If ever there was an actor born to play Errol Flynn it’s Kevin Kline, who has reportedly turned down several offers in the past. At age 65, Kline finally tackles the legendary actor and womanizer — in the final two years of his life, before his death at age 50 of a heart attack in Vancouver. At the time of his death the coroner said the hard-living Flynn had the body of a 75-year-old.
Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland “The Last of Robin Hood” centers on the actor’s scandalous last romance with Beverly Aadland (a miscast Dakota Fanning) who was just 15 when the aging actor espied the under-aged chorus girl while he was on the Warner lot playing the dying John Barrymore in “Too Much, Too Soon.” (Designer Orry-Kelly, played by a cameo-ing Bryan Batt, serves as Flynn’s procurer).
Though her “audition” for a Broadway role with Barrymore ends in date rape, Flynn’s “mentoring” of this particular jailbait (he had previously been acquitted of statutory rape in 1943) is actively encouraged by Beverly’s stage-struck mother Florence, a former dancer whose own career ended when she lost a leg in an automobile accident.
The hard-drinking Florence — a role once proposed for Bette Davis — is played with relish, and a bit of ham, by Susan Sarandon. Between flirting with Flynn herself, she permits her precocious daughter to accompany the star on long trips to Africa (“The Roots of Heaven”) and Cuba (where Beverly’s movie career peaked, and ended, with the lead role in the infamous “Cuban Rebel Girls,” featuring Flynn as a reporter who helps Fidel Castro lead his revolution).
Meanwhile, Flynn’s years of boozing and drugging are taking their toll, even as he professes undying love and proposes marriage to Beverly, as well as dictating a will to take care of her (which he fails to properly execute).
“The Last of Robin Hood” isn’t a great movie. Produced by A&E and Lifetime (it’s seeking theatrical distribution in the U.S.), it was clearly produced on a penny pinching TV budget and even an actor of Kline’s prodigious gifts can’t totally convince you his Flynn would risk jail for Fanning’s Beverly, who is just not quite trashy enough for the part.
But it’s still catnip for fans of old Hollywood, particularly those of us obsessed with its more lurid scandals (even if this one is handled as tastefully as possible under the circumstances). It’s hard to imagine even Bette Davis doing a better job than Sarandon as Florence, who cashed in on the scandal with a tell-all book.
And then their is Kline’s perfect casting as Flynn, who he plays with equal parts predatory charm and self-destructiveness. There are a couple of great scenes, one where he meets with Stanley Kubrick (Max Casella) who offers Flynn the role of Humbert Humbert — but balks when Flynn insists on a package deal that would include Beverly (who he rejects as too old because of a phony birth certificate that made her two years “older’) as “Lolita.”
And then there’s Kline’s very last scene as the dying Flynn, who may be in excruciating pain but can’t resist telling partygoers the famous story of finding his pal John Barrymore’s corpse in his easy chair, where it was placed as a ghoulish prank by their friends.