a life well lived

    Florczak, Robert. Errol Flynn: the illustrated life chronology. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2022. Summary: "Though there have been myriad books on Errol Flynn - scores of biographies, film studies, analyses, etc. - there has never been one that unfurls his dashing life day-by-day, predominantly through photos, letters, news clippings, and documents. This book does so: from Flynn's birth in Hobart, Australia in 1909 through to his death in Vancouver, Canada in 1959. Culled from over 11,000 images in the author's personal collection (many rarely or never before published), from the author's own travels around the world to photograph locations key to Flynn's life, and with text gathered from four years research in the Warner Bros. Archives, the USC Cinematic Arts Library, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Flynn's colorful life was lived out on the world stage and a better candidate for a book of this style would be hard to find." [provided by the publisher].


    With the possible exception of Marilyn Monroe, more books have been written about Errol Flynn than any other film actor. Alas, biographers have not always been generous or forgiving. Indeed, in the first four decades or so after his death most of the Flynn literature focused on the more sensationalist aspects of his life and career, tarring him with a broad brushstroke: lecher, alcoholic, deadbeat, drug addict, Nazi sympathizer, connoisseur of underage girls, and all around out-of-control hedonist. Few public figures have had such a checkered afterlife. Lost in all the lurid, and largely unsubstantiated, haze was anything meaningful about Flynn the actor, or the writer [1].
    But around the year 2000 things began to change, and it’s probably no coincidence that about this time new forms of technology, principally the DVD and the Internet, were just beginning to hit their stride. In the meantime a few pro-Flynn books appeared, including the first scholarly biography [2]. Another factor was the Flynn centenary of 2009, which helped keep the momentum going, and a few years later there was the generally sympathetic portrayal in the film The Last of Robin Hood. Today there are numerous blogs and fan pages, and perhaps more important, DVDs that have been issued which represent a huge swath of the Flynn oeuvre, all of which give us a more rounded portrait of the man and artist.
    Packed full of letters, telegrams, notes, diary entries, receipts, cables, memos, images and various other memorabilia, The Illustrated Life Chronology is more a huge scrapbook, lovingly collected and organized, than a coffee table book or conventional biography. Author Florczak is to be commended for yeoman service in what was obviously a labor of love. While the book is vaguely pro-Flynn, Florczak doesn’t play the role of apologist or vilifier, rather he lets the material speak for itself, and likewise lets the man literally speak for himself. Especially welcome are the images, which include posters of all the films. Also of note are the many informal photos of Flynn and friends, associates and family, which capture Flynn in more candid moments. The rich detail provides aspects of Flynn's life that aren't so well covered: to wit, it struck me how often he was ill and thus the work on a film had to be shut down while he recuperated. This is surprising in view of his athletic, energetic screen image.
    It would be misleading to say that with the present book the long overdue rehabilitation of Errol Flynn is complete. No such thing; he was a man of many shadings and complexities, and it's just too tempting for biographers and commentators to focus on the lurid and scandalous aspects of his life and career. Then again, all the huffing and puffing may be to some extent moot. As  author Florczak points out, for all the fame in his lifetime and the more recent comeback, if you will, he remains a marginal figure in comparison to his better known contemporaries. Perhaps the explanation is Flynn's (in his later years) dissolute public persona, or that he was never taken seriously as an actor, or that the heroic swashbuckler film has gone out of fashion (when a swashbuckler movie does get made these days, it tends to be parody). Whatever the case, the present volume is in its modest way a corrective, and as such allows us to better appreciate as a human being and artist the phenomenon that was Errol Flynn. In short Errol Flynn: the Illustrated Life Chronology is catnip for Flynn fans and will appeal to anyone interested in golden age Hollywood.

    1 An exception to this rather tawdry history was, ironically enough, Flynn’s own autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, published only a few months after his death. Admittedly of dubious accuracy in many of the details, nonetheless the book has a spiritual truth and honesty as it captures the voice and panache of the man himself. And it isn’t totally self-serving: Flynn recalls with relish, sometimes a little too much relish, the more rascally side of his personality. Still, Wicked Ways remains the most exuberant and entertaining biography of a film actor to date, perhaps of any Hollywood personality.  
    2 Thomas McNulty, Errol Flynn: the Life and Career, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.