Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Action and Adventure Films
ERROL FLYNN
b. Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, 20 June 1909, d. 14 October 1959
Errol Flynn is the Hollywood star most closely associated
with the genre of historical adventure at the height of
that cycle’s popularity. His good looks and athletic
performance came to define the romantic male exuberance
of the swashbuckler.
Flynn’s most successful and influential films were
made at the beginning of his career as a leading actor.
Captain Blood (1935), which both propelled Flynn into
stardom and set the terms of his subsequent image, was the
first of several collaborations with the director Michael Curtiz
and the co-star Olivia de Havilland. He plays Peter Blood—a
doctor turned fighter who is sold into slavery by a tyrannical
English monarch, flees with his fellow captives to escape
slavery for a life of piracy, and finally reclaims his position
and marries his former owner (de Havilland), when the
monarchy changes—the archetypal redeemed rogue.
Flynn starred in a variety of different genre films,
including westerns and war movies, romances and
comedies. Early in his career he demonstrated dramatic
versatility in the remade World War I aviation drama The
Dawn Patrol (1938), yet Flynn’s stardom remained linked
to the swashbuckling roles he played in Warner Bros.
historical adventures. Of these, the most accomplished and
well regarded is certainly The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938), an acclaimed Technicolor adventure in which
Flynn romances de Havilland’s Marion, fights memorably
with Basil Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and outwits
Claude Rains’s weaselly Prince John. Effectively
showcasing his physical grace and athleticism, boyish good
looks, and easy manner, Flynn plays Robin Hood as a
charismatic figure of roguish charm, a conservative rebel
whose robbery and violence is, like Peter Blood’s piracy, a
clear response to injustice. Produced during World War II,
in films featuring action sequences, an adventure setting,
and a legitimate context in which to display near-naked
bodies. The long-running cinematic success of the Tarzan
story can be understood in terms of its deployment of a
series of core action and adventure elements, which reassured
viewers through white male dominance in an
African landscape defined by its remoteness and racial
difference. Such constructions are not limited to fantastic
representations of Africa, of course; the construction of
The Sea Hawk (1940) also effectively exploited Flynn’s
adventure-hero persona while emphasizing the
contemporary resonances of its tale of Spanish imperial
expansionism.
If Flynn’s film career was defined by the romantic
figure of the swashbuckler, his star persona was framed by
sexual scandal. His (first) trial for statutory rape in 1942
had a devastating effect, even though Flynn was acquitted,
initiating a period of personal and physical setbacks.
Alcohol and drug use led to a marked decline in the looks
on which his career had been founded. The Master of
Ballantrae (1953) was his last swashbuckling hit (though
not his last effort in the genre) and marked the end of his
contract with Warner Bros. His final years included a
series of performances as alcoholics, in a somewhat
perverse on-screen enactment of his physical decline; the
first of these, The Sun Also Rises (1957), received critical
praise, generating renewed interest in the star’s career.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936),
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Dawn Patrol
(1938), Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), They
Died With Their Boots On (1941), Gentleman Jim (1942),
Adventures of Don Juan (1948), The Sun Also Rises (1957)
FURTHER READING
Flynn, Errol. My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Autobiography of
Errol Flynn. New York: Cooper Square, 2003.
McNulty, Thomas. Errol Flynn: The Life and Career.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Richards, Jeffrey. Swordsmen of the Screen, from Douglas
Fairbanks to Michael York. London and Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1977.
Yvonne Tasker
native American lands and peoples within the western
may also be considered in this context—the much discussed
John Ford film The Searchers (1956), for instance.
As this suggests, sites closer to home may still be rendered
as threatening, fantastic, and exotic within the codes of
Hollywood adventure. Equally, though, the quest for
empire may provide the explicit setting for war, as in the
British action epic Zulu (1964); produced in a period
defined by Britain’s emerging post-imperial status, the
30 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM