The Warners box set presents many substantial and interesting extras. Each disc contains a newsreel, a musical short (usually music by a service band), one or two cartoons and trailers for the featured film plus one other, including The Constant Nymph and The Mask of Dimitrios. Best of all, the Objective, Burma! DVD includes a joint commentary by writer Rudy Behlmer, film historian Frank Thompson and Jon Burlingame, professor of film music history at the University of Southern California. The most interesting comments are by Burlingame on Waxman’s music; Behlmer seems somewhat nervous around his companions, with much laughing, “yesing” the others’ observations and even bursting into song.
Errol Flynn made his name with swashbucklers, Westerns and, later, war movies. Before WWII inspired many of his films in the early 1940s, there was The Dawn Patrol (1938), technically his first war movie. As a flying ace, now in WWI, he holds his own against Basil Rathbone and Donald Crisp. Another Dawn, made the year before, is not a credible war film, rather a stodgy soap opera. The only redeeming grace is Korngold’s score.
This five-disc set could have been more imaginatively titled “Errol Flynn and World War II,” rather than the uninspired “Errol Flynn Adventures.” No matter. While Objective, Burma! is the only top-drawer movie, Desperate Journey and Edge of Darkness, despite much angst in the latter, show the comic and serious range of the star’s acting craft.
And Errol would have preferred, I’m sure, “craft” to “art,” for, whatever his faults, he was not a pretentious man, on or off screen, and never entertained the thought that what he did was for the ages. Ever deprecating about his career, Flynn once said, “I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.”
When it came to war, though, apparently he could—and did—do it all . . . in the movies.
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Review copy provided by Warner Bros. Thanks!