Discussion of the merits of films based on real-life subjects often involve words like “truth” and “accuracy”. When it comes to stories about Errol Flynn, the intrepid and charismatic Tasmanian who became a Hollywood megastar in the 1930s, such descriptors should be banished and anyone who dares use them publicly shamed.
Or perhaps, in a more Flynnian mode of punishment: forced run through a jungle naked then walk the plank of the nearest pirate ship.
The actor’s self-mythologising autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways out-sensationalised any subsequent depiction of his life. I put it down thinking I’d just consumed the greatest amount of codswallop ever given the label of “nonfiction”, though it was a fabulously entertaining read – stuffed to the gills with anecdotes involving life and death, opium, booze, women, swords, arrows, bar fights, high seas and lowlifes.
The director Russell Mulcahy’s Queensland-shot period swashbuckler In Like Flynn adapts a novel written by Flynn himself, Beam Ends, set during his pre-acting years when the future star supposedly embarked on a quest to locate a stash of gold in New Guinea. It is both celebration and embellishment of his legacy, directed by a man who is a bit of a legend himself. Mulcahy’s oeuvre includes the Ozploitation film Razorback (AKA “Jaws on Trotters”), two Highlander movies and an array of music videos including the Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star.
Flynn’s legacy is tied to the idea that the story of our lives and the narrative of real-life events are two very different things. Introduced as “a mostly true account of the Hollywood star’s early adventures”, the plot kicks off in the jungles of New Guinea where Flynn (Thomas Cocquerel) leads a small expedition of US film-makers. When the cameraman, Ronald (Lochlyn Munro), asks the director, Joel Schwartz (Dan Fogler), where he found this funny Australian fellow, Schwartz responds: “He was the only schmuck who answered the ad.”
Mulcahy and his screenwriters (four are credited, including Flynn’s grandson Luke) whisk the audience through a series of rapid-fire escapades. The group encounter a human skull with a maggot crawling through an eye socket, before looking up to discover a severed arm dripping with blood. Flynn saves a man from falling off a steep precipice before a vicious tribe arrive baying for blood – kicking off a chase sequence that culminates with a daring escape through crocodile-infested waters.
The story arrives in Sydney circa the early 1920s, showing a partially constructed Sydney Harbour Bridge on a stormy day – and marking the second occasion in less than a month that a new Australian film has presented dreamily nostalgic images of the city’s past (after the drama Ladies in Black). Flynn returns to the high seas to pursue the aforementioned gold, with three companions: the ex-bootlegger Rex (Corey Large), an English gentleman, Dook (William Moseley), and an emotionally volatile beefcake, Charlie (Clive Standen).
All the cast are slightly (and quite deliberately) over the top to accommodate the film’s tone, which is sort of real and sort of not: historical drama by way of Saturday matinee. Cocquerel leads the cast with an appealing and slightly cartoonish performance that has more than a whiff of Indiana Jones about it. David Wenham arrives 45 minutes in to steal the show as the fictitious Christian Travers, mayor – and priest – of Townsville. With a pencil-thin curly moustache and the suspicious, flustered demeanour of a vaudeville hack, Wenham is irresistibly eccentric.
When Flynn and his trio of pals set off on their ocean adventure – perhaps, in an scene left on the editing room floor, singing “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” – my mind shot back to the 1935 classic Captain Blood, which is rightly considered one of the subject’s best films. Flynn gives a vintage performance as a physician transformed by several twists of fate into a pirate. You could re-release that film in cinemas today, unchanged, and I am certain audiences would still love it.
Mulcahy is also working with the mantra of “good, old-fashioned entertainment” for In Like Flynn, coming up with a kind of Hergé-from-down-under. There are limitations to this sort of approach, particularly if you’re not in on the joke or are expecting the kind of ultra-lavish sets associated with large-scale Hollywood productions. But this is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.
• In Like Flynn opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 11 October
