Follow that cad!
Patricia A. O’Brien’s ERROL FLYNN seeks to dig beneath the American myth of Errol Flynn to uncover the Australian man, tracing the odyssey from his Hobart birth to his Hollywood burial and his cultural afterlife.
Errol Flynn’s incredible life elicits competing emotions that run the full gamut from ardent admiration and curiosity to disgust.
Allotted power, privilege and entitlement, a man who lived well but so badly. How do you depict a person with so many conflicting versions and dimensions? Embodiment of masculine perfection to broken down addict. Exemplary gentleman, devoted father or apex sexual predator. Imperial hero or debauched playboy?
Whether warmed by him or warned off him, he remains, in O’Brien’s view, Australia’s greatest Hollywood icon.
Associate Professor Patricia A. O’Brien takes an academic, polemical view putting his life in social context. Would he have survived the Me Too movement? Would he have been cancelled in this cancel culture world.
He mesmerised millions around the world with his swordsmanship, swagger and smouldering sexuality as he played an array of heroes in Hollywood’s Golden Age. At the peak of his fame, he was tried for rape, an event that only amplified his fame and the myths around him.
The statuary rape accusations stuck, even though acquitted, just as the absurd Nazi agent book was discredited. Dead at fifty, life eternal through the firmament of film, immortality through immorality.
But just how enduring is that “immortality”? Does anyone under fifty really know or remember Errol Flynn? Does anyone watch his movies? Dead for nearly seventy years what is his relevance and does he really have a lasting legacy other than a hit song by Australian Crawl, a boulevard in his name at the Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park, and the dubious catch phrase In Like Flynn?
If you’re mad about the boy, way one or the other, the book, ERROL FLYNN, carries a certain cultural cache.
ERROL FLYNN by Patricia A. O’Brien is published by Allen & Unwin
