Sir Guy of Gisbourne- Could it be because, at the time, Bette Davis was in the running the play Scarlett. Bette hated Errol and so he was bumped. Didn't work out for Bette either. They gave her Jezebel instead.
I think Errol would have done a good job. In his dramas, he was convincing. At least, he wouldn't have need to suck in his dentures and looked like a pickle puss.
- Love "Robin Hood", Flynn was so sexy and manly that he didn't look like a fool in those green tights! Seriously, the man had the best legs, he loved showing them off in tights.
And Flynn was too good-natured to play Rhett Butler. Butler has a serious and intelligent side, and a vicious side that came out when Scarlett provoked him beyond endurance. Gable was able to play the character's charm and flippancy, and Butler's serious and deadly aspects too. Flynn never brought much but the charm and flippancy.
http://www.me-me-me.tv/images/2009/09/errol-flynn-tights.jpg
- Supposedly Margaret Mitchell wrote Rhett Butler specifically with Clark Gable as the model. Flynn was too easygoing, there wasn't the kind of darkness to his charm that Gable had.
- Am I wrong or is Robin Hood unlike anything Warners produced in the 1930s....not only colorful and lush and romantic but so expensive looking. It must have been by far their most costly film of the decade.
- Flynn was a great action star--effortlessly charming and a good actor and of course, very handsome. People like Tom Cruise, et al., don't even come close.
I saw this when I was about 10. It was my idea of a great movie then. I'd like to see it again but I'm afraid it might not live up to my memories.....
Flynn could have aced the part of Rhett. I don't know about Bette as Scarlett....
max%20steiner%27s%20ruptured%20eardrums
- I just watched this tonight. I went to college where they filmed all the exterior stuff so seeing all the trees and rolling Northern California landscape was nice. I remember reading David Niven's books and the the contrast between Flynn's charm and dash and the rather painful and sad end Niven detailed.
- Was it considered a particular triumph for Technicolor (or whatever process Warners used)?
It predates Gone With the Wind by a year but the color photography is even more sumptuous...actually quite startling....than any other film I can remember pre-WWII.
Claude Rains' medieval shoulder pads
- [quote]Was it considered a particular triumph for Technicolor (or whatever process Warners used)?
Yes. In one of David Selznick's endless memos, he praises the color in AORH.
- Yes, it was considered a triumph. They borrowed all 11 Technicolor cameras in existence to film it. I find it interesting that Flynn and the director, Michael Curtiz, supposedly loathed each other.
- [quote]I just watched this tonight. I went to college where they filmed all the exterior stuff so seeing all the trees and rolling Northern California landscape was nice.
"A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, shoot it in Griffith Park."
- [quote]Supposedly Margaret Mitchell wrote Rhett Butler specifically with Clark Gable as the model.
That would have been difficult since she began writing GWTW in 1926. Mitchell said that her first choice to play Rhett was Basil Rathbone, of all people. Thankfully she had no input on casting and the public pretty much demanded it be Gable. Mitchell later said he was the perfect one to play the part.
- One of my favorite movies. I think it should be up there with GWTW and Wizard of Oz. The color makes your eyes ache, everyone seems to be have a grand time, especially the bad guys, and at the end of the day everyone works out perfectly for all involved.
The only sad note is that one of my favorite characters, the little serf who kills the royal stag and romances Marian's servant was killed in a car crash shortly after production ended.
FYI, Maid Marian's horse was played by Trigger of Roy Rogers fame. It was his first role.
- I think Flynn would have been too lightweight a Rhett - I agree with those saying he would have missed the darker side of Rhett.
(Although, to my eyes, Flynn's looks have stood the test of time better than Gable's - I don't really find Gable hot.)
- When even the homosexuals go thirteen posts without mentioning me, maybe it really is time to check out...
Olivia
- I love GWTW and think it is perfect as is, BUT as a Bette Davis fan, it would be fascinating to see a Davis-Flynn-De Havilland GWTW. Davis was a great actress and would have done well with the part, the difficulty being only that she was not as beautiful as Leigh. But Davis wouldn't have played the part for sympathy any more than Leigh did, so it might really have been very good. Flynn would have been different as Rhett, but it might have been fascinatingly different...a gentler Rhett. I've never thought seriously about it before, but it really might have been quite good.
- Anyone who thinks Davis/Flynn would have made a good Scarlett/Rhett team needs to watch one of the films they did make together, The Sisters and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. They had ZERO chemistry.
Only Flynn's charm keeps the scenes where his character declares his love for Bette's character (and his praise of her great beauty) from being utterly ridiculous, because Bette was no beauty in either movie.
Flynn really never got the credit he deserved for his acting. He was quite good as cold Soames Forsythe in That Forsythe Woman.
Nora%20Eddington
- Flynn as Rhett? How about Flynn as Ashley? At least with Flynn in that role we might have believed that Scarlett would actually carry a torch for him.
- How would the US take to a Brit as Scarlett and an Aussie as Rhett??
Hmmmm?
- In 1972 Olivia de Havilland made a personal appearance and answered questions on her career at London's National Film Theatre, I was there (as a young gayling) and got up close to Livvy in her delicious chiffon dress, and watched her watching herself and Erroll riding their horses in the forest - she then said how difficult it was to appear before us 34 years after that scene was shot .... now of course its over 40 years since that event and dear Olivia is still here with us.
- Nice story. Olivia just goes on and on.
- Basil Rathbone was an incredibly sexy villain as Sir Guy.These days his quirky looks would make him a leading man, not just relegated to secondary character roles in A list films.
- Wasn't Patrick Knowles in Auntie Mame?
- Yes, r22.
In the small world department, Patrick Knowles was also in another movie with Rosalind Russell -- that also starring Errol Flynn and Olivia deHaviland.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030151/%3Fref_%3Dfn_al_tt_1
Nora%20Eddington
- Patric Knowles was too pretty for stardom in the 1930s. He was more of the Henry Willson ilk, like Guy Madison and Tab Hunter.
- Did I miss why Bette detested Errol? Did he refuse her advances? Bad breath? Like John Barrymore used to do...did he ask Bette to come to his dressing room and then sit here stark naked?
As good looking as Errol was, his son, Sean was even better looking.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi%3Fpage%3Dgr%26GRid%3D7689636
- R25, when Bette Davis and Errol Flynn shot THE SISTERS (1938), their first film together, Bette complained that he had no talent, and Errol thought she was an unmitigated bitch. They also fought over billing. Flynn, riding high from the popularity of THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD released earlier that year, was to receive top billing. Davis would not hear of it and fought to get equal billing.
The following year, Flynn and Davis again were to co-star, in THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX. Davis had wanted Laurence Olivier to play the Earl of Essex as she felt Flynn was a weak actor and couldn't do blank verse. She complained about this throughout filming, which undoubtedly irked Flynn. Flynn, to his discredit, wanted better presence in the title, which was originally called ELIZABETH THE QUEEN, and suggested the title be changed to THE KNIGHT AND THE LADY. This of course infuriated the leading lady, and lead to another battle of wills.
- "Basil Rathbone was an incredibly sexy villain as Sir Guy.These days his quirky looks would make him a leading man, not just relegated to secondary character roles in A list films."
I doubt Rathbone would have changed his career for that of a leading man. He was a highly-paid free-lancer at a time when most actors were slaves to a studio, and he alternated excellent supporting roles with starring in the Sherlock Holmes films. He had a much longer and more varied career than his "star" contemporaries.
- Errol Flynn- now there was a SWORDSMAN!
In Like Flynn!
- Errol Flynn was the one big male star who played opposite Bette Davis at the height of her Warners' years and she felt threatened not only by his lack of depth as an actor but also by his superiority as a popular box office leading man.
I wonder if she was also uncomfortable with the frank and effortless sexiness he so easily portrayed onscreen, an attribute none of her other costars, like Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, George Brent, et. al. had.
- For me this is his most sexy photo.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdreviews11/errol_flynn_box/captain%20blood%20errol%20flynn%20dvd%20PDVD_006-01.jpg
- I thought I read somewhere Bette asked Flynn out for drinks and he refused. I have his autobio, I'llhave to check. Then again he probably exaggerated throughout that book.
The scene in Elizabeth/Essex where she slaps him, she wore these huge rings that stung him. I think he wrote that their fued during the filming of that movie made him vomit.
Years later, after Flynn died, Bette watched a clip of E/E and said mused that she was wrong about him and he was talented after all.
- A nice set of bloopers featuring Bette and various co-stars including one with Errol from "The Sisters." The gorgeous hunk in the last one is Gig Young playing Gig Young. He took his screen name from this character.
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DXT2rTg44SQc
- Movies was not a subject I could talk with my father about too frequently. So it stood out that one of the things he told me was he had known some guy that had been good (I assume drinking) buddies with Flynn.
The guy told him that of all the woman Flynn had been with, Olivia DeHavilland was one of the best lays he ever had.
My father thought that even in her later years, because she was "into Yoga and stuff" it was probably true and that she was a "hot piece of ass."
Memories!
- That's interesting, r33. In his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Errol wrote (or more likely dictated in a drunken stupor) that, after he placed a toy snake in her underwear in her dressing room during the making of one of their movies, he could not get anywhere with her. If they ever slept together, he didn't mention it.
He also didn't say a whole lot about me in his book, either, though. I have a lot more to say in my own autobiography, Errol and Me.
Nora%20Eddington
- You gotta love Bette Davis, she made Errol Flynn throw up!
- Nice photo...he looks sexy again
Ann Sheridan and Errol Flynn promote Edge of Darkness
http://acertaincinema.pemomo.com/workspace/media/sheridan-flynn-book.jpg
- Errol Flynn, Eugene Pallette and Ian Hunter relax between takes of 'The Adventures of Robin Hood'
http://acertaincinema.pemomo.com/workspace/media/errol-flynn-eugene-palette-ian-hunter-relax-on-robin-hood-set.jpg
- I'm also R30 and i was meaning that photo. He looks so sexy!
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdreviews11/errol_flynn_box/captain%20blood%20errol%20flynn%20dvd%20PDVD_006-01.jpg
- Strange now the photo can appear in both answers. Before it couldn't.
!!!!!!!
I don't understand, but it's alright!
- No one wanted Flynn for Rhett Butler. He was a "pale imitation of Gable," according to Selznick. That comes straight from the documentary on the making of GWTW.
Flynn was underrated as an actor. As "pretty" and lightweight as his image was, he did a good job playing against type in a very little known thriller with Barbara Stanwyck called Cry Wolf.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039288/
- He was a drunkard and a womanizer but he was sexy and charming when he was young.
http://media-cache-ec3.pinterest.com/550x/20/5e/9e/205e9e89592f0603a38ead46aa99f5e3.jpg
- Narcissistic too!
http://media-cache-is0.pinimg.com/550x/d9/a5/95/d9a59555e6048ea8806b15876b3a467e.jpg
- Errol Flynn at a costume fitting for 'Captain Blood' (1935)
http://media-cache-lt0.pinterest.com/550x/87/c7/1a/87c71a94139a03101c8902d508e9155d.jpg
- "Captain Blood" may sound like a dude-esque picture, but come on! Olivia DeHavilland BUYS Errol Flynn at a slave market.
http://media-cache-ec4.pinterest.com/550x/99/d3/19/99d319ffca75f830482d204be6205aed.jpg
- My partner went to Duke at the same time as Sean Flynn, he said he was the most beautiful man he had ever seen. Poor guy, what a sad end to a promising life.
