When Katy Perry’s “Firework” begins playing for the first time in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, it’s not especially noticeable. The song is part of the background music at Marineland, the aquatic park where Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) works as an orca trainer, one of several upbeat pop songs that serve to get the crowd excited during the routine animal performances in the outdoor amphitheater. It’s only after the minute-long section of the song has ended, and the soundtrack has shifted to tense orchestral music, that it becomes clear how indelibly “Firework” will be seared into Stephanie’s psyche, probably for the rest of her life.
Raffi Asdourian/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Pepe courtesy Matt Furie/mattfurie.com | Remix by Jason Reed
Werner Herzog, that hypnotic German filmmaker who once tried to murder his leading man, who taunted death atop a soon-to-erupt volcano, and who looking upon the screeching Amazon mused that he saw only pain and misery in the jungle, was on a press tour. He sat beside his producer Jim McNiel, both bundled up in the Park City cold, and listened politely as the Los Angeles Times Steve Zeitchik asked about his new film.
It was 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival, and Herzogs latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World made its debut in the festivals Doc Premieres section. The film saw Herzog turning his inimitable lens to the ramifications of modern technology, and initial reviews (at least those counted by Rotten Tomatoes) were uniformly positive. One critic for The Young Folkssaid Herzog took the same adventurous spirit that made him drag a cruise ship across a Peruvian jungle in Fitzcarraldo and put it toward exploring the labyrinth of the internets history. Many more remarked on the films wondrous, sobering, and truly Herzogian revelations about mans place in the midst of an unprecedented technological revolution.
Zeitchik asked Herzog directly, why make a film about the internet?
We should know in which world we are living, he responded. As thinking people, we should try to scrutinize our environment and know in which world we live.
Well, this is the world in which we live:
Lo and Behold is a commercial.
It was produced by Massachusetts-based network management company NetScout, in conjunction with New York ad agency Pereira & ODell; borne not from Herzogs own passions, but from those of a marketing team seeking to promote a corporation in the midst of a massive rebranding effort. Marketers might bristle at the exact term, commercial, preferring instead the term branded content, one tool in an industry-wise trend towards nearly-invisible advertising meant to implant a positive perception of a companys identity.
After Lo and Behold played Sundance, several reviewers mentioned NetScout had provided the funding, but not one writer took that detail further. Critics focused on the films structure and Herzogs larger-than-life persona, and no one stopped to ask just who NetScout was, and why they had made this film. Perhaps it was the promise of Herzogs integrity and character he had fought and earned for himself throughout his career as cinemas wild man that kept anyone from asking questions. In what world could the man, who has braved deserts, the antarctic, and war zones in the tireless pursuit of filmmaking, sell out?
Branding Cinema
Historically when one spoke of the cross section of advertising and filmmaking, they spoke of product placement – James Bond drinking Heineken in Skyfall, Tom Cruise wearing Aviators in Top Gun, or E.T.s beloved Reeses Pieces. But something different happens when advertising agencies realize that they dont just have to tag-along on a film, but can influence its very structure.
In the late 1990s, while scripting Cast Away, Tom Hanks and William Broyles Jr. approached FedEx with an unusual offer. They said let us use your companys likeness, and in exchange you can help produce the film. Hanks and Broyles problem was that the inciting event of Cast Away was the gruesomely detailed crash of a plane branded with FedExs markings.
[FedEx spokeswoman Sandra] Munoz said FedEx decided that the script highlighting the company’s humble origins, its global reach and can-do spirit outweighed the aircraft disaster. FedEx provided filming locations at its package sorting hubs in Memphis, Los Angeles and Moscow, as well as airplanes, trucks, uniforms and logistical support. A team of FedEx marketers oversaw production through more than two years of filming.
This new relationship in which a third partys marketing team oversaw the production of a high-budget film, foretold a major change in the way companies and cinema interact.
A managing director for FedEx said, “As we stepped back and looked at it, we thought, It’s not product placement, we’re a character in this movie. […] It’s not just a product on the screen. It transcends product placement.”
In 2001, a year after Cast Away, BMW pioneered their cinematic ad series The Hire. The premise was simple: Clive Owen posed through a series of stylish, high-production value action shorts. The Hire played at Cannes and was so successful that – in what must be some kind of a first – the Jason Statham hit The Transporter was based on the ads. The genius of The Hire is that they are not films about BMW, but films in which the style and power of the automobile act as the architectural underlay for a compelling narrative.
This is branded content. It is not an attempt to insert a brand into a work of art, but to insert a work of art into the brand. As Naomi Klein once described it: the goal [of a corporation] is no longer association, but merger with the culture.
Branded content is a graffiti artist covertly painting original work for a video game company, or a vodka brand working with a music festival to promote gender equality. At its best, it is The Lego Movie, in which the sensory experience of playing with LEGO blocks is lovingly evoked to tell a story. That films careful digital animation stands as not just some of the most impeccably textural filmmaking ever attempted, but as a cruise missile of nostalgia aimed at the viewer. The Lego Movienearly doubled the worth of its parent corporation.
Such a thing has never really existed in film before, but it is very similar to the early years of television, when companies like US Steel, Alcoa, or Kraft would pick up the tab for a show in exchange for the prestige of having their name on it. A great deal of powerful programs were produced in this era of television, but none free from compromises. Rod Serling was just one of many talented writers who found themselves increasingly stymied by his sponsors patter of seemly changes. In the introduction to the paperback edition of his great teleplay Patterns, Serling cautioned us about mixing corporations and art: I think it is a basic truth that no dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training, interest and instincts are cut of entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.
Censorship eventually drove Serling from writing about contemporary society to The Twilight Zone, where he could explore his stories of intolerance and bigotry in a politically-neutral fantasia.
A NetScout Production
Founded in 1984, NetScout specializes in network systems, producing both hardware and software. It was an early developer of packet sniffers, the technology that logs data being transferred over networks. Today, according to its own online bio, NetScout has a heavy focus on cybersecurity, anti-DDoS and Advanced Threat Solutions tech. It also provides web service performance platforms, cloud management, and packet brokers, among many other interconnected divisions.
All this to say, the company operates behind the scenes. It is not purchasing Super Bowl ad time to become a household name, rather its financial investments lie in the sustained prominence and upkeep of the internets infrastructure.
The seed of Lo and Behold formed in 2015, when NetScout was in the midst of a massive company-wide rebrand led by its then-CMO Jim McNiel, who would later participate next to Herzog in the films publicity tour. The company had spent the previous year making major corporate acquisitions, including the communications sector of Danaher Corporation, Arbor Networks, Fluke Networks, Tektronix Communications, and VSS Monitoring. The shopping spree consolidated their share of the communications market and helped the company more than double its revenue to the $1.3 billion it generates today. But NetScout remained a largely unheard of entity outside of the inner circle of the network management industry it had helped pioneer in the 1980s. The company needed a way to boost its status and reach new clients.
And so, Lo and Behold was born in the walls of Pereira & ODells New York office, where the agency has serviced clients such as Intel, Fifth Third Bank, and Procter & Gamble.
It was Pereira & ODells executive creative director Dave Arnold who approached McNiel with a fresh, but risky idea. They would make a feature length documentary celebrating the creation of the internet and the boundless potential of its future. It would engage consumers with a focus on the importance of the technological innovations being made today, and toast the creators and engineers who contract with NetScout for their cybersecurity and hardware needs. The kicker: It would be directed by Werner Herzog.
In a 2016 AdWeek reflection on the film, McNiel wrote that Herzog initially balked at the idea, telling NetScout: No! I do not do commercials.
But McNiel managed to convince Herzog the film was not a commercial, but a serious documentary that would explore the world-changing and potentially apocalyptic ramifications of the internet.
Speaking to McNiel this month, he told us there was no second choice for a director. If Herzog couldnt be won over, the entire project would be scrapped. Why?
Hes an icon, McNiel said. And hes a meme!
Herzog the Meme
Popular arthouse directors have long been a favorite target for ad firms. This past year, Herzogs friend and collaborator Errol Morris directed a series of 56 commercials for Wealthsimple, in which celebrities from all walks, including himself, tell anecdotes about handling their own finances. Wes Anderson has made ads for American Express, Darren Aronofsky has been recruited by Yves Saint Laurent, and Ridley Scott has made advertising history time again with his Hovis, Chanel, and Apple ads.
Many renowned directors from Scott to David Fincher to George Romero got their start making commercials. In Japan, Nobuhiko Obayashi was so good at TV spots he was given free reign by Toho to make his psychedelic freakout cult classic House. Even David Lynch, one of the staunchest opponents of product placement in cinema, has made commercials for Playstation, Gucci, and Clearblue Pregnancy Test. When asked during a Q&A if he finds this hypocritical, he answered bluntly: I do sometimes [direct] commercials to make money.
For Lynch, if the ads dont bleed into the art then there is no reason for purists to hold directors advertising works against them; after all Inland Empire probably didnt pay very many bills. Spike Lee has even opened up his own ad agency, and often blurs the line between his core filmography and his ad work, licensing to Nike and performing as his Mars Blackmon character from Shes Gotta Have It, retroactively making his feature debut something akin to after-the-fact branded content.
But Herzog was different. He came from the roiling, unfettered New German Cinema of Syberberg and Fassbinder, where they ranted and bled and snorted endless coke for their art. And even among that crowd, he was different. He came from the fringes, growing up in the mountains of Bavaria and making his first films with a camera he stole from a local university. In the 1970s and 80s, while his contemporaries in the movement like Volker Schlndorff and Wim Wenders went mainstream, he kept his distance. His adventures in storytelling have taken him to every continent on the planet, and he has further cemented his legend with tales of being arrested, threatened at gunpoint, forging documents, and picking locks to forbidden zones all in the pursuit of cinema. Alone, the troubled making of Fitzcarraldo has probably done more than anything else to create the idea of Werner Herzog in the mind of western audiences, that of a madman mystic lost in the jungle chasing truth and art while eschewing formulaic Hollywood methods of filmmaking. His explicit anti-commercialism has made him appear incorruptible to his fans, who still at every chance possible put on impersonations of his signature Black Forest accent.
Theres a concept in video game theory called ludonarrative dissonance. At its core, its about the interaction between a games themes (what it wants you to feel) and its mechanics (what it wants you to do), as well as any conflicts that might result when those two things intersect. An example of this would be a game that promotes themes of individuality and freedom while locking the player into a...
There’s a concept in video game theory called “ludonarrative dissonance.” At its core, it’s about the interaction between a game’s themes (what it wants you to feel) and its mechanics (what it wants you to do), as well as any conflicts that might result when those two things intersect. An example of this would be a game that promotes themes of individuality and freedom while locking the player...
Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggagewe may not know what character hes playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.
Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.
Waits doesnt consider himself foremost an actor. I do some acting, Waits tells Pitchfork. And theres a difference between I do some acting and I’m an actor. People dont really trust people to do two things well. If theyre going to spend money, they want to get the guy whos the best at what he does. Otherwise, its like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.
Waits first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallones 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. Its a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. When was the last time you was with a woman? Stallones character asks him. Probably before the depression, Mumbles says. What are you saving it for? Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. I dunno, Waits replies. Probably a big finish.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, Its a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.
Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggage—we may not know what character he’s playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.
Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits’ musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.
Waits doesn’t consider himself foremost an actor. “I do some acting,” Waits tells Pitchfork. “And there’s a difference between ‘I do some acting’ and ‘I’m an actor.’ People don’t really trust people to do two things well. If they’re going to spend money, they want to get the guy who’s the best at what he does. Otherwise, it’s like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.”
Waits’ first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallone’s 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. It’s a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. “When was the last time you was with a woman?” Stallone’s character asks him. “Probably before the depression,” Mumbles says. “What are you saving it for?” Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. “I dunno,” Waits replies. “Probably a big finish.”
In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits’ piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, “It’s a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.”
After any viewing of Errol Flynns The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one is tempted to say, They dont make em like that anymore. From the perfection of its casting, with Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper, to its lush score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to its unity of tone (despite a midcourse change of directors), to what historian David Thomson called its stained-glass Technicolor, it represents the apotheosis of a genre as well as an exemplar of what the old factory-style studios could deliver when the personnel on staff and the story they were telling found a near-perfect alchemy. However, Robin Hood had only dim antecedents and no successors, so to say, They dont make em like that anymore, isnt quite accurate. But for this one picture, They never made em is closer to the mark.
The swashbuckler genre, that of swords flashing in times ranging from the Dark Ages to the 18th century Caribbean to which Flynns greatest film belongs, began in 1920 when Douglas Fairbanks switched from comedies to action films with The Mark of Zorro. Right in that first picture, Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo established conventions that were repeated in film after film and still recur in cinematic cousins such as the Star Wars movies. The hero is, in the words of Robin Hood co-writer Norman Reilly Raine, a swashbuckling, reckless, rakehell type of character, who is in rebellion against corrupt government authority, but never government authority in generalthe swashbuckling hero is not an anarchist or terrorist, but in many senses a conservative who wants to see power exercised responsibly or by the right people. The hero is an expert with the sword and other weapons, but is also an acrobat, capable of amazing stunts such as riding down a mainsail on the point of a dagger (Fairbanks in his 1926 The Black Pirate). He wins his cause in one on one combat with the villain, usually in a long duel, after which he is often revealed to be a disguised noble, or at the very least forgiven for his trespasses against a government that had lost its way.
Zorro came out of pulp fiction by way of Baroness Orczys Scarlett Pimpernel, but as Fairbanks and others went on to capitalize on the films success, they found additional sources in the novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, The Black Swan, Scaramouche), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy), and the pirate and Robin Hood tales of Howard Pyle. Despite the deep well of material to adapt, the run of swashbucklers largely halted with the simultaneous decline of Fairbankshe was 46 in 1929, the year of The Iron Mask, his last genre film and the first in which, as if to underscore the passage of time, he diedand the arrival of sound.
It wasnt just that Fairbanks was now a bit old and somewhat paunchy for an action hero. Other actors might have picked up cloak and rapier, but nascent sound technology made it impractical for a hero to bounce all over the screen while delivering dialogue. As hilariously and accurately recalled in Singin in the Rain (1952), movies were almost back to the fixed camera and proscenium arch style of the early days, when filmmakers couldnt do much more than film plays as staged. Sound rapidly evolved to allow for more dynamic productions. In the meantime, Hollywood reveled in films set in contemporary times that explored sex, crime, and even the odd glimpse of nudityprominent swords gave way to prominent nipples.
Alas, the new candor only lasted so long due to the strict enforcement of the Production Code that began in 1934. Now the studios had to offer clean thrills, which is to say pure romance without innuendo and visceralbut not prurientexcitement. A small handful of successful 1934 filmsMGMs Treasure Island with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and a too-young Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, independent producer Edward Smalls The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as the revenge-minded Edmond Dantes, and the Britain-originating The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard as the title charactersuggested that public taste would welcome romantic adventure in place of earthier forms of romance.
Warner Brothers entry was Captain Blood. Donat initially committed to taking the title role of an Irish doctor who inadvertently finds himself on the wrong side of an attempt to overthrow King James II and is condemned to serve as a slave in the Jamaica colony, but he withdrew at the last minute for reasons that are still unclear but may have been as simple as a health issue and as complicated as his mistress refusing to spend several months in California. The films producers fantasized about Howard, Fredric March, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman (the last of whom would later excel in the 1937 swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda for David Selznick), and tested Brian Aherne and designated Bette Davis costar George Brent before studio head Jack Warner suggested they try Flynn. The 26-year-old Tasmanian was on the payroll, after all; might as well use him.
In retrospect, its amazing how all the elements of a successful Flynn swashbuckler came together at once, but again, for all the negatives inherent in the studio system, one plus was that it functioned as a huge sorting bin for talent that could be deployed as needed. Flynn and the director Michael Curtiz would be together for years. De Havilland, going on 20, was a film neophyte the studio was trying to establish. She and Flynn would eventually make another seven films together (eight if you count the review film Thank Your Lucky Stars) and tantalize the public with one of the screens great unconsummated but nevertheless real romances. Rathbone is on hand as an antagonist with a deadly sword (something he didnt have to fake), a role he would reprise not just in Robin Hood but in pictures as diverse as The Mark of Zorro (1940) opposite Tyrone Power and The Court Jester (1955) in tongue-twisting battle against Danny Kaye.
And then there was Flynn himself, vaulted instantly to stardom by the picture. The son of a marine biologist and a distant mother he came to despise, Flynn never completed his formal education due to the peripatetic existence required by his fathers career and his own propensity for getting expelled from whatever school his parents placed him in. By the time he was 18, he had worked as a mail clerk and a stevedore, and he competed as an amateur boxer before leaving Australia for New Guinea to prospect for gold. In addition to his efforts to get rich quick, he worked a series of jobs with the islands various tobacco and copra plantations, got into a series of scrapes he would spend the rest of his life embellishing, and somehow, in 1933, ended up playing Fletcher Christian in an Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. This seems to have put the idea of becoming an actor in his mind, and that year he went to Great Britain and got work in a repertory theater company. The next year he was the lead in the film Murder at Monte Carlo, a film financed by Warner Bros. to honor British laws requiring a certain percentage of films exhibited in the country must have originated there. Flynns work was promising enough to intrigue the studio (completing a kind of circle, he was recommended by an acquaintance, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and they brought him to Hollywood.
Critics have long considered Flynn a poor actor. If true, this would certainly be unsurprising given his journey from New Guinea knockabout to leading man took a little over a year, with training that consisted almost entirely of the 22 plays in which he performed for the Northampton Repertory Players in England. It was certainly true at times in Captain Blood. Flynn was nervous and his readings were often stiff. As he became more comfortable, Curtiz was ordered to reshoot certain scenes so that Flynn could give a better performance. Yet even in the finished film there are many lines that die in his mouth. He never was good at limning deeper emotions. Hes far more polished in his second film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Curtiz), and yet when hes asked to react to a brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians by tribesmen on the Indian frontier, he tosses off the line, Those poor little kids horrible, with all the anguish of a man ordering a ham sandwich. Its something hes saying, not feeling.
And yet, he was also able to convey a brio that few other actors, then or now, could equal. It is often remarked that Flynn could carry off a period costume in a way that contemporaries such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant could not. (Each had a famous flop in this regard, the former with Parnell, 1937, directed by John M. Stahl, and the latter with The Howards of Virginia, 1940, Frank Lloyd). Midway through Captain Blood, Peter Blood leads his fellow slaves to escape, capture a ship, and embark on a career of piracy with himself as captain. As they ready the ship to depart Jamaica, Flynn shouts, Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! Theres no chains to hold you now! Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind thats carrying us all to freedom!
Its a ridiculous speechno one really talks like that, least of all in 17th century Jamaica. Yet, while Flynn couldnt mourn murdered children on screen with any real passion, he could make lines like that believable. It doesnt hurt that he was beautiful. A joyous Flynn was simply radiant, his elation in liberation contagious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he could also bring a convincingly grim intensity to a duel to the death, which he animated not via the complexity of the swordplay (as a swordsman, Flynn was able to fake an excellence that far exceeded his technical ability) but through personality and character. Compare his climatic duel with Rathbone in Robin Hood to the endless and mostly mute balletics of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen that close Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas, God help us). There is an exchange between Flynns Robin Hood and Rathbones Guy at the outset of what will clearly be a long and fatal fight:
Robin (smiling): Did I upset your plans? Sir Guy: Youve come to Nottingham once too often! Robin: When this is over, my friend, therell be no need for me to come again!
Or moments later, when Robin is down and Guy has the advantage:
Sir Guy: You know any prayers, my friend? Robin: Ill say one for you!
And with that, he escapes once more. It would be a pleasure to report that Warner Bros. recognized the alchemy they created and made a dozen more films in this vein, but it didnt happen that way. Some of that was due to the studios grind-em-out ethos, a great deal to Flynn himself, and some to the way World War II disrupted lives in ways both monumental and trivial. Peak Flynn was short-lived, and during that time he made only one more pure swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk in 1940 (Curtiz), with an honorable mention to 1937s The Prince and the Pauper, in which he acts in support of (and steals the picture from) the juvenile twins Billy and Bobby Mauch. It would be eight years before The Sea Hawk received a follow-up, The Adventures of Don Juan, a very different kind of swashbuckler with a very different Flynn, and also his last of inarguable merit.
Period pictures took time to put together, something antithetical to the way Warner Bros. viewed actors and films. This was the studio of gangster pictures and backstage musicals, both of which could be knocked out quickly. The careers of James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who appeared in both kinds of films and had arrived at Warners together ahead of Flynn, are instructive. They began in 1930 with Sinners Holiday and rapidly ascended to stardom. By the time Flynn arrived five years later, Cagney had appeared in 23 films and Blondell in 36. These actors were shuttling from soundstage to soundstage, sometimes starting their next picture before their current one had quite been finished. Similarly, Bette Davis came to Warners with The Man Who Played God in 1932. Though she fought relentlessly against being tossed into the studios meat-grinder (For the first time in my life I dont care whether I ever make another picture or not, she wrote to Jack Warner in 1939, I am that overworked), she nevertheless made another 34 pictures by the end of the decade. Jack Warner was heard to say, I dont want it good, I want it Tuesday, and the studio did its best to work on that pace.
After any viewing of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one is tempted to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” From the perfection of its casting, with Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper, to its lush score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to its unity of tone (despite a midcourse change of directors), to what historian David Thomson called it’s stained-glass Technicolor, it represents the apotheosis of a genre as well as an exemplar of what the old factory-style studios could deliver when the personnel on staff and the story they were telling found a near-perfect alchemy. However, Robin Hood had only dim antecedents and no successors, so to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” isn’t quite accurate. But for this one picture, “They never made ‘em” is closer to the mark.
The swashbuckler genre, that of swords flashing in times ranging from the Dark Ages to the 18th century Caribbean to which Flynn’s greatest film belongs, began in 1920 when Douglas Fairbanks switched from comedies to action films with The Mark of Zorro. Right in that first picture, Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo established conventions that were repeated in film after film and still recur in cinematic cousins such as the Star Wars movies. The hero is, in the words of Robin Hood co-writer Norman Reilly Raine, a “swashbuckling, reckless, rakehell type of character,” who is in rebellion against corrupt government authority, but never government authority in general—the swashbuckling hero is not an anarchist or terrorist, but in many senses a conservative who wants to see power exercised responsibly or by the right people. The hero is an expert with the sword and other weapons, but is also an acrobat, capable of amazing stunts such as riding down a mainsail on the point of a dagger (Fairbanks in his 1926 The Black Pirate). He wins his cause in one on one combat with the villain, usually in a long duel, after which he is often revealed to be a disguised noble, or at the very least forgiven for his trespasses against a government that had lost its way.
Zorro came out of pulp fiction by way of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, but as Fairbanks and others went on to capitalize on the film’s success, they found additional sources in the novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, The Black Swan, Scaramouche), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy), and the pirate and Robin Hood tales of Howard Pyle. Despite the deep well of material to adapt, the run of swashbucklers largely halted with the simultaneous decline of Fairbanks—he was 46 in 1929, the year of The Iron Mask, his last genre film and the first in which, as if to underscore the passage of time, he died—and the arrival of sound.
It wasn’t just that Fairbanks was now a bit old and somewhat paunchy for an action hero. Other actors might have picked up cloak and rapier, but nascent sound technology made it impractical for a hero to bounce all over the screen while delivering dialogue. As hilariously and accurately recalled in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), movies were almost back to the fixed camera and proscenium arch style of the early days, when filmmakers couldn’t do much more than film plays as staged. Sound rapidly evolved to allow for more dynamic productions. In the meantime, Hollywood reveled in films set in contemporary times that explored sex, crime, and even the odd glimpse of nudity—prominent swords gave way to prominent nipples.
Alas, the new candor only lasted so long due to the strict enforcement of the Production Code that began in 1934. Now the studios had to offer clean thrills, which is to say pure romance without innuendo and visceral—but not prurient—excitement. A small handful of successful 1934 films—MGM’s Treasure Island with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and a too-young Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, independent producer Edward Small’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as the revenge-minded Edmond Dantes, and the Britain-originating The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard as the title character—suggested that public taste would welcome romantic adventure in place of earthier forms of romance.
Warner Brothers’ entry was Captain Blood. Donat initially committed to taking the title role of an Irish doctor who inadvertently finds himself on the wrong side of an attempt to overthrow King James II and is condemned to serve as a slave in the Jamaica colony, but he withdrew at the last minute for reasons that are still unclear but may have been as simple as a health issue and as complicated as his mistress refusing to spend several months in California. The film’s producers fantasized about Howard, Fredric March, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman (the last of whom would later excel in the 1937 swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda for David Selznick), and tested Brian Aherne and designated Bette Davis costar George Brent before studio head Jack Warner suggested they try Flynn. The 26-year-old Tasmanian was on the payroll, after all; might as well use him.
In retrospect, it’s amazing how all the elements of a successful Flynn swashbuckler came together at once, but again, for all the negatives inherent in the studio system, one plus was that it functioned as a huge sorting bin for talent that could be deployed as needed. Flynn and the director Michael Curtiz would be together for years. De Havilland, going on 20, was a film neophyte the studio was trying to establish. She and Flynn would eventually make another seven films together (eight if you count the review film Thank Your Lucky Stars) and tantalize the public with one of the screen’s great unconsummated but nevertheless real romances. Rathbone is on hand as an antagonist with a deadly sword (something he didn’t have to fake), a role he would reprise not just in Robin Hood but in pictures as diverse as The Mark of Zorro (1940) opposite Tyrone Power and The Court Jester (1955) in tongue-twisting battle against Danny Kaye.
And then there was Flynn himself, vaulted instantly to stardom by the picture. The son of a marine biologist and a distant mother he came to despise, Flynn never completed his formal education due to the peripatetic existence required by his father’s career and his own propensity for getting expelled from whatever school his parents placed him in. By the time he was 18, he had worked as a mail clerk and a stevedore, and he competed as an amateur boxer before leaving Australia for New Guinea to prospect for gold. In addition to his efforts to get rich quick, he worked a series of jobs with the island’s various tobacco and copra plantations, got into a series of scrapes he would spend the rest of his life embellishing, and somehow, in 1933, ended up playing Fletcher Christian in an Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. This seems to have put the idea of becoming an actor in his mind, and that year he went to Great Britain and got work in a repertory theater company. The next year he was the lead in the film Murder at Monte Carlo, a film financed by Warner Bros. to honor British laws requiring a certain percentage of films exhibited in the country must have originated there. Flynn’s work was promising enough to intrigue the studio (completing a kind of circle, he was recommended by an acquaintance, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and they brought him to Hollywood.
Critics have long considered Flynn a poor actor. If true, this would certainly be unsurprising given his journey from New Guinea knockabout to leading man took a little over a year, with training that consisted almost entirely of the 22 plays in which he performed for the Northampton Repertory Players in England. It was certainly true at times in Captain Blood. Flynn was nervous and his readings were often stiff. As he became more comfortable, Curtiz was ordered to reshoot certain scenes so that Flynn could give a better performance. Yet even in the finished film there are many lines that die in his mouth. He never was good at limning deeper emotions. He’s far more polished in his second film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Curtiz), and yet when he’s asked to react to a brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians by tribesmen on the Indian frontier, he tosses off the line, “Those poor little kids… horrible,” with all the anguish of a man ordering a ham sandwich. It’s something he’s saying, not feeling.
And yet, he was also able to convey a brio that few other actors, then or now, could equal. It is often remarked that Flynn could carry off a period costume in a way that contemporaries such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant could not. (Each had a famous flop in this regard, the former with Parnell, 1937, directed by John M. Stahl, and the latter with The Howards of Virginia, 1940, Frank Lloyd). Midway through Captain Blood, Peter Blood leads his fellow slaves to escape, capture a ship, and embark on a career of piracy with himself as captain. As they ready the ship to depart Jamaica, Flynn shouts, “Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! There’s no chains to hold you now! Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind that’s carrying us all to freedom!”
It’s a ridiculous speech—no one really talks like that, least of all in 17th century Jamaica. Yet, while Flynn couldn’t mourn murdered children on screen with any real passion, he could make lines like that believable. It doesn’t hurt that he was beautiful. A joyous Flynn was simply radiant, his elation in liberation contagious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he could also bring a convincingly grim intensity to a duel to the death, which he animated not via the complexity of the swordplay (as a swordsman, Flynn was able to fake an excellence that far exceeded his technical ability) but through personality and character. Compare his climatic duel with Rathbone in Robin Hood to the endless and mostly mute balletics of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen that close Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas, God help us). There is an exchange between Flynn’s Robin Hood and Rathbone’s Guy at the outset of what will clearly be a long and fatal fight:
Robin (smiling): Did I upset your plans? Sir Guy: You’ve come to Nottingham once too often! Robin: When this is over, my friend, there’ll be no need for me to come again!
Or moments later, when Robin is down and Guy has the advantage:
Sir Guy: You know any prayers, my friend? Robin: I’ll say one for you!
And with that, he escapes once more. It would be a pleasure to report that Warner Bros. recognized the alchemy they created and made a dozen more films in this vein, but it didn’t happen that way. Some of that was due to the studio’s grind-‘em-out ethos, a great deal to Flynn himself, and some to the way World War II disrupted lives in ways both monumental and trivial. “Peak Flynn” was short-lived, and during that time he made only one more pure swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk in 1940 (Curtiz), with an honorable mention to 1937’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which he acts in support of (and steals the picture from) the juvenile twins Billy and Bobby Mauch. It would be eight years before The Sea Hawk received a follow-up, The Adventures of Don Juan, a very different kind of swashbuckler with a very different Flynn, and also his last of inarguable merit.
Period pictures took time to put together, something antithetical to the way Warner Bros. viewed actors and films. This was the studio of gangster pictures and backstage musicals, both of which could be knocked out quickly. The careers of James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who appeared in both kinds of films and had arrived at Warners together ahead of Flynn, are instructive. They began in 1930 with Sinner’s Holiday and rapidly ascended to stardom. By the time Flynn arrived five years later, Cagney had appeared in 23 films and Blondell in 36. These actors were shuttling from soundstage to soundstage, sometimes starting their next picture before their current one had quite been finished. Similarly, Bette Davis came to Warners with The Man Who Played God in 1932. Though she fought relentlessly against being tossed into the studio’s meat-grinder (“For the first time in my life I don’t care whether I ever make another picture or not,” she wrote to Jack Warner in 1939, “I am that overworked”), she nevertheless made another 34 pictures by the end of the decade. Jack Warner was heard to say, “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday,” and the studio did its best to work on that pace.
