Like most Hollywood bio-pics, this one makes agreeable wallpaper - a more-or-less truthful chronicling of a filmstar's career against an evocative period backdrop, that does not enable great dramatic effects.
The opening words are symptomatic of the limp script: "I was just 26 years old when I arrived on the rugged shores of California...The year was 1935." They should have binned that quite needless footnote and cut straight to "Are you Flynn? We're all waiting for you. The director's mad as hell!", referencing his eternal upsetting of other people's lives, while always able to charm his way through.
Flynn is played by an enthusiastic Duncan Regehr, tall and handsome enough to carry the part, but lacking the aggression and the devilish guile of the original, so for example the fight scenes are embarrassingly artificial, as are the attempts at replicating the drunken carousing. More convincing by far is Hal Linden as studio boss Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers), locked in a constant elbow-game with Flynn over money. And Lee Purcell makes a remarkably lifelike and suitably demure Olivia de Havilland.
Less well-cast is Barbara Hershey as Flynn's French wife Lily Damita, while other figures like Bette Davis and Raoul Walsh have little more than walk-ons. And it gets irritating to hear about "a new bandleader called Benny Goodman" or the mention of Clark Gable winning the part of Rhett Butler.
One early glimpse of Flynn's health problems is significant (in a rather hammy collapse into a chair), as we learn that he is malarial as well as helplessly alcoholic and a chain-smoker, having to be rejected for war service at thirty. It is one irony of his career that his genuine swashbuckling days were long behind him by the time he reached Hollywood, and it was the camera, not Flynn, that had to be quick and nimble enough to create the famous effects.
Finally, they just had to feature the old story of John Barrymore's corpse being left propped up in Flynn's house, to frighten him when he got home from a bender. Proved apocryphal, on investigation.
