The Errol Flynn Blog

Wish I coud see what those pictures on the wall contain a lot closer – looks to be ships! What a surprise… huh?

— David DeWitt

…left us on this day, October 14, 1959. He would have been 99 years old if he had not felt other winds blowing in a new direction…

…in Remembrance…

— David DeWitt

— David DeWitt

Olympiads! Look under Recent Articles for two posts that will show up only for our Authors on that list! If you are one of our Authors – you are a member of the Olympiads and anything posted to Secure/Olympiads is seen only by us and not the general readers of the blog… go forth and enjoy!

— David DeWitt

Olympiads… here are some more photos from the Lisa Wallis Grab! Gene Tierney out of focus but still stunning… and Lesley Howard on a movie set somewhere in Hollywood history…

— David DeWitt

Olympiads! Here is a Special Photos Posting just for our Authors! I found these pics on an Ancestry website including this one of Errol with Anna Neagle… The older gentleman is name Muntz, I think. He is the “ancestor” of Lisa Wallis who has the copyright on these pics… but we post them here for our enjoyment nonetheless, Pirates that we are!

Other photos in the Treasure Chest (see attachments) are of Sammy Stein the wrestler-Actor from Gentleman Jim seen with Errol, John Wayne, and Abott & Costello…

Enjoy, fellow Olympians!

— David DeWitt

I want to welcome the increasing number of visitors to the Errol Flynn Blog, today… Check out our Year Archive for the earliest articles since the first blog post on Sun 04 Feb 2007. You will find we now have grown to 23 Authors, 452 Articles, 283 comments, as of this post – 8 Photo Albums, and 265 Photos… and are growing every day! We have added videos recently with wonderful results and in the near future will be adding PDF documents readable in an onscreen resizable viewer.

Thanks for stopping by and joining us!

Admin/The Errol Flynn Blog

— David DeWitt

Amazon.com… Review 

He Beat the Devil, October 5, 2008
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) 
The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre        

Like all the other reviewers I'm staggered by Youngkin's accomplishment, which seems to me–perhaps profanely–even more impressive than Lorre's own. In a way, Lorre has found a biographer supreme, one beautifully blessed by all the gifts of sympathy and knowledge needed to translate an artist's work into contemporary times. How many of Lorre's peers have been given such a chance to live again? It's really shocking how few good biographies there have been of Hollywood stars, and even some of the most acclaimed (think of Gavin Lambert's Norma Shearer) have actually been among the most banal and simplistic.

Of course Lorre gave Youngkin a life really worth chronicling. If it wasn't the drug addiction, it was the dramatic life in Germamny observing and protesting the rise of Hitler, till he and Celia Lovsky found their way out in a sequence right out of Shearer's ESCAPE! The work with Fritz Lang, with Brecht, with Hitchcock, with Bogart, with Irwin Allen, with Roger Corman, each one of these phases could have made an interesting book, and Youngkin knows how to spread them out so that every angle is covered and yet our curiosity remains high. And the research and the interviewing is by itself amazing. Every time you turn around, Youngkin is eliciting revealing and wry comments from exactly the people you hope would comment on the particular situation he is writing about. Because the book has apparently been in motion for something like 30 years, his reach goes way back–he spoke with Frank Capra, with Hitchcock and Huston, with Broderick Crawford and Corinne Calvet–hundreds of actors, writers, directors and behind the scenes personnel. This research gives the book a depth and richness of point of view that elevates it to the Mount Rushmore of biography.

I wasn't always persuaded by Youngkin's critical judgments, and would rather put a staple gun to my face than have to watch SILK STOCKINGS again, for example–but now he's got me re-thinking, “Maybe it is a great performance stuck within a lousy film.” Youngkin pulls the camera way back and takes us through Rouben Mamoulian's whole career, his way of astonishing audiences by revealing unexpected sides to their favorite stars. I didn't actually need all of that to get the point, but I hope he gets to do the DVD commentary for SILK STOCKINGS, for we need more enthusiasts and fewer haters. Why write a book about a man, even a drug-addled and morose one, unless you love him?

— David DeWitt

. . . A new volume has just been announced from the publishers of award-winning investigative journalist, I. SMELLA FRAUD. Fraud, author of over twenty books, has been working on this one for the past eight years.  His other works include HIGHAM AND GOEBBELS: A LOVE STORY, WHO NEEDS THE TRUTH WHEN YOU'VE GOT HIGHAM?, and The New York Times #1 Best-Seller, FRANKLY, MY DEAR HISTORIANS, HIGHAM DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN.

Stay tuned – details are forthcoming…

— David DeWitt