Network Films Tackle Tabloids, Errol Flynn
By Fred Rothenberg – AP Television Writer
Vicksburg Evening Post, Vicksburg, Miss., Jan 1, 1985
New York – Movie rogue Errol Flynn was the kind of king-size character who would make great copy for the screaming headlines of today’s checkout-counter tabloids.
Tonight, those sleazy supermarket papers get appropriately rude treatment from ABC’s Scandal Sheet,” while Flynn is handled with kid gloves in CBS’ competing “My Wicked, Wicked Ways...The Legend of Errol Flynn.”
Although both films are watchable, “Scandal Sheet,” starring Burt Lancaster in a rare ATV role, is more substantial. “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” is engagingly light-hearted, but viewers will leave the three-hour film feeling they’ve missed the full story.
Based on Flynn’s autobiography, the movie is a whitewash, a glorified, sanitized profile of an on-and off-screen idol who comes across as more college prankster than wicked womanizer.
All his fights are provoked by the other guy, and his drinking is mostly social. His escapades are more the harmless kind glamorized in today’s macho beer commercials.
It appears CBS intentionally made an apolitical film. Published reports of Flynn’s friendship with an alleged Nazi spy are swept under the table. In fact, the friend, a Dutchman, here becomes an adventurous Irishman played by Darren McGavin.
If you can accept a little sugar-coating and see the film merely as an amiable peek into a bygone Hollywood era, then “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” can be “jolly good fun, sport,” as Flynn would say.
Duncan Regehr, a strapping Canadian actor who was a bronzed gladiator in “Last Days of Pompeii” plays the character with an endearing twinkle. Above everything else, Flynn seems to have been a charmer.
Hal Linden is also believable as movie mogul Harry Warner, who was bluster, shrewd pragmatic and even fatherly in his dealings with Flynn.
The film begins with Flynn’s arrival in Hollywood in 1935 as a 26-year-old unknown and ends with his acquittal in a 1943 statutory rape case. In between, there’s his failed marriage to French film queen Lili Damita (Barbara Hershey), his battles with the movie studio and assorted adventures, including a stint fighting in the Spanish Civil War when he was wounded and reported to be dead by at least one newspaper account.