Bette Davis, Anita Louise and Jane Bryan play three small town siters who marry Errol Flynn, Alan Hale and Dick Foran and have problems with them, (Flynn can't get his life together, Hale is too old and Foran has an affair with the town tramp). The focus is on the two big stars and both are excellent, Davis as a practical girl who suddenly finds herself madly in love and Flynn as a guy who wants to be like Errol Flynn but lacks the confidence.
It must have been easy to look across the room and fall in love with Flynn, (although Davis in real life decidedly didn't), but up close he's not's not as good as he looks. He wants to have adventures and see the world but the farthest he's been able to get is to become a San Francisco sportswriter and dream of the great novel he's going to write. Bette gets him to actually try to write the novel but nobody wants to publish it. He loses his job in an argument with his boss. Bette goes to work and proves to be more conscientious and successful as an employee than her husband ever was, (I've seen something similar happen in real life - the man feels obligated to be the bread-winner and the more capable wife stays home). His failures get the better of him. He drinks too much and decides to leave her to become an adventurer aboard a ship just as the 1906 earthquake hits. He shows up a couple of years later when she's fully established in the business world and wants to marry her boss. Instead, she takes him back. That was the 'happy' ending, although to what happiness that will lead, we don't know. That's not how the book ends. The studio filmed both endings and let the preview audiences decide. It would be fun to see the other ending but the old VHS tape I have of this doesn't include it.
Davis, besotted with Flynn on screen, was disgusted with him off of it. She claimed he said "Why do you work so hard?" She was appalled when he was assigned to play Essex opposite her Elizabeth I the next year instead of Lawrence Olivier. Years later she watched that film with her friend Olivia de Havilland and admitted to her that "he really was good". But she didn't think so at the time so her performance as a well-grounded young women who sprouts wings when she sees him constitutes great acting. Flynn, for his part, does very well, a confident man playing one who isn't. He may have lacked focus on his career but he was never timid, as this man is. Yet he conveys his emptiness well. The character's alcoholism and failure as a husband may have anticipated his own problems in those areas but Flynn's troubles, whatever the cause, were very different than his character's. And I don't believe that he failed to work hard on this characterization: he was looking to prove he could 'act' and didn't consider swashbucklers as acting.
It's well known that there could have been a third film pairing Davis and Flynn. Jack Warner put together a package deal with Davis playing Scarlett O'Hara and Flynn Rhett Butler for Gone With the Wind but Davis would have none of it. Flynn could have been Rhett Butler- the sea captain who ran union blockades for a hefty profit, frequented Belle Watling's whorehouse and played poker with his Union captors while falling in love with the beautiful but tempestuous Scarlett. But he looked too young and pretty in the late 30's to have been the sardonic Rhett. He would have bene more convincing in the tole 10 years later when he looked more weathered. Gable was the perfect Rhett in 1939.
It must have been easy to look across the room and fall in love with Flynn, (although Davis in real life decidedly didn't), but up close he's not's not as good as he looks. He wants to have adventures and see the world but the farthest he's been able to get is to become a San Francisco sportswriter and dream of the great novel he's going to write. Bette gets him to actually try to write the novel but nobody wants to publish it. He loses his job in an argument with his boss. Bette goes to work and proves to be more conscientious and successful as an employee than her husband ever was, (I've seen something similar happen in real life - the man feels obligated to be the bread-winner and the more capable wife stays home). His failures get the better of him. He drinks too much and decides to leave her to become an adventurer aboard a ship just as the 1906 earthquake hits. He shows up a couple of years later when she's fully established in the business world and wants to marry her boss. Instead, she takes him back. That was the 'happy' ending, although to what happiness that will lead, we don't know. That's not how the book ends. The studio filmed both endings and let the preview audiences decide. It would be fun to see the other ending but the old VHS tape I have of this doesn't include it.
Davis, besotted with Flynn on screen, was disgusted with him off of it. She claimed he said "Why do you work so hard?" She was appalled when he was assigned to play Essex opposite her Elizabeth I the next year instead of Lawrence Olivier. Years later she watched that film with her friend Olivia de Havilland and admitted to her that "he really was good". But she didn't think so at the time so her performance as a well-grounded young women who sprouts wings when she sees him constitutes great acting. Flynn, for his part, does very well, a confident man playing one who isn't. He may have lacked focus on his career but he was never timid, as this man is. Yet he conveys his emptiness well. The character's alcoholism and failure as a husband may have anticipated his own problems in those areas but Flynn's troubles, whatever the cause, were very different than his character's. And I don't believe that he failed to work hard on this characterization: he was looking to prove he could 'act' and didn't consider swashbucklers as acting.
It's well known that there could have been a third film pairing Davis and Flynn. Jack Warner put together a package deal with Davis playing Scarlett O'Hara and Flynn Rhett Butler for Gone With the Wind but Davis would have none of it. Flynn could have been Rhett Butler- the sea captain who ran union blockades for a hefty profit, frequented Belle Watling's whorehouse and played poker with his Union captors while falling in love with the beautiful but tempestuous Scarlett. But he looked too young and pretty in the late 30's to have been the sardonic Rhett. He would have bene more convincing in the tole 10 years later when he looked more weathered. Gable was the perfect Rhett in 1939.