The Last of Robin
Hood
Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Year: 2013
Rating: 5.0
There has been on ongoing debate of late about
the political correctness of seeing older films with racist overtones such
as the Charlie Chan films and also the films of people who have shown themselves
to be less than worthy in real life like Weinstein and Woody Allen. I like
to separate the man from the film though I admit to refusing to see any more
Mel Gibson films since his anti-Semite tirade of a few years ago. But how
far back should we go?
For example, here we have a film that focuses on the last few years of Errol
Flynn. Flynn was a Nazi sympathizer before WWII who was under the observation
of the FBI, he was a drunkard and he dallied with underage girls. He was
accused by two underage girls in 1942 of raping them on his boat but he was
acquitted. He claimed to have slept with 10,000 women and had hidden mirrors
and trap doors installed in his house for peeping. When he died at the age
of 50 in 1959, the doctor who examined him said he had the insides of an
80 year old and he certainly looked well past 50 in his final films. But
from 1935 to the mid 40's he made a series of films that are some of the
best adventure films ever made. It was barely so. In 1935 Warner Brothers
had bought the property for Captain Blood but director Michael Curtiz could
find no actor under contract that he felt was right for the role of this
swashbuckling adventurer - until he spotted Flynn who until then had done
practically nothing other than extra work and thought this was the guy. And
was he ever right. It is hard to imagine any other actor of the time doing
Captain Blood, Robin Hood, the Sea Hawk, Don Juan and Custer.
By 1957 when this film opens Flynn's career is sort of in limbo - often too
drunk to act, all puffed up by alcohol - but he was still making films and
he spots a young woman Beverly Aadland on the studio grounds and introduces
himself to her. On their first date in the imitable Flynn style he pretty
much rapes her but realizes he really likes this girl and they begin a 2-year
affair until he died. Oh, it turns out that she is not so much a young woman
as a young girl - 15 at the time. The term "in like Flynn" was for a reason.
If you look her up on IMDB you will see that she has a few credits thanks
to Flynn. His last film that he produced was the wonderfully titled Cuban
Rebel Girls which is a sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro and his revolution.
I would love to see this film though it is considered a truly awful film.
A book was written on this titled Errol and Fidel and the Cuban Rebel Girls.
I should buy that. Beverly never did another film after Errol's death and
her mother later wrote a book about the affair. Beverly died in 2010.
The film is just ok. I thought it was a TV movie but it got a release. It
made $269,000 but it has a fine cast with Susan Sarandon as the mother, Dakota
Fanning as Beverly and Kevin Kline as Errol.