And Also Starring Errol Flynn: The Action Movies of Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland was born in 1916 in Tokyo, Japan. She started acting in eighth-grade school plays, moved on to a part in Max Reinhardt's stage version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and made her film debut in 1935. (I'm condensing a little.) Also in 1935, she was cast (over Jean Muir and Bette Davis) in the swashbuckling adventure film Captain Blood. Her costar was a virtual unknown from Australia who was being sold as an Irishman: Errol Flynn. Flynn got the part because Robert Donat, Ronald Colman, Leslie Howard, Clark Gable, Brian Aherne, and Ian Hunter were unavailable. Over the next six years, the pair would costar in eight films together; two of those (Four's a Crowd and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) weren't action movies. This essay discusses the six that were. It was intended as an entry in Nathaniel's Action Heroine Blog-a-Thon, but my blog was still broken on that happy day, and then I got overwhelmed with work.

CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935)

She's the neice of the evil governor of Jamaica; he's a pacifist doctor convicted of treason and sent to Jamaica as a slave. He ends up a pirate, and she ends up one of his captives. We first meet her when she buys Flynn at auction and seems genuinely shocked that he's not grateful; her benificence turns into good-natured spite as she taunts him by continually coming to his rescue. They have some nice sparring scenes, her snappishness, as usual, coming across as more genuine than his. She can't sell the bashfulness that's supposed to overcome her when he's blunt about his feelings for her, but there's a hint of the complexity of her earlier scenes when she gives him a near-predatory, lips-parted glance after slapping him for being so forward.

I like her quite a bit in the early scenes, but by the time the pirate action gets going, she's devolved into a rather typical "the girl" performance, shackled in part by some awful lines that nobody could manage with dignity—"go back to your ladies of Tortuga who are thrilled by your bold, lawless ways!"—but also giving in to the temptation to both overact a little more than is necessary, and at times to grow curiously inert. It doesn't help that she's saddled with increasingly stupefying costumes, a horrific laugh-giggle, and even an ugly little dog to emphasize her girlishness, to which she contributes with ample eyelash fluttering and that hands-clasped-to-bosom thing.

There is an interesting scene at the end when she spoofs the typical hand-wringing overacting one expects from "the girl" in an adventure film, but I'm not sure what to make of it. It's quite funny, but she is, after all, spoofing her own performance up to that point. Does she realize it? I think so, or at least I'm going to assume she does, because in the denouement she's already doing a comic escalation of the hand-wringing when she thinks her uncle is going to hang Blood, not knowing that Blood is the new governor. The final scene just takes it the next step into outright comic hysterics. De Havilland has a flair for comedy (despite what Charles Higham thinks), and she clearly relishes getting to overact in that final scene.

Behind the scenes: Charles Higham, in Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Haviland and Joan Fontaine (New York: Coward-McCann, 1984, p. 52) tells us that de Havilland fell hopelessly in love with her handsome scumbag of a costar; he reciprocated by cheating on his wife, Lili Damita, with every other female on the set except Olivia. Flynn's legendary drinking sometimes disrupted the shooting schedule, as did de Havilland's unconscionable decision to choose her own costumes, both of which resulted in sternly-worded missives from Hal Wallis.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1936)

She's the daughter of a military man; he's a dashing soldier in the doomed brigade made famous by Tennyson's poetic celebration of bad military decisions. This features what seems like de Havilland's lowest screen time-to-film length ratio; she's barely in it, and although she's involved in a central love triangle (the other person is Patric Knowles as Flynn's brother), she seems absent from much of the film. She does get one action-type scene: During a harrowing massacre, she struggles against an enemy soldier who's attempting to do her harm. Flynn saves her, and she repays him by patching the bullet wound in his shoulder and, later, dumping him for his little brother.

She doesn't give a very good performance. There’s far too much head-waggling and breathiness for emphasis; at times, she sounds like Bette Davis trying to sound coy, which is a scary thing to hear coming out of de Havilland. Throughout, her voice sounds pinched and overly theatrical, as if she’s trying, and failing, to make a bigger screen impression to compensate for her smaller part. She wrings her hands through the dramatic scenes, that cute little pained, worried look permanently etched on her face—early in her career, that was her best look, and she knew it. It doesn’t help that director Michael Curtiz, who didn’t like her, favors Flynn in all of their two-shots: he’s in the middle of the frame, and she’s pushed off to the side.

Behind the scenes: Flynn embarked on a campaign of tasteless practical jokes to annoy Olivia, including putting a giant rubber snake in her panties (this fits with his own autobiography, in which he relishes his descriptions of the practical jokes he played on his costars). Director Michael Curtiz had obscenity-laced screaming matches with Flynn throughout the shoot, which was miserable for Olivia anyway because she had to ride 80 miles a day to a sweltering desert location.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)

She's Maid Marian; he's Robin Hood. De Havilland is busy in this 1938 teamup with Flynn. She changes her allegiance from Norman to Saxon, falls for an outlaw, hatches a brilliant escape plan, turns into a spy, and gets locked in the dungeon. And this is the first time I noticed the little dimple in her chin when she's doing her patented excited/afraid face. One of the best things about watching her closely is seeing how she manages to add little flourishes to sometimes thinly-written parts, often with wordless gestures that add another dimension to a scene. Just after Flynn's dished the dirt on nasty Prince John, he kisses her hand and then they turn to go. We cut to a long shot of them walking, hand in hand, and for a split second she hesitates, raising her head a bit and taking a breath, as if she's still conflicted about the decision to go along with him, before she trots to catch up to him.

The script sort of jerks her around: sometimes she's the smartest person in the room, and sometimes she's pretty stupid. After her world-shifting walk in the woods with Robin, you'd think that her opinion of Prince John would fall a little, but in the next scene (the famous archery contest) she's sitting happily by his side, incredulous that anything fishy could be going on. When Robin is captured, she's the one who hatches the escape plot, which is one of the most active things that she gets to do in any of the films with Flynn, but her spying career is dreadful: she thinks merely hunching over in plain sight is enough to keep her hidden, and when she's interrupted in writing a letter to warn Robin, she hides it in the only receptacle in the room and then glances at it repeatedly, her cute little brow crinkled up in her "concerned" face, until Rathbone figures out what's going on. No surprise she ends up in chokey. She overdoes it once in a while, relying too much on the emphatic head shake to make her points. Still, it's one of her best roles in the Flynn films.

Behind the scenes: Olivia had to memorize her part while shooting another film, Gold Is Where You Find It. Flynn's drinking grew worse, turning him into "a monster who allegedly would make love to any living thing" (Higham's words, p. 68), and one night he attempted to break down Olivia's door and rape her. He was finally dissuaded by his stunt double. Keep in mind that Higham's hatred and character assassination of Flynn are legendary, and it's perfectly likely that he made this incident up or inflated a drunken attempt at seduction.

DODGE CITY (1939)

She's the niece of a doctor; he's a hard-riding cowboy who gets made sheriff of Dodge City. She has to spend half the film hating him, then of course they fall in love. She's pretty active in this one, by turns a Sunday-school teacher, a society columnist, and an investigative journalist; she uncovers the bad guys' dastardly train-robbery plans; she's taken hostage and then involved in a gunfight (sadly, she doesn't do any shooting), at the end of which she's potentially in the path of bullets (peeking under Flynn's elbow). Pretty hairy stuff for a de Havilland character.

However, she doesn't seem very interested. She's really muted and seems uncommitted. We can see that she's feeling or thinking something, but her body language doesn't sell it. Her line readings are off; it often sounds like she's just reading out loud. There's one particularly bad scene where she's involved in a conversation with Flynn and two others, and you can tell who's going to speak next by watching where she's looking. It's probably her worst performance in any of these films.

Behind the scenes: De Havilland was very upset at getting saddled (heh, it's a Western) with another Flynn film. She was "testy, irritable, even filled with fury during the entire shooting" (Higham, p. 77). She met and started dating Howard Hughes during the shooting, but not before Louella Parsons proclaimed that she was already married to the reclusive millionaire.

SANTA FE TRAIL (1940)

She's Kit Carson Holliday, daughter of a railroad baron; he's J.E.B. Stuart, fresh out of West Point. If she looked bored and lost in 1939's Dodge City, she makes up for it here as a fiery dark-haired beauty with an unlikely moniker that had me excited that she'd get to do some a-gunnin' and a-fightin', until I remembered that Kit Carson was a man. Still, she's a peach. The first word out of her mouth is a Texas-sized whoop at the West Point graduation ceremony when her brother Bob gets his handshake from Commandant Robert E. Lee. Bob's fellow graduates J.E.B. Stuart (Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan) (yes, Ronald Reagan plays the Son of the Morning Star, a role Flynn would take on the next year) decide she's the one for them, and she has a great time humoring both men. Although she's credited second, she has very little screen time; while the men are off being manly and shooting at one another, she's waiting in the wings to steal her five or six scenes.

I’ve mentioned that she excelled at comedy, and she gets a few scenes to show off here. The wooing scenes, which usually featured a confident Flynn and a cocky Reagan, are played for laughs, as she goodnaturedly leads Reagan on and halfheartedly staves off Flynn's advances. She makes great use of her eyebrows; she has a way of raising them just a hair—a combination of mocking and challenging—that makes me melt every time (she used this to great effect the following year in The Strawberry Blonde). She obviously relishes getting a break from all the lacey frippery she usually has to wear; in an early scene she's covered in dirt, wearing a torn skirt and calling people "ornery cusses," something that her many drawing-room dramas didn't allow.

However, her role is mostly dramatic, and her performance is richer and more emotionally resonant than in the previous film. She's one of the only characters who can see both sides of the slavery debate as well as what the future holds. She's the only major character who is allowed to acknowledge that John Brown's cause is just, even if his actions are immoral; poor Ronald Reagan attempts to speak up in favor of abolitionists, only to cave in immediately when Flynn lectures him, but de Havilland won't back down. There's a silly scene where several officers consult a Native American fortune teller and learn that soon they'll be bitter enemies, but we can see in de Havilland's unsurprised anguish that none of this is news to her. The real surprise—well, it's not a surprise, since the formula requires them to get married—is that she marries Flynn in the end, since she already knows where his passionate committment to the South will lead them. (No pics for this—I moved, and I can't find the DVD!)

Behind the scenes: De Havilland's reward for her triumph in Gone with the Wind was yet another Flynn vehicle, and she wasn't pleased. She was seeing James Stewart and fending off Van Heflin's advances; Flynn was (according to Higham's unsubstantiated claims, p. 116, which have been disproved elsewhere) busy helping Nazis enter the United States, and flubbing his lines a lot.

THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (1941)

She's the daughter of a wealthy businessman; he's George Armstrong Custer. She was heartily sick of appearing in these films, but her growth as an actress—maybe just her increasing ability to keep her feelings about the quality of the film from appearing in her performance—is apparent, as she gives her best performance in a film costarring Errol Flynn. Her introduction to the film is one of the comic highlights of the series: he's on guard duty and can't talk, and she prattles on at him, increasingly agitated that he won't pay any attention to her. Of course they fall in love. The generally chaste, adolescent love of the previous films, however, is replaced with something that implies the actual physical aspects of romance: there's a kissing scene where she's nearly horizontal, a far cry from the brief embraces of the other films, and she makes a couple of cracks (delivered with fetching raised eyebrows) that border on the raunchy (well, as close to raunch as you could get in 1941).

The last scene they shot together was her best: Custer's about to ride off into what he knows will be a massacre, and she knows he's not coming back, but the code of the stiff upper lip won't allow either to admit it. She pretends that she always writes in her diary about "premonitions of disaster," and he pretends to believe her. They both pretend to be flippant; at one point she asks, "Don't I look happy?" Of course she doesn't. She overdoes the twitchy-lip thing toward the end, but for the most part it's a flawless scene, and even Flynn rises to the occasion. And then she was done with him. Her last scene in the film (it was shot out of order) is a bit of a letdown—she's too fidgety and distracted in a scene that doesn't call for distraction—but it doesn't damage her overall performance. She seems to be doing an unnecessary accent that comes and goes, but it's a minor problem as well.

Behind the scenes: Even another Oscar nomination (this one for Hold Back the Dawn) wasn't enough to save her from her final Flynn feature, which Higham claims she had to do because her sister Joan Fontaine refused the part, "thus compelling Olivia to accept it" (how would that work? they were under contract to different studios. anyway). This role forced her to turn down a Leo McCarey comedy, the Bette Davis role in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and the female lead in Kings Row, any of which she would have preferred. The studio was angry at her for various things (like wanting to be treated like a human being), so they forced her to star in The Male Animal at the same time, and she became sick and depressed. At the end of the year, she learned that Jack Warner had decided to cast her sister Joan in The Constant Nymph instead of Olivia.

CONCLUSION

I kept hoping that she'd get a chance to stab someone with a sword, even if the sword belonged to someone else, or shoot a desperado, even if she had to swoon into Flynn's arms immediately after. However, I'm not surprised that she never did: de Havilland was being groomed as a Serious Actress, and besides, what women of the 1930s and 1940s got to kick ass (outside of the comedies, that is)? When you think about what little help she got from Flynn, it's amazing how good she tended to be in these films (with a couple of exceptions). Acting opposite an overgrown wooden boy whose only expressions were cynical, happy, and angry must have been difficult, forcing her to carry scene after scene. (I'm not disparaging Flynn too much: he was certainly a handsome, dashing leading man who could pull off action scenes with aplomb, and he knew how to use his commanding voice and undeniable "presence" to his advantage. He just wasn't capable of any subtlety.) De Havilland went on to four Oscar nominations and two wins; Flynn went on to three statutory rape trials. Charles Higham (p. 53) tells us that in one of their first serious conversations together, she asked Flynn what he wanted from life, to which he replied, "success," which she took to mean fame and money. When he asked her what she wanted, she said "respect," which she certainly deserved and received. Just not always from Warner Brothers.