CBS’s ‘Wicked Ways’ offers Flynn-flam
By Bob D. Matteo
Errol Flynn was the Hollywood star as irresistible rake – his off-screen exploits adding to his appeal as the dashing leading man of such movies as “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “Objective Burma.” Flynn seemed remarkably free of hypocrisy too. His highly readable best-selling autobiography – “My Wicked, Wicked Ways,” is anything but your typical “authorized” whitewash of a star’s peccadilloes. A standard sentence reads: I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British Museum or the Metropolitan – in the same spirit of curiosity.” By the time he dies at 50 in 1959, this adventurer-provocateur had survived however barely a stint in the Spanish Civil War, battles with studio head Harry Warner and a sensational statutory rape trial.
One expects “My Wicked, Wicked Ways...The Legend of Errol Flynn” (CBS Jan 21) the three-hour adaptation of the star’s autobiography to dish up some choice dirt, while providing a colorful behind-the-scenes portrait of the decadent, free-wheeling Hollywood of the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Primarily this moderately diverting movie tends to offer just the sort of whitewash that Flynn himself tried to avoid. Very little of what we see could pass for wickedness – the sexual innuendoes and cavorting are of the banal sort that Dynasty traffics in. It all seems innocuous – even the side trip to the Mexican whorehouse. There’s no suggestion of Flynn’s rumored bisexuality or of any other sexual kinks.
Canadian-born Duncan Regehr plays Flynn with a colorless suavity that is characteristic of the movie as a whole Regehr is an Omar Sharif type – with Sharif’s limitations as an actor, too. What’s missing from his performance – and from this comic- strip bio in general – is any sense of the complex, reckless man behind the myth. Surely, the real Flynn had more lascivious fun than Regehr is allowed to have on network TV. This Flynn is a greatly simplified figure- a Hollywood sheik who ends up a victim of the American Public’s desire for outlaw heroes that it can revere and then excoriate.
Along the way to its abrupt, inconclusive finish this made-for-TV-movies offers some period flavor and atmosphere, and some lively supporting performances by Darren McGain, Barbara Hershey and Barrie Ingham. Yet, in its entirety, “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” is about as credible as a portrait of Hollywood stardom as the lamentable “Gable and Lombard.”