by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a quite interesting
Warner Bros. feature from 1953: The Master of Ballantrae, which was Errol Flynn’s last film as a Warners
contract player (five years he would return to the studio as a free-lancer to
play John Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon — the memoir of Diana Barrymore, John’s daughter and Drew’s mother —
mainly because Jack Warner, who had worked with both Barrymore and Flynn, found
them equally talented and equally self-destructive, though as one of Flynn’s
biographers acidly pointed out it took Barrymore 62 years to drink, drug and
screw himself to death and Flynn accomplished it in just 50) and the last film
directed by veteran Warners hack William Keighley (his name is pronounced
“Keeley,” something I would never have known if I hadn’t heard one of the Lux
Radio Theatre broadcasts from after he
replaced Cecil B. DeMille as the series’ host because as a matter of Right-wing
principle DeMille refused to join the American Federation of Radio Artists) —
though he would live until 1984. It was based on an adventure novel by Robert
Louis Stevenson (one imdb.com commentator ranked it and the unfinished The
Weir of Hermiston as “generally conceded
today [to be] Robert Louis Stevenson’s two greatest works” — huh? Better than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Treasure Island or Kidnapped?) set during the 1740’s in Scotland, during the
last-ditch attempt of clan lords loyal to the Stuart family to dethrone the
House of Hanover as the ruling family of Great Britain and restore the Stuarts
to the throne in the persons of Bonny Prince Charlie and his father. Ballantrae
is a Scottish village ruled by the Durie family: father Lord Durrisdeer (Felix
Aylmer), oldest son Jamie Durie (Errol Flynn) and his younger brother Henry
(Anthony Steel). Never having read Stevenson’s novel I can’t vouch for how
close the adaptation is — though in at least one particular writers Herb
Meadow (screenplay) and Harold Medford (additional dialogue) — I guess your
initials had to be “H.M.” to get the job working on writing this movie! —
softened the tale. Stevenson apparently meant the work as a critique of family
feuding and the egomaniacal quest for “glory” in fighting for hopeless causes,
and to make that point he dispatched both younger Duries to their graves at the
end, while Meadow and Medford left both of them alive.
It was Warners’
last-ditch attempt to return Flynn to the costume-drama milieu in which he’d made his greatest successes and most
legendary films — Captain Blood
(1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940) —
though he was older and considerably stouter than he’d been in his prime, and
whereas he’d faked his way through the fencing duels in those previous movies
(much to the discomfiture of Basil Rathbone, who was an accomplished fencer and
rued that the scripts of Captain Blood and Robin Hood called
for him to lose his on-screen duels to Flynn, who faked it all), this time
around he had a fencing double, Bob Anderson. Anderson, who died just a month
or two ago, was best known for a film he worked on 24 years after this one —
the first Star Wars, in which he
was the on-screen body under the Darth Vader costume (though James Earl Jones
dubbed the character’s voice) and was picked because of his skill in fighting
on-screen duels; in The Master of Ballantrae he doubled for both Flynn and one of his on-screen
opponents and thereby “killed” himself. As presented on screen, the plot of The
Master of Ballantrae (incidentally the last
syllable is pronounced “-tray,” not
“-try”) actually tracks pretty closely to Flynn’s first starring vehicle, Captain
Blood: he ends up on the wrong side of a
civil war (Warners showed the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, where the
British redcoats mopped up the Scottish clans and the Stuart cause was defeated
once and for all, but they weren’t about to give this film enough of a budget
to stage any of the actual battle), has to flee the oppressive British
occupation of Scotland (they are executing anyone with any connection with the
rebellion), meets up with a comic-relief sidekick named Col. Francis Burke
(Roger Livesey, one of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s favorite
actors) — an Irish officer who fought with the Stuarts — and the two of them
flee and eventually end up on a pirate ship captained by a supercilious
Frenchman, Captain Arnaud (Jacques Berthier).
They make an uneasy alliance with
him until the crew mutinies; they take over the ship from Arnaud but Jamie
takes it back and takes over as captain, and eventually they sail back to Scotland
with a treasure with which Jamie hopes to re-establish himself as the master of
Ballantrae and finally marry his high-born fiancée Lady Alison (Beatrice
Campbell). Earlier in the story Jamie had been shown having an affair on the
side with tavern wench Jessie Brown (Yvonne Furneaux), and when Alison showed
up at Jessie’s tavern on the night Jamie and Burke were supposed to take a
small boat to a smugglers’ vessel and flee for France, Alison kissed Jamie in
Jessie’s presence and Jamie had a hissy-fit of jealousy and got revenge by
reporting Jamie’s planned escape to the British, who intercepted them on the
beach and nearly captured them. Jamie had assumed his brother Henry (ya
remember Henry?) had turned him
in to get the Ballantrae estate and Alison’s hand for himself — and his
suspicions are only strengthened when he comes home and finds Henry living as
the master of Ballantrae (even though their father is still alive!) and engaged
to Alison, who justified her actions on the assumption that her real lover,
Jamie, was dead. (It seems to me there’s another Warner Bros. movie, a much
more prestigious one, that used this particular plot gimmick. Oh, right — Casablanca!) In the end Henry gets to keep the Ballantrae
estate and Jamie even gives him the treasure so he’ll have the funds he needs
to maintain it, but Alison runs off with Jamie and Burke, fleeing to heaven
knows where.
Not that this is a movie where one really cares about the plot:
it’s basically action porn, but at least it’s good action porn, and it’s also utterly gorgeous, not
only because it’s in three-strip Technicolor just as it was about to be
replaced by Eastmancolor but because the cinematographer is Jack Cardiff. The
Cardiff touch shows throughout this movie: the interiors burnished with a
painterly glow, the exteriors also looking like landscapes of the period and
not like soundstages with a nature painting as a backdrop — and I suspect
Cardiff may have directed some of the film because there’s a visual imagination
and a sense of excitement far beyond the norm for a film by William Keighley.
(Keighley’s and Flynn’s paths had crossed during the glory years: Keighley
started The Adventures of Robin Hood
but was fired because Jack Warner and Hal Wallis didn’t think his footage was
exciting enough, and Michael Curtiz was brought in to replace him while B.
Reaves “Breezy” Eason shot a lot of the action footage.) Flynn had actually
taken Cardiff under his wing and engaged him to make his directorial debut in a
1955 epic shot in Continental Europe; it was supposed to be the story of
William Tell, but after about half an hour of the film was shot Flynn’s
producers pulled their financial backing, he was unable to find replacement
money, and he lost what little money he had left over from his glory years at
Warners and was bailed out by Herbert Wilcox, British producer-director who
gave Flynn two fat parts in the musical spectacles he produced for his wife,
actress Anna Neagle, to star in. The Master of Ballantrae isn’t a great movie but it is a reasonably fun one, and while a number of imdb.com
commentators regretted Flynn hadn’t been able to make it a decade earlier
(though in the meantime Flynn’s acting chops had actually improved — in the
1940’s he turned in finely honed performances in Escape Me Never and That Forsyte Woman that would have been inconceivable for the Flynn of
the 1930’s), it’s still one of his best late films and a nice hour-and-a-half
of entertainment.
