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First Time in Paris? — L’intrigue se Corse

29 Nov

THIRD WEEK OF NOVEMBER, 1936

EVENING HERALD EXPRESS
HARRISON CARROLL

You Asked Me and I’m Telling You!

[Question from] Ada Hefflin, Chicago:

Errol Flynn first met Lili Damita at a party in Paris and they met again on shipboard coming to this country. But the third time was the charm. Lili was lunching with Dolores Del Rio at the Warners Brothers Studios. Flynn stopped to speak and the romance dated from there.

Here is a famous photo of lightning striking the Eiffel Tower in 1933. Did lightning also strike in 1933 for Errol and Lili in Paris?

Or was it in 1934 aboard the SS Paris?

Or was it later in ’34 at Warner Bros. with these two contintental cinestars ?

— Tim

 

Lucey’s

28 Nov

THIRD WEEK OF NOVEMBER, 1936

LOUELLA O. PARSONS
LOS ANGELES EXAMINER

Errol Flynn and Lili Damita talking things over at Lucey’s Cafe.

Lucey’s Restaurant (aka Cafe?) was at 5444 Melrose Avenue, across the street from Paramount.

— Tim

 

GOlivia Go!

27 Nov

deadline-com.cdn.ampproject.org…

In a statement from her home in Paris, Dame Olivia said: “We must persevere and speak truth to power.”

“The fight is itself important to the principle of honesty, so much in need today in the face of deliberate public confusion for selfish agendas.”

The question presented for Supreme Court review is:

“Are reckless or knowing false statements about a living public figure, published in docudrama format, entitled to absolute First Amendment protection from claims based on the victim’s statutory and common law causes of action for defamation and right of publicity, so as to justify dismissal at the pleading stage?”

“Dame Olivia, who won Oscars for 1946’s To Each His Own and 1949’s The Heiress, previously won a landmark victory over Warner Bros in 1943 which effectively ended actors’ contract servitude.”

www.bailiwickexpress.com…

Olivia with her outstanding attorney, Suzelle M. Smith:

— Tim

 

Errol Leads the Way

25 Nov

Flynn’s Robin Hood the template for all the rest, and still the best …

fandom.wikia.com…

 

— Philip

 
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Rita on the Zaca

24 Nov

PHOTO FROM “NOVEMBER 23, 1946”

www.gettyimages.com…

P.S. Rita turned 100 this year! Thank you, Rita, for all the beauty, talent, joy and love you brought the world!

— Tim

 

NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP OH LOOK, ANOTHER TERRIBLE ROBIN HOOD MOVIE

23 Nov

Robin Hood famously “stole from the rich to give to the poor.” Odd, since that’s pretty much the inverse of what Hollywood’s many adaptations of the Robin Hood legend have done: take moviegoers’ hard-earned cash every few years, and in exchange give us very bad Robin Hood movies. The rich get richer; the rest of us get “Robin Hood, but hip.”

If the legendary Sherwood-Forest-dweller ever existed at all (some historians believe that the real man from whom the legends are derived was actually a petty thief, not a heroic swashbuckler), Robin would certainly disapprove of the perpetual exploitation of his story for corporate gain. The latest Hollywood adaptation—Robin Hood, out in theaters today (Nov. 21)—could be the worst of them all.

The film, starring the Welsh heartthrob Taron Egerton as the titular outlaw, is being panned by critics, who are almost unanimously deeming it a disaster: “Gird your loins for a misguided attempt to profit off the public domain that takes its one big idea—what if we marketed 15th century class warfare to millennials?—and leans into it so hard that the movie starts to feel less like Robin Hood than it does a castrated ‘Riverdale’ spin-off for Bernie bros,” wrote David Erhlich of Indiewire. ”By the way, gasoline exists in the Middle Ages now—as do midriff tops, wire-rimmed glasses, roulette, the entire Industrial Revolution, and my permanently bewildered expression,” io9’s Beth Elderkin wrote.

Those hoping that Robin Hood would be modern in ways other than the cast’s sartorial choices will probably leave the theater disappointed. “I won’t waste time talking about Marian, the movie’s only notable female character, because she fails every representation test there is,” Elderkin wrote. ”She’s worse than a ‘Sexy Lamp,’ she’s a Human Stare. All she does is look at stuff, lips partially opened, waiting to have a thought. She bought her clothes in Forever 21’s Reign section.”

It would be unfair to pick on the 2018 Robin Hood without mentioning some of Hollywood’s many previous debacles. There was, of course, Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood film starring Russell Crowe, a film whose critical panning was usurped only by its dismal box office returns. Though it later achieved a cult following, the 1993 spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights was one of Mel Brooks’ least successful films both critically and commercially. Even Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood movie was a bust, and remains one of the Mouse House’s rare misfires. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner, performed relatively well in 1991, but that’s setting the bar quite low. You’d have to go back to 1938 for the Technicolor sensation The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring a dashing Errol Flynn, to find an indisputably successful Hollywood adaptation of the Robin Hood legend.

So why is such a universally resonant tale about fighting injustice and oppression so difficult to make interesting? Perhaps it’s precisely that it’s too universal, too generic—an innocuous blank slate that inspires either bland filmmaking or, in the case of this 2018 film, desperate, revisionist attempts to make the centuries-old legend socially or politically relevant to the era of its adaptation.

In a piece for Smithsonian Magazine, James Deutsch, a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, noted that Robin Hood adaptations tend to pop up every generation, often during times of US economic turmoil. “Folklore comes from the folk, which is why ‘robbing the rich to give to the poor’ is a motif that has endured for centuries in the imagination of the people,” he wrote.

The first feature-length Robin Hood, a silent film in 1922, followed a recession in the aftermath of World War I, Deutsch observed. Errol Flynn’s turn as the hooded bandit came in the midst of the Great Depression. And Ridley Scott’s 2010 film was released during the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s unsurprising that Hollywood tries to exploit working class fears for profit, with the Robin Hood character recurring in troubled times as an avatar of resistance to the fat-cat elites. Except, these movies are almost always bad investments.

The US economy is relatively stable today, though income inequality is still an enormous problem in the US and globally. As long as that remains the case, the Robin Hood story will resonate, and Hollywood will keep trying to cash in on it. There are already several more Robin Hood films development.

— tassie devil

 
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Thanksgiving 1938

23 Nov

EVENING HERALD EXPRESS
HARRISON CARROLL

Errol Flynn’s Thanksgiving Present from Lili Damita was a long distance call from Paris. It was collect and cost $73.

P. S. Though it wasn’t Lili, nor connected in any way to her Turkey Day call from 1938 Paree, here’s an interesting photo of an American woman using a mobile phone that very same year, 80 years ago! (Errol was probably very fortunate Tiger Lil didn’t have one!)

i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/03/31/article-2301996-190666A3000005DC-712_308x185.jpg…

— Tim

 

Oh, O-Han-Zee!

22 Nov

In Celebration of Thanksgiving and the Native American Annual Harvest

COMFORTING SHADOWS IN CENTRAL PARK, 1941

Indians Adopt Errol Flynn. New York: “Movie actor Errol Flynn has to undergo a ‘tomahawking’ during the ceremony marking his adoption as a member of the United Sioux Tribe at the Indian’s Annual Harvest Festival in Central Park (Hechsher Playground) New York November 24. Named ‘Comforting Shadows’, Flynn is one of two notables ever to be given this particular adoption. It made him blood brother of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City.”

ERROL GETS SIOUXED AND LOSES HIS SHOES

— Tim

 

For Better, Not for Worse

21 Nov

Third Week of November, 1936

LOS ANGELES EXAMINER
LOUELLA O. PARSONS

The Errol-Lili Damita marriage has gone on the rocks. For months rumors have been afloat in Hollywood that the matrimonial bark of Errol and Lili was having rough sailing, but to the outside world they denied there had been any serious troubles.

Yesterday, however, Errol was reported as having moved out of his Hollywood hilltop home and be staying with a writer friend, William Ullman, preparatory to moving into a fashionable apartment hotel. The final separation cane Saturday night when Lili followed her husband to a local cafe, where he was dining with a party of friends, and left shortly after in years.

Flynn’s much publicized trip to Borneo, the South Seas and England is definitely called off for the reason he will remain here and see the separation trouble through.

Neither Flynn nor Miss Damita would make any comment on their separation, but word of an impending divorce cane from a representative of the actor, who said that the court action would probably be filed by Miss Damita today or tomorrow.

— Tim

 

Not Errol’s Nottingham

21 Nov

EMPIRE

To be fair, when you’re dealing with something as culturally ingrained and cliché-ridden as Robin Hood you might as well go for something fresh, and go for broke. But for all its stylistic ambition, and its efforts to reference modern concerns (the Sheriff of Nottingham’s anti-Islamic invective), Robin Hood misfires thanks to a crucial absence of internal logic. This world just doesn’t work.”

NEW YORK TIMES

“The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.”

THE GUARDIAN

“This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.”

LITTLE WHITE LIES

It’s a love story devoid of romance, an action flick severely lacking in spark and spectacle, a historical epic filled with flagrant inaccuracies and wrongheaded revisionism. There is nothing particularly fresh or inventive about the film, and, setting aside the wildly incongruous accents, jarringly modern, machine-stitched costumes and ugly CG render of a vaguely medieval setting, it is a simple fact that no one has ever looked cool shooting a bow and arrow while pirouetting backwards off a ledge.”

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“The action here is too phony and mechanically cranked up to believe that anything is on the line. Mendelsohn’s villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson’s Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she’s just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal’s vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he’s not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he’s a boy doing a man’s job.”

Ouch.

However, it’s not all terrible news as there are some positive reviews out there, such as in Variety who state it “shouldn’t work, but it’s more honest fun than the Kevin Costner or Russell Crowe versions”.

So there’s that, at least.

All reviews above are quoted in the Digital Spy link below:

www.digitalspy.com…

— Tim