“The thing with Kurt [Nightcrawler] is, in his heart of hearts, he wants to be Errol Flynn, he wants to be a swashbuckler, he wants to kick the living daylights out of bad guys with a sword.” “Actually with three swords, using his tail as well. And he wants to be a romantic lead, and he wants to save the day, and he wants to be friends with everyone.”
— Tim
Being that this is the day after D-Day, with the Allies beginning to bring freedom to France once again, this post will be in the lingua franca of Normandy.
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Jusqu’à l’excellent La Patrouille de l’Aube (1938) de Edmund Goulding, où les escadrilles de gentlemen, menées par Errol Flynn et David Niven, conduisent une guerre dans les airs, et partagent des verres sur terre. Quatre ailes en toile, deux mitrailleuses bon marché, une carcasse métallique, un moteur en guise d’âme, il n’en fallait pas plus à ces aviateurs pour s’élancer vers une mort inévitable. Portraits de ces fous extraordinaires, ces premières œuvres semblent déjà mettre le doigt sur un certain amour du risque, où disparaître dans les nuages s’apparente à inscrire le courage de ces pilotes dans de nouveaux mythes.
— Tim
I’d Like to Volunteer, Sir’
Just before parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe, Fayette Richardson asked himself an existential question: “My God Most Powerful, what am I doing here?”
The thought had to be on the minds of myriad soldiers on June 6, 1944. It was D-Day, the launch of a long-awaited campaign by the U.S. and British armies to free the nations of Western Europe that Hitler had conquered.
Mounted from airfields and ports in Great Britain, it was the largest amphibious assault in history. Code-named Operation Overlord, it dramatically changed the course of World War II.
Seventy-five years later, the ranks have thinned of those who braved machine gun fire on French beaches that were marked on their maps with American names — Utah and Omaha. Richardson died in 2010. But fortunately for us and for future generations, he and other veterans kept diaries, wrote memoirs or recorded their recollections.
As a boy in Machias, N.Y., Richardson was fascinated by airplanes and war movies. At 17, he enlisted but didn’t qualify for pilot training. Instead, he was asked to join a parachute regiment’s Pathfinder team: those who jump first and guide those who follow. It was strictly voluntary, his commanding officer said.
“I think of Errol Flynn and how he and David Niven volunteered to do things in ‘Dawn Patrol,’ ” Richardson recalled. He told his commanding officer: “I’d like to volunteer, sir.”
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— Tim
Queen Alexandra Hospital
Hobart, Tasmania – 1908
Errol was born in Battery Point at the Queen Alexandra Hospital on June 20, 1909.
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— Tim
A Cutting Edge Quiz
Who wrote on the image below that he “lost his finger”?
— Tim
From
From this week’s Fayetteville Flyer:
“Northern Pursuit”
“Though he was Australian-born, Errol Flynn was one of the United States’ most popular commodities during World War II.
Flynn made a name for himself swashbuckling across the silver screen in such classics of the 1930a as 1935’s “Captain Blood” and 1938’s “Adventures of Robin Hood,” but during the early 1940s few Hollywood stars made more of a splash in war pictures than Flynn. Films like 1941’s “Dive Bomber” and 1942’s “Desperate Journey” cemented him as one of Hollywood’s greatest stay-at-home warriors.
One of Flynn’s most overlooked pictures “Northern Pursuit” comes from the same era and is set against a World War II backdrop as he stars as Steve Wagner, a former corporal in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that goes undercover to root out a covert Nazi scheme.
The film, which Turner Classic Movie channel is scheduled to play at 7 p.m. (CT) Tuesday was Flynn’s first movie after being acquitted of two statutory rape charges in 1942. Though Flynn’s was never as popular after the trial as he was before, he still knew how to carry adventure movies and romance pictures alike.
“Northern Pursuit” is a solid thriller, directed by the capable Raoul Walsh, who also directed Flynn in the Gen. George Armstrong Custer biopic “They Died With Their Boots On” in 1941.
Walsh amps up the tension and leaves the viewer questioning whether Flynn is a turncoat or not through much of the movie which co-stars Julie Bishop, Helmut Dantine, John Ridgely, and Gene Lockhart.
Avalanche!
— Tim
Follow Errol’s 88-years-old wooden yawl race from Newport to Ensenada! yb.tl/N2E2019#…
Racing starts at 11 a.m. Friday (tomorrow) near the Balboa Pier.
Here’s Errol in 1937 at the helm of Cheerio II, which he briefly called The Bachelor.
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A couple of seasoned sea travelers will slice through the Pacific Ocean from Newport Beach to Baja California on Friday (tomorrow) as the 72nd annual Newport to Ensenada International Yacht Race gets underway.
Not only is Cheerio II, an 88-year-old wooden yawl, the oldest boat in the race, its skipper has been around the water even longer than it has.
Cheerio’s skipper is Dick McNish, a 91-year-old Santa Barbara native who has guided the 46-foot boat in 20 Newport to Ensenada races.
McNish bought Cheerio II in 1980 and extensively restored it in 1994 and ’95. One of its former owners was Hollywood swashbuckler Errol Flynn.
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— Tim
Fare thee well, Richard. You were a great Flynnmate.
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From another interview:
Erdman would go on to work with the best, including Errol Flynn in “Objective, Burma!”
“We drove out to the Warner Ranch in Calabasas for location shooting in the same car every day and he couldn’t have been nicer to me. In some scenes we were waist deep in mud simulating a swamp. It was a very hot summer and tiring, but Errol was great throughout. There were no actresses in the film, but women would just turn up on the set and follow him around. He literally had to fight them off. He was a man’s man, but also had a sensitive side to him. He was just a charming guy.”
— Tim
