is one of those archetypal supporting performers who seemed to be everywhere in the 1930s through the 1950s, including 16 films co-starring with John Wayne. Most people know him from his later roles, when he usually played the cantankerous middle-aged authority figure, or occasionally a thug. It was thrilling to seem him as a strapping younger actor.

Sullivan outweighed Corbett by more than 40 pounds, and few people gave the young challenger any chance of prevailing. The physical dissimilarity between Bond and Flynn is equally staggering, with the lithe, quick Flynn dancing around Bond, who flails like an angry rhinoceros.

The antagonistic exchanges between the two men leading up to their fight are amusing stuff, but much of the rest is a wearying ride. There's some stuff about Corbett's family life, a collection of moldy cliches about Irish immigrant families. "The Corbetts are at it again!" someone invariably shouts when Jim and his brothers are brought to blows again. Pop (Alan Hale) is an amiable drunk, mother is a paragon of homespun virtue and Jim is the social climber with the swelled head.

Most of the rest of the story is involved with Jim trying to elbow his way into the company of the high-and-mighty, and their subsequent pushback. Alexis Smith plays Victoria Ware, the daughter of a wealthy former gold miner who plays the classic romantic comedy dance with Flynn, barking and sniping and grappling with each other, right up until the moment -- conveniently parked at the end of the movie -- when they realize they're deeply in love.

(Pure poppycock -- Corbett was married long before he began contending for the boxing title.)

For 1942, the boxing scenes are decently shot by director Raoul Walsh. He focuses much on the footwork of Corbett, with (over)frequent cuts to his dancing limbs, but the punches look largely real, the knockouts sufficiently gripping. They go on a bit too long -- Walsh generally shows the first couple of rounds of his big fights in their entirety, before moving to the familiar montage leading up to the climax.

Boxing was a very different sport back then. Some men were still fighting barehanded in that era, and Corbett helped pioneer the use of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Fights went on much longer than they do today -- Corbett knocked Sullivan out in the 21st round, and one of his notable preceding fights was called a draw after 61 rounds.

That was against his crosstown rival Peter Jackson, whom Sullivan refused to fight because Jackson was black. Corbett was one of the first white boxers to take on opponents of other races. Unsurprisingly for its era, "Gentleman Jim" only alludes to this fight, and Flynn is never shown contesting anyone other than another Caucasian.

As much of a trial as I felt the non-boxing scenes were to get through, the film ends on a spectacular note. At a big party celebrating Corbett's victory, a surprise guest appears: Sullivan himself. His face battered and his over-proud manner punctured, the defeated champ comes to personally present Gentleman Jim with the championship belt.

It's an extraordinarily moving scene, with both Bond and Flynn at the top of their games. It's most effective because the moment is underplayed and subtle -- a sharp contrast with the bombast and cartoonish obviousness of the rest of the proceedings.

2.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Objective, Burma!" (1945)

I started out actively disliking "Objective, Burma!", but the movie eventually won me over. It begins like every other standard-issue World War II propaganda film, with a bunch of swell guys banding together through adversity to overcome the troglodyte enemy. It even stars a bunch of the same actors in supporting roles I've seen in other war pictures, with little variance as to their characterizations: the wisecracking New Yorker (George Tobias) playing a New Yorker, the tall Texan (James Brown) is again a Texan, etc.

Eying its nearly 2½-hour run time, I was ready to settle in for a long and laborious trek through the Burmese jungle with the swell gang. In other words, it looked like a repeat of another Raoul Walsh film recently discussed in this space, "Battle Cry," which amounted to nothing more than a bunch of training footage and smoochy-time with the local females.

But somewhere along the way, "Objective, Burma!" morphs into a gritty and realistic drama that gives audiences a taste of what it was really like to be a G.I. dogface trying to survive in the Pacific theater. No smooching here -- there's nary a female in the flick.

Based loosely on history, the story depicts a raid on a Japanese radar station in advance of the Allied invasion of Burma. It's so loose with the facts, though, that it depicts the invasion as an entirely American affair, when in fact the U.S. played only a relatively small role in the operation. Winston Churchill was so upset about the British forces getting the high hat, the film was banned in the U.K. for seven years.

The picture starts out with achingly slow exposition, as a bunch of officers meet in rooms and point at maps, and then the troops get briefed on the mission. They'll be dropped by parachute, take out the radar station, then be picked up at an abandoned airfield later that same day. The commanding officer, Capt. Nelson (Errol Flynn), is not terribly pleased about being saddled with an American newsman, Mark Williams (Henry Hull), who's a mite long in the tooth and green to boot.

Interesting aside: usually having a character who's a writer acts an obvious framing device, as his or her scribblings form the basis for the recollection of the events portrayed. Curiously, Williams dies about three-quarters of the way through the movie, which begs the question of who it was telling their story. The trailer for "Burma" makes this notion even more explicit, showing Williams' notebook pages being flipped to unspool the tale.

The actual raid goes off without a hitch, or even any American fatalities. The men are jabbering away about their easiest mission of the war, and I was bored to tears.

But then a huge Japanese force comes after them, forcing the planes to pull away just as they were about to land. The cakewalk turns into a death march, as they must traverse through the steamy jungle, depending on supply drops from planes to keep them alive as the Japs are never far behind in their vengeful pursuit.

I was struck by how much the screenplay -- by Ranald MacDougall and Lester Cole, story by Alvah Bessie -- focuses on the minutia of the soldiers' experience. We see what sort of food they eat (dry, tasteless rations), setting booby traps using grenades and wire, taking "salt pills" to help keep them from getting dehydrates, and putting water purifying tablets in their canteens to make the swamp muck drinkable.

Movies of this era generally gloss over the unpleasant details of life in the military, so I was impressed by the verisimilitude.

The disposition of the men changes, too, as their numbers dwindle and their odds grow worse. The swell-guy shtick pretty much goes out the window, and they get more and more surly. There's even one occasion where the men refuse to get up at Nelson's orders -- a display of insubordination that one hardly ever sees in movies of the 1940s.

"Objective, Burma!" came out in early 1945, not terribly long after the fate of the war in the Pacific was still in doubt. By this point, the Allied forces were beginning to wrap things up against the Japanese. I think that's why it was possible to release a movie that showed how grim life in the Army can be -- Hollywood realized it was no longer in the business of recruiting new soldiers. That makes it the sort of unglamorous movie you probably wouldn't have seen from the big studios in 1942 or '43.

One more note: Unless I'm mistaken, I believe non-Japanese actors were used to mostly portray the enemy. They certainly don't look or sound Japanese. It's possible they were supposed to be soldiers of other nationalities commanded by the Empire, but it's still a little off-putting.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood"

"Captain Blood" was supposed to be just another quickie action flick for 1935 Depression-era audiences, a pirate adventure with an unknown actor. It was such an unexpected success, it made Errol Flynn an overnight star -- arguably the biggest star in Hollywood's first half-century.

In fact, Warner Brothers so liked the pairing of Flynn, Olivia de Havilland as his leading lady and director Michael Curtiz that they quickly ordered up two more pictures with the same group -- "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1936, and "The Adventures of Robin Hood" in 1938, which would become Flynn's signature role.

It was not at all unusual for Golden Age studios to re-use the same grouping of actors from a successful movie, which is why John Wayne always seemed to have the same supporting cast. So it's not surprising that Basil Rathbone played Flynn's rival in several pictures, including both "Captain Blood" and "Robin Hood," as well as "The Dawn Patrol," which was the subject of a Reeling Backward review a few weeks ago.

These two movies are strikingly similar in theme and the portrayal of Flynn and de Havilland. Flynn is a noble figure -- a nobleman in "Robin Hood," a physician in "Captain Blood" -- who stands up to injustice and becomes an freedom-loving outcast as a result. He has a taunting, cocksure bravado that infuriates his enemies to no end. De Havilland is the unattainable rich woman who, despite her higher station, finds herself attracted to the impudent adventurer. Their relationship is classic love-hate -- mostly hate until near the end, when she decides she loves him.

There's plenty of battle scenes in "Captain Blood," and they're pretty convincing for the most part. The vintage ships from circa 1680 appear very authentic -- if they used models, it must have been extremely high-tech stuff for 1935, because I can't tell.

Rathbone has a rather brief role in "Blood." He plays Captain Lavasseur, a French pirate who becomes Peter Blood's partner as soon as he's introduced, then two scenes later they're bitter enemies and having a deadly sword fight on a rocky beach.

"Captain Blood" ends on a rather strange note. His biggest enemy is Col. Bishop, the governor of Port Royale, who buys Blood as a slave, and vows to hunt him down after Blood leads a slave revolt to capture a ship, becoming pirates in the process. But just as a big showdown with Bishop appears to be looming, an emissary from the English king shows up with a letter of marque for Blood, wiping away his criminal record.

By contrast to the relatively cheap budget of "Captain Blood," "The Adventures of Robin Hood" was a major showcase for Warner Bros., the most expensive movie made to date. Unlike "Ivanhoe," whose production values I commented negatively upon previously, you can see every dollar up on the screen in "Robin Hood." The colors are vivid and bold even 70 years later, and everything from the armor to the woodsmen tights looks spot-on. And all the arrows thunk into their targets convincingly.

Claude Rains is delicious as a slightly sexually ambiguous Prince John, and Basil Rathbone has a meatier role here as Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Robin's chief antagonist. Interestingly, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a minor player in this version of Robin Hood, a fat and bumbling figure who's more of a comic relief than a villain. Eugene Pallette is a much more martial version of Friar Tuck than other iterations, as quick with his sword as the cross.

There's a wonderful tone to "Robin Hood" that makes it an infectious film to watch. Even some of the dialogue, which is typically stilted for its time, doesn't land with a thud like it might. I think the rousing music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold has much to do with it -- it won the Oscar for best score.

Robin Hood is such an indelible cinematic character, that a host of actors have portrayed him over the years. Douglas Fairbanks played him in 1922, there was a 1950s TV series, an older Robin played by Sean Connery, and of course Kevin Costner had a very successful turn in 1990, portraying Robin Hood with an accent that alternated between light English and California dudespeak.

As I'm writing this, I learn that Russell Crowe is set to tackle the green tights in a new film version coming out in 2010, directed by Ridley Scott and co-starring Cate Blanchett. It seems this quiver never runs empty.