Errol Flynn Westerns Collection (Montana / Rocky Mountain / San Antonio / Virginia City)
by Michael Curtiz
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Actor: Alexis Smith, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Miriam Hopkins, Randolph ScottDirector: Michael Curtiz
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Box set, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Original recording remastered
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 389 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-08-26
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- MONTANA Big Sky Country is cattle country! But sheep rancher Flynn has other ideas in this gun-blazing range-war saga. Alexis Smith co-stars.ROCKY MOUNTAIN The Civil War comes to California, and rebel leader Flynn finds that marauding Shoshones may be fiercer foes than the Union Army. With future Mrs. Flynn Patrice Wymore.SAN ANTONIO A man is only as good as his aim when Flynn rides into ol? San A
DVD Reviews of Errol Flynn Westerns Collection (Montana / Rocky Mountain / San Antonio / Virginia City)
DVD Review: Flynn's Westerns - A Unique Sub-Genre
Summary: 4 Stars
There are westerns (with John Wayne, Gary Cooper, directed by John Ford, Howard Hawks, not to mention Roy Rogers and Gene Autry) and then there are Errol Flynn's westerns. I think I saw some of Flynn's westerns on TV before I saw any of the others and was therefore very surprised to find that DODGE CITY, VIRGINIA CITY, THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON, etc., were unlike any of the other films in the genre. That said, these films created a unique western sub-genre on their own terms, mainly because Flynn was a unique screen presence and Warners figured out how to tailor stories to his personality.
This four-film collection brings together the less celebrated films. 1940's VIRGINIA CITY is basically a "prequel" to 1939's DODGE CITY with Flynn, Alan Hale, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams playing virtually the same characters they did in the first film. My guess is that the romantic subplot with Miriam Hopkins (she and Flynn have absolutely NO screen chemistry)would have confused the love match in DODGE CITY had they played the same characters. Basically, VIRGINIA CITY is a shaggy dog story; that is, it starts off great even showing some influence of Ford's STAGECOACH with its extended sequences on a stage coach (and repeating one of STAGECOACH's best stunt scenes). But the plot gets so involved with so many characters that there's enough story for three films. You know things have gotten out of hand when you find yourself rooting for the Bogart character.
VIRGINIA CITY's saving grace is that it is an expertly made production and the money really shows on the screen. Technicolor would have been nice (as in DODGE CITY) but the b/w photography is crisp. Max Steiner contributes another fine score although some of the story's characters, like Frank McHugh, seem to get lost in the plot. This epic-scale film is a testament to the confidence Warners had in Errol Flynn at that time. It seems that almost every film he made during those years was an epic production and Flynn, at 30 years of age, never looked better.
Fast forward five years to the next film in this set, SAN ANTONIO, and we see more of a Roy Rogers influence than John Ford - Flynn even sings in this one! Glorious Technicolor is back (which makes up for a multitude of other shortcomings) but Flynn has developed a new screen persona by now. Gone is the noble Robin Hood-like knight that he more or less played in his films up to 1942. His well-publicized trial for statutory rape (he was acquitted however) persuaded Warners to reshape his character along the lines of Rhett Butler - a seeming gentleman with a shady past, decent people didn't speak to him - and this is the Flynn we see in films from about 1943 on.
SAN ANTONIO is Flynn's fifth western (of eight) and the first that was not an historical western. Played strictly as post-WWII escapist entertainment, Flynn at 35 is beginning to look like his dissipated lifestyle has started to catch up with him. His eyes were wonderfully expressive in earlier films but by now they're expressionless (check his closeups if you don't believe me). Teamed for the third time with Alexis Smith, they make a nice romantic team that almost (but not quite) makes you forget about Olivia De Havilland. Paul Kelly plays the dapper villain who seems to be based on Bruce Cabot's character in DODGE CITY. In real life, Kelly earlier served a prison term for a fist fight that turned fatal. But the climatic showdown between Flynn and Kelly that we've all been waiting for fizzles out. Duking it out in the deserted Alamo (we have a feeling that Kelly can take care of himself even against Flynn), the fight suddenly ends when Kelly falls down and hits his head against a rock, presumably killing him. What kind of climax is this!!!!
1950's MONTANA is the third film in the set but Technicolor seems to be used to disguise the fact that this film is a 76 minute B-picture. By now, Flynn was starting to really look haggard and Warners was pulling the plug on his films (and for the first time loaning him out to other studios). The previous year's ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN was Warners' last effort to promote Flynn in a big budget film. His absences, lateness, and general lack of cooperation on JUAN convinced the studio to just let him serve out the remaining films in his contract in routine productions. By 1950, the studio was hiring Gary Cooper and James Stewart for big budget westerns that a few years earlier almost certainly would have starred Flynn. MONTANA reunited Flynn and Alexis Smith for the fourth and last time - she looks ageless while he has clearly seen better days.
The last film in this set is ROCKY MOUNTAIN, a better production than MONTANA but a far cry from DODGE CITY, VIRGINIA CITY, SANTA FE TRAIL, and THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON, which were made about a decade earlier. His co-star from most of those earlier films, Big Boy Williams, is with Flynn in ROCKY MOUNTAIN and there are moments when Williams almost seems to say to Flynn, "What happened - how did we wind up in this thing?" (OK, you can accuse me of having an overactive imagination.)
If you enjoy any of the earlier Flynn westerns, you will want to have this set although it unintentionally documents the decline of one of Hollywood's greatest stars. Finally, I can recommend the book, "THE FILMS OF ERROL FLYNN" by Tony Thomas, et al. Originally published in 1969, it is chock full of great photos, credits, etc. from all his films. My only complaint is that the authors are dismissive of many good Flynn films - but they made their judgments almost 40 years ago. A number of the Flynn films beyond the essentials (CAPTAIN BLOOD, ROBIN HOOD, SEA HAWK) have grown in stature through the years as it has become obvious that we will never see the likes of Flynn or the wonderful films that Warners produced for him ever again.
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Description of Errol Flynn Westerns Collection (Montana / Rocky Mountain / San Antonio / Virginia City)
ERROL FLYNN WESTERNS COLLECTION - DVD MovieErrol Flynn is primarily recognized for his swashbuckling roles, but let's adjust that. As Frank Thompson notes in his characteristically droll and well-informed commentary on Virginia City, Flynn was born to star in period pictures, and that included Westerns. This son of Tasmania slipped into Stetson and six-gun mode without strain, and without having to conceal his somewhere-in-the-British-Empire accent. Which is only fair: the director of his first three Wild West outings was the Hungarian-born, English-language-mauling Michael Curtiz. Not to beat about the sagebrush, the best of Flynn's Westerns--the Curtiz-directed Dodge City (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940), plus Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On (1942)--are not included in this set. Of the four films that are, Curtiz's Virginia City (1940) is much the liveliest, and certainly the most handsome. Set in the closing months of the Civil War, it's about Confederate loyalists making one last effort to stave off defeat on the battlefields back East by transporting five million dollars in gold from the Nevada mining town of the title. Union spy Flynn spars with Rebel counterpart Randolph Scott, as both also vie for the love of saloon songstress and gold-plot mastermind Miriam Hopkins. Warner Bros. hoped to replicate the Dodge City hit formula, even recycling the same town set (albeit in black and white instead of Technicolor) and re-teaming cinematographer Sol Polito (who was better at black and white anyway), screenwriter Robert Buckner (strewing illogic and coincidence with abandon), and composer Max Steiner, as well as Flynn sidekicks Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. But who thought of (mis)casting Humphrey Bogart as a Mexican bandito--possibly the nadir of Bogie's life as a contract player? On the upside, extensive location shooting around Flagstaff, Arizona, gave Virginia City by far the most striking scenery of any Flynn Western.
Flynn spent the WWII years concentrating on war-related films, but 1945 found him saddling up again for San Antonio (or did it?--he's clearly doubled in horseback longshots). He plays a Texas rancher turned de facto outlaw by virtue of losing his land in a cattle war and being driven into Mexican exile. Never fear, he's soon finessed his way back across the border and set about undermining those who wronged him and his friends. San Antonio was Flynn's fifth Western but only the second in Technicolor--bright, bold color, and lots of it. Truth to tell, it's a bit of a mishmash, with so much skulking around upstairs, downstairs, and backstage at chief villain Paul Kelly's Bella Union music-hall saloon that it begins to resemble Feydeau farce. The script is credited to Alan Le May (The Searchers) and W.R. Burnett, and the direction to David Butler--though Raoul Walsh is known to have lent a hand (surely "Get that drunken cat off the bar" is a Walsh touch). Leading lady Alexis Smith sings a few songs and her brassy red hair is grand for Technicolor, but her romance with Flynn is a pale shadow of their delightful pairing three years earlier in Gentleman Jim. Warner Home Video has yet to release Walsh's Silver River (1948), the last Flynn Western to boast grade-A production values and co-stars, so that leaves two virtual B movies from 1950 to round out the set. In the 76-minute Montana, an Australian sheepman ventures into Big Sky country, "where cattle was king," and overcomes years of bloody resistance to the idea that sheep and cattle can coexist not only peacefully but profitably. Alexis Smith, who had earned her first billing opposite Flynn in 1941's Dive Bomber and is paired with him for the last time here, inveigles him into a frontier duet.
The somewhat better Rocky Mountain (83 minutes) borrows a leaf from Virginia City to propose another Confederate adventure in the West, an Army patrol attempting to join with Rebel sympathizers in California and foment an armed uprising. The mission gets sidetracked at Ghost Mountain, where the presence of hostile Shoshone Indians urges Rebs and Yankee cavalry to make common cause. Flynn plays it low-key throughout, as though his character, a man of honor in a world that scarcely recalls the notion, had already accepted the lostness of his cause. Each member of Flynn's small command has enough of a backstory to sit around and philosophize about--a narrative tactic anticipating how 90 percent of screentime in the coming decade of Westerns on TV would be filled. William Keighley (who would direct Flynn's last Warner film, The Master of Ballantrae, in 1953) breaks things up as best he can with the multi-tiered rockscape setting. Incidentally, Flynn's leading lady this time is his third and final wife, Patrice Wymore, cast as a Union officer's fiancée whose stagecoach gets ambushed nearby. Each of the films rates its own disc, with accompanying "Warner Night at the Movies" shorts and trailers from the season when the movie was released. Only two boast a commentary, and of these, only the one on Virginia City is worth the listen. Visual and technical quality is excellent overall. --Richard T. Jameson
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