Product Description
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Errol Flynn: The Warner Bros. Western Collection (DVD)
MONTANA Big Sky Country is cattle country! But sheep rancher
Flynn has other ideas in this -blazing range-war saga. Alexis
Smith co-stars. ROCKY AIN The Civil War comes to California,
and rebel leader Flynn finds that marauding Shoshones may be
fiercer foes than the Union Army. With future Mrs. Flynn Patrice
Wymore. SAN ANTONIO A man is only as good as his when Flynn
rides into ol’ San Antone to hunt cattle rustlers. A landmark of
Western excitement with an amazing saloon shoot-’em-up…and lovely
Alexis Smith. VIRGINIA CITY Union officer Flynn goes undercover
to stop a gold-laden Nevada wagon train rolling to Dixie. With
Randolph Scott and, yes, Humphrey Bogart as a pencil-mustached
desperado.
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Errol Flynn is primarily recognized for his
swashbuckling roles, but let's adjust that. As Frank Thompson
notes in his characteristically droll and well-informed
commentary on Virginia City, Flynn was born to star in period
pictures, and that included Westerns. This son of Tasmania
slipped into Stetson and six- mode without strain, and without
having to conceal his somewhere-in-the-British-Empire accent.
Which is only fair: the director of his first three Wild West
outings was the Hungarian-born, English-language-mauling Michael
Curtiz. Not to beat about the sagebrush, the best of Flynn's
Westerns--the Curtiz-directed Dodge City (1939) and Santa Fe
Trail (1940), plus Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On
(1942)--are not included in this set. Of the four films that are,
Curtiz's Virginia City (1940) is much the liveliest, and
certainly the most handsome. Set in the closing months of the
Civil War, it's about Confederate loyalists making one last
effort to stave off defeat on the battlefields back East by
transporting five million dollars in gold from the Nevada mining
town of the title. Union Flynn spars with Rebel counterpart
Randolph Scott, as both also vie for the love of saloon
songstress and gold-plot mastermind Miriam Hopkins. Warner Bros.
hoped to replicate the Dodge City hit formula, even recycling the
same town set (albeit in black and white instead of Technicolor)
and re-teaming cinematographer Sol Polito (who was better at
black and white anyway), screenwriter Robert Buckner (strewing
illogic and coincidence with abandon), and composer Max Steiner,
as well as Flynn sidekicks Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy"
Williams. But who thought of (mis)casting Humphrey Bogart as a
Mexican bandito--possibly the nadir of Bogie's life as a contract
player? On the upside, extensive location shooting around
staff, Arizona, gave Virginia City by far the most striking
scenery of any Flynn Western.
Flynn spent the WWII years concentrating on war-related films,
but 1945 found him saddling up again for San Antonio (or did
it?--he's clearly doubled in horseback longs). He plays a
Texas rancher turned de facto outlaw by virtue of losing his land
in a cattle war and being driven into Mexican exile. Never fear,
he's soon finessed his way back across the border and set about
undermining those who wronged him and his friends. San Antonio
was Flynn's fifth Western but only the second in
Technicolor--bright, bold color, and lots of it. Truth to tell,
it's a bit of a mishmash, with so much skulking around upstairs,
downstairs, and backstage at chief villain Paul Kelly's Bella
Union music-hall saloon that it begins to resemble Feydeau farce.
The script is credited to Alan Le May (The Searchers) and W.R.
Burnett, and the direction to David Butler--though Raoul Walsh is
known to have lent a hand (surely "Get that drunken cat off the
bar" is a Walsh touch). Leading lady Alexis Smith sings a few
songs and her brassy red hair is grand for Technicolor, but her
romance with Flynn is a pale shadow of their delightful pairing
three years earlier in Gentleman Jim. Warner Home Video has yet
to release Walsh's Silver River (1948), the last Flynn Western to
boast grade-A production values and co-stars, so that leaves two
virtual B movies from 1950 to round out the set. In the 76-minute
Montana, an Australian sheepman ventures into Big Sky country,
"where cattle was king," and overcomes years of bloody resistance
to the idea that sheep and cattle can coexist not only peacefully
but profitably. Alexis Smith, who had earned her first billing
site Flynn in 1941's Dive Bomber and is paired with him for
the last time here, inveigles him into a frontier duet.
The somewhat better Rocky ain (83 minutes) borrows a leaf
from Virginia City to propose another Confederate adventure in
the West, an Army patrol attempting to join with Rebel
sympathizers in California and foment an armed uprising. The
mission gets sidetracked at Ghost ain, where the presence of
hostile Shoshone Indians urges Rebs and Yankee cavalry to make
common cause. Flynn plays it low-key throughout, as though his
character, a man of honor in a world that cely recalls the
notion, had already accepted the lostness of his cause. Each
member of Flynn's small command has enough of a backstory to sit
around and philosophize about--a narrative tactic anticipating
how 90 percent of screentime in the coming decade of Westerns on
TV would be filled. William Keighley (who would direct Flynn's
last Warner film, The Master of Ballantrae, in 1953) breaks
things up as best he can with the multi-tiered rockscape setting.
Incidentally, Flynn's leading lady this time is his third and
final wife, Patrice Wymore, cast as a Union officer's fiancée
whose stagecoach gets ambushed nearby. Each of the films rates
its own disc, with accompanying "Warner Night at the Movies"
shorts and trailers from the season when the movie was released.
Only two boast a commentary, and of these, only the one on
Virginia City is worth the listen. Visual and technical quality
is excellent overall. --Richard T. Jameson
