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Archive for the ‘Newspaper & Headlines’ Category

Erben’s Myth — A Million Dollar Srory

22 Apr

By United Press
Hollywood, April 21, 1937

ACTOR DENIES SAYING STARS RAISED FUNDS

Report That $1,500,000 Given By Certain Film Players to Loyalists Claimed False

An Interview with Errol Flynn In Barcelona Spain, in which the film actor and soldier of fortune purportedly told of helping raise a $1,500,000 fund in the Hollywood film colony to aid the loyalist forces, came under the scrutiny of the Knight of Columbus today. Thomas B. Flanagan, secretary of the Los Angeles council of the Knights of Columbus, said he was sending a report on Flynn to John J. Rossborough, state deputy of the order at Oakland, California, and to the national headquarters of the organization’s newly launched “antiradical” campaign at New Haven, Conn.

The purported interview was published in the Hollywood Reporter, a film trade paper. The Reporter stated the interview was filed to them by “our regular Barcelona correspondent.” The part to which the Knights of Columbus reportedly found most objection to follows:

SAYS FUND RAISED

“Is it true that money has been collected in Hollywood to help the Spanish government?’ asked the Reporter. “‘Yes,’ said the actor, ‘Fredrick March, James Cagney and I were the initiators and $1,500,000 has been raised so far”.” Flynn, husky film leading man and husband of Lili Damita, French actress, has been in Spain as a roving correspondent He was reported wounded by a machine gun bullet in dispatches from Madrid which later developed to be erroneous.

The Hollywood Reporter’s dispatch upon his arrival at Barcelona, strong loyalist headquarters, further stated: “When Errol Flynn arrived in Barcelona he was greeted by the “commissioner of public spectacles, J. Carner Rlbalta, who introduced him to the “commissioner of propaganda” of the Catalonian government, Jaime Miravitles, and the heart of the cinema section the same department, Juan Castanyer.

While in Barcelona, Flynn was considered a guest of honor of the Catalonian government and all facilities were accorded him. “In an interview with the press, Flynn said his visit to Spain was prompted by a desire to ascertain the truth regarding conditions here. “Asked by the press boys what was the general impression in the United States about the war, he replied: “That’s it, the confusing news and the fact that all the American press is in the hands of powerful trusts made me decide to take this trip to see with my own eves what is really happening and write a series of articles for publication.”

The dispatch ended:

“Flynn was accompanied by his old friend, Dr. Hermann F. Erben, a well known member of the American Communist party.”

— Tim

 

The Swashbuckling Life of Errol Flynn

20 Apr

“The Adventures of Errol Flynn,” premiered on TCM on April 5, 2005, encoring two weeks later on April 19.

“Imbued with the same swashbuckling spirit as its subject matter, this Turner Classic Movies documentary qualifies as must-see TV for anyone weaned on the cinematic exploits of Errol Flynn, whose life on and off the screen makes for a great deal of fun.”

THE SWASHBUCKLING LIFE OF ERROL FLYNN

Washington Post
By Tom Shales

April 5, 2005

We may as well retire the word “dashing,” since nowadays it applies to nearly no one. The adjective fits icons and movie stars and royal personages who exist only in the past.

Of all the dashing figures to swing across the movie screen in Hollywood’s golden age, Errol Flynn has to have been the dashingest, at least among candidates from the sound era. He may not have cut a wide swath, exactly, but he cut a rambunctious one. He was one of the screen’s most magnificent rascals, wittily self-aware yet never self-adoring.

Turner Classic Movies pays jaunty and justifiable tribute to Flynn this month with a splendid 32-film Flynn festival, mostly movies made at Warner Bros. Studios, but shamefully omitting the 1943 Warner spectacle “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” in which Flynn sang and danced.

We’re all used to hearing that in real life, this or that performer had no resemblance to the image projected on the screen. But as the word “Adventures” in the title suggests, Flynn was larger-than-life whether on the screen or off it. He was determined not to bore or be bored, and he perhaps exhausted himself in that pursuit, dying at the age of 50 but looking much older.

Even the simplest details of Errol Flynn’s life seem exotic: He was born in Tasmania, of all places, in 1909, and just sort of stumbled into movies in 1933, when he played Fletcher Christian in the sea saga “In the Wake of the Bounty,” Australia’s first talkie.

Two years later, Flynn landed what couldn’t quite be called a plum role in a Hollywood film: He played an impeccable corpse in “The Case of the Curious Bride,” a Perry Mason mystery. There was, as the saying goes, nowhere to go but up, and Flynn went there with a string of swashbuckling, supremely entertaining classics, of which the most memorable and rousing was “The Adventures of Robin Hood” in 1938.

Flynn and the Technicolor tights fit each other so perfectly that one can only wonder what mogul Jack L. Warner had been thinking or drinking when, years earlier, he’d decreed that James Cagney, not Flynn, would be the perfect guy-in-green.

Many other versions of “Robin Hood” have been filmed in the years since, but nobody ever played Mr. Hood with greater gusto, charm and spirit, as the sumptuous clips make clear. According to the documentary, Flynn handled his own sword fighting in the film’s bravura duel with pernicious popinjay Basil Rathbone.

Olivia de Havilland made eight films with Flynn and still seems smitten, as when she recalls the impression he made when first they met on the set of “Captain Blood.”

“Ohhhhh, ohhhhh,” she murmurs, summoning her initial reaction with such enthusiasm she almost gets the vapors. “He is the handsomest, most charming, most magnetic, most virile young man in the entire world,” she says, and she was thus willing to forgive him anything, even the time he left a dead snake in one of the voluminous gowns she wore in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Unfortunately, the documentary makes the error of attributing the still-thrilling eponymous charge that ends the movie to director Michael Curtiz, who directed several Flynn films, including most of this one. But the logistics and filming of the actual charge (intercut with quotations from Tennyson’s epic poem) were handled by B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason, the legendary action master whose credit was usually “second unit director.”

The mustache Flynn wore in “Charge” and most of his other action films added the perfect rakish touch to his appearance. Rakishness came naturally; so did a rebellious arrogance. Producer Hal B. Wallis (“Casablanca”) confirms the impression that Flynn gave studio bosses as many ulcers and migraines as he could: “He was the same likable rogue from the beginning right on through his career. He’d make these demands, he’d disappear, he’d come back to work and he would have the top brass at the studio apologizing to him!”

He loved sailing and playing tennis and, unfortunately, shooting up morphine. In very rare footage from 1955, we see Flynn lampooning himself on TV’s “Martha Raye Show.” His days as a lean, limber, devilishly handsome movie star were behind him, but he could even be irreverent about that. The producers begin the documentary with a priceless clip from “The Steve Allen Show,” satirizing “To Tell the Truth.” In this case, the announcer asked for “the real Errol Flynn” to stand up, and since the faux Flynns were a fatuously suave Louis Nye and a quivering Don Knotts, the genuine article was amusingly obvious.

There’s a poignancy to the clip, though, especially when one recalls that Flynn would be dead within a few years. He was long past his days of tights and tree-climbing, looking as though he had left his 40s behind several eons ago. The situation clearly inspired Richard Benjamin’s raucously evocative comedy “My Favorite Year,” which is about a fading old rake. Peter O’Toole, another of the last-of-the-dashers, appears to have nearly as high a time being Errol Flynn as Errol Flynn did.

Separating the actual from the mythic in Flynn’s life isn’t always easy — nor, arguably, at all necessary. J. Edgar Hoover, with typical perversity, started investigating Flynn early in the ’40s, and decades later, a biographer would scrounge up allegations that Flynn had loopy Nazi leanings all that time. In 1942, he faced an apparently trumped-up charge of statutory rape by two Hollywood party girls. Says Flynn’s daughter Deirdre, among many Flynn intimates interviewed: “My father never had to ‘rape’ anybody. Women chased him.”

“I have a zest for living,” Flynn himself once said, “yet twice an urge to die.” Die he did, on Oct. 14, 1959, a few years after giving a hauntingly dissipated performance in “The Sun Also Rises.”

Film of Flynn as himself, near life’s end, shows him looking wan and chubby, and yet some of the dash still survived, apparent in the wicked twinkle of his mischievous eyes.

There was no indication, on the other hand, that he suffered even a hint of regret. “I’ve loved it,” he said of his life, “every minute of it.” You may feel precisely the same way about watching “The Adventures of Errol Flynn.”

— Tim

 

Who Better Than Errol?

18 Apr

April 18, 1944

— Tim

 

Hollywood — April 16, 1944

16 Apr

Photo above taken in 1936 at the Los Angeles Tennis Club

— Tim

 

LOOK 🎯 Errol Kissing Olivia

13 Apr

LOOK Magazine – April 12, 1938
The Adventures of Robin Hood

OTHER CONTENTS

– The Rockefeller Women, wives of the John D. Rockefeller clan, the former Blanchette Hooker, Mary Clark and Mary French.

– Blind persons learn how to row at European school for the blind.

– Confidentially column includes Francisca Gall, Yehudi Menuhin, Barbara Huckins, May McAvoy, Will H. Hays, Lora Marlo, Sidney Skolsky, Anthony Averill, Mary Margaret McBride, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David and Joseph Maddox and two unrelated men named Joseph John Toth.

– Auto driver Wilbur Shaw in an ad for Camel cigarettes.

– Photographic manipulations proved pictures do tell lies, samples by photographers Henry Clay Gipson, Bill Ries, and A.J. Sockoloskie.

– A photo study of who collects taxes and where they go in Peoria, Illinois; carpenter Homer M. Lynn and family buy shoes from Harry Frankel, groceries from John Frasco, discuss taxes with city assessor Dan Goggin. Other businesses include Hiram Walker, Rock Island railroad, Caterpillar Tractor, young Russell Deal at the Pea Ridge School, Marjorie Frye at the Proctor Recreation Center, Tildon Cecil at the relief office.

– A magician saws a woman in half using Horace Goldin’s trick.

– Boycott against Japan.

– Dorothy Wender Heizer of Essex Falls, New Jersey creates the world’s most expensive dolls.

– Passion play in Oberammergau, Germany.

– Is Paulette Goddard your choice for Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind”?

– U.S. Navy builds biggest aircraft carrier, the Yorktown, illustration by Logan Reavis.

– The table manners of Mable Tanners.

– The camera trains diver Herta Schieche of Berlin.

– Hollywood off guard, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper.

– Climbing the pyramid of Gizeh is a workout.

– Movie tricks, including Henry Fonda.

– The private life of Louisiana’s governor Richard Leche.

– Flash Gordon returns to Earth.

– Bill Klem, the umpire who never made a mistake.

-Girl archers at Long Branch Junior College in California.

– Ruth Law, first woman stunt flyer.

– 60-year-old Grace Logan of Los Angeles is skilled at jujitsu.

— Tim

 

Eightieth Anniversary Celebration of Captain Blood – April 11, 2015

12 Apr

St. Augustine, Florida

Quoting primarily from VisitStAugustine.com…:

The St. Augustine Pirate and Treasure Museum hosts a cinematic tribute to Hollywood’s iconic swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, on Saturday, April 11, 2015, The event marks the 80th anniversary of Flynn’s pirate classic, “Captain Blood”, which will be shown on a large outdoors screen in the Colonial Quarter.

“The Sea Hawk”, another classic Errol Flynn swashbuckler, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and will also be shown. The Sea Hawk is loosely based on the history of Sir Francis Drake, who took St. Augustine from the Spanish.

Among the many activities planned for the evening are “Captain Blood” and Errol Flynn look-alike contests (with face painting and mustaches available for Errol Flynn impersonators), swordfighting demonstrations, and a discussion and sampling of the pirate’s favorite drinks, Rum and Grog, by Jamie Jackson of Pusser’s Rum.

Live music, visits from The Pirate Museum’s Captain Mayhem, and a black powder final salute will round out the evening.

This event is planned to appeal to the whole family (though only adults, of course, can participate in the drink tastings).

Admission: Free.

When? Saturday, April 11, 2015, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The screening of “Captain Blood” will begin at 6:15 p.m., and “The Sea Hawk” will begin at 8:45 p.m.

Where? The Colonial Quarter is located at 33 St. George Street in downtown St. Augustine.

Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood Coat

— Tim

 

Thank You, Comrade [S.O.B.]!

12 Apr

Photo below published April 11, 1937:

“Errol Flynn is pictured in a photography accompanying an ABC article lauding Hollywood actors and cinematographers for collecting money in support of Republican Spain (ABC, April 11, 1937, p. 4-5)”

Thank you, Comrade [S.O.B]!

“At a lunch with high-ranking military officers, one of them talked about “the heartfelt emotions and happiness the Spanish people felt that their hero of the screen and upholder of justice, Errol Flynn, was with them. The Spanish people would never forget this … I sat there in amazement, trying not to show surprise to be cast in such a role.” (Errol Flynn, “My Wicked, Wicked Ways.” New York: Cooper Square Press: Distributed by National Book Network, 2003. Orig. pub. in 1959, p. 230. Flynn eventually found out why he was being given the royal treatment and why people had such high expectations about his visit. On his last day in Spain his driver asked him when he was going to donate the money that he and his Hollywood friends had raised. It was then, according to Flynn’s autobiography, that Erben explained that the best way to go places was to say they were bringing $1 million dollars to help the cause. Again, according to Flynn, Erben said that all he wanted was a chance to work as a doctor, performing surgeries. “The only way I could do it and get by in style here was to use you.” To which Flynn responded, “Thank you, Comrade [S.O.B.]!” (Ibid., p. 235)”

Quoted from: blogs.loc.gov…

— Tim

 

Baron in London, April 9, 1956

10 Apr

— Tim

 

Divorce Granted — April 8, 1942

09 Apr

Toward the end…

In the beginning…

— Tim

 

Overboard Like Flynn — April 7

08 Apr

Who was he?

– He deliberately looked a lot like Flynn.

– He was to be thrown overboard from the Bounty

– He received a last-minute gubernatorial pardon

Two imsges immediately below added 6pm Thursday. April 8:

— Tim