Olivia DeHavilland, Errol Flynn
“Dodge City” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, March 1, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film sereies Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
Depending upon how you choose to view it, “Dodge City” is either a quintessential Western or a shameless collection of cowboy cliches.
It’s got a cattle drive, a stampede, fetching dance hall girls (the main one is played by Ann Sheridan), a wicked gambler (Bruce Cabot) who runs the town like a private fiefdom, a temperance meeting, a running gun battle on a steam-driven train, and a world-class barroom brawl … all of it captured in glorious early Technicolor.
Most of all it features the cinematic three-way of director Michael Curtiz and stars Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland.
Flynn and DeHavilland had been successfully paired in “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (’36), and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (’38). They would go on to share the screen in a total of eight features, including “Dodge City” (’39) and “They Died with Their Boots On” (’41).
It was widely assumed that the actor and actress were an item. But that was all publicity. DeHavilland was a fairly genteel sort, while the Australian Flynn was a notorious womanizer and drinker whose career barely survived a 1942 trial for statutory rape. His memoir was entitled My Wicked, Wicked Ways.
Still, DeHavilland was not immune to her co-star’s bad-boy charisma. “He was a charming and magnetic man,” she wrote years later, “but so tormented. I had a crush on him, and later I found he did for me.”
In the films they made together Flynn and DeHavilland invariably were directed by Curtiz, an Austrian immigrant who just a couple of years later would achieve screen immortality by giving us Bogie and Bergman in “Casablanca.”
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