24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A JOYLESS TREATMENT OF A JOYFUL, ROLLICKING LIFE, April 6, 2003
Jeffrey Meyers, best known for his works on such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a gifted, at times brilliant biographer. Here he brings to his treatment of Errol and Sean Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine a future Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.
Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean. With reference to Sean, few will feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which reincarnate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - seemed weak; the recreation of "the facts" may be a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence.
In the main section of this book Errol Flynn comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, melancholic sociopath. The habitual choice to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light surfaces in numerous ways, as in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography involves some shading of details, which usually goes under the heading of "literary license." But the deliberate reshaping of a quotation by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is disingenuous - a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, a long comment of Basil Rathbone is subtly rearranged so as to produce the desired result to contribute to Meyers' overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. It creates a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn, and leaves one wondering how many other things have been cleverly reshaped in order to fit the thesis.
The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers actually get under Errols skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no - despite what Meyers and his publicists say. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn. His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an infuriatingly complex, three-dimensional, Technicolor personality. Meyers is a very careful writer, but he also tends to be a cold, dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. One gets little sense of the joi-de-vivre of the Errol Flynn of this book. Flynn was at heart a very, very funny man.
On the other hand there is something un-humorous, at points even tiresome, about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful that after reading it the reader will have chuckled even once. This is a major failing in a biography of Errol Flynn. The ever-so-literate Meyers, in all his zeal to analyze him - to dissect him into his component parts and to isolate his various destructive influences - has somehow let the real Flynn elude him.
There are other anomalies in INHERITED RISK. In one of his appendices (p. 326), Meyers breaks down Flynn's films into three categories: "best," "seeable," and "poor." With all due respect to Meyers, the list is bizarre, and may call into question his cinematic judgment. Is "The Roots of Heaven" (1958) really a better film than "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941) or "Adventures of Don Juan" (1949)? What cinematic myopia would place "The Sisters" (1938), "Edge of Darkness" (1943), and "Northern Pursuit" (1943) - not to mention "Silver River" (1948) - into the "poor" category?
Despite the dual photos on the front of the dust-jacket, the book is not really an analysis of the relationship of the two men, Errol and Sean, along the lines of Sir Edmund Goss' FATHER AND SON. The disparity in the treatments is made clear by the arrangement - Sean constitutes the endpapers (totaling a mere 49 pages), while the main section deals with Errol (244 pages). There is thus a serious question of balance.
Also, Meyers' central idea of Greek tragedy - that of the fatal character flaw of the father being reproduced in the son, leading to the latter's inevitable doom, does not really come off - no matter how energetically Meyers tries. One gets from this book the clear impression that the lives of the two Flynns were a complete waste. That may well have been true of the son, but it can't be said of the father. Errol Flynn brought untold joy to millions worldwide and still does to this day.
INHERITED RISK is a missed opportunity. With all the research that went into the book, it could have been the best Flynn biography ever written. But throughout most of it Meyers staid approach just doesn't hold the readers attention. There is also a procrustean feel the impression that the lives of these two men are being stretched and cut to fit the "Greek tragedy" model that Meyers is pushing. Such shortcomings, sadly, mar what otherwise might have been a monumental biographical achievement.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Two Stars for Sean, June 1, 2003
This review is from: Inherited Risk: Errol Flynn and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam (Hardcover)
I have to agree with Mr. Hurst's eloquent review, and I'll put it more succinctly: this is a lousy book. Why write a biography of Errol Flynn, of all people, if you're going to do it with no humor and with lordly disdain? It's like a biography of Tom Sawyer written by his half-brother, the tattle-tale goody-goody Sid. Like many, I guess, I picked it up in order to read about Sean Flynn, since there is so little out there about him. But as noted, Sean is reduced to three chapters presented as endpapers. One might conclude there wasn't enough to his short life to make a full book... if there weren't so much other evidence of the biographer's tendency to stop researching once he has enough evidence to support his (rather ugly) pre-determined thesis.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sean, the Man or Myth, November 3, 2008
I don't feel that this book did the "man" Sean Flynn any justice. The author was filled with his own need to create a myth connecting Errol Flynn and his son in some tableau of doom. The title "Inherited Risk" says it all, that Errol lived his life with a sense of danger and that Sean was trying to follow in his father's footsteps by living a life that put him in constant danger. The object of a journalist or writer is to be objective not subjective. Mr. Meyers seems like he is doing a lot of guesswork, and trying to put it together in a biography of two people that he does not even begin to understand. I don't know much about Errol, except that my father was a big fan of his movies. Sean was always the one who caught my interest, the combat photographer, like so many others in his field at the time, risked all for the truth. He was known as a generous, kind man to all his friends.
As far as Sean having a deathwish, I don't believe this. One would have to understand the times, to understand the insanity going on over in Vietnam and Cambodia. Thousands of people were being killed and Sean wanted to show this. He was burned out on the Vietnam war, on the atrocities being committed on both sides. Just before he disappeared, he had planned to buy land in Bali and live out his life there. Bali was where he went when he needed to find peace. If he was going on a suicide mission into Cambodia, why would he be making plans for the future? Sean wanted to go into Cambodia and talk to the people and get their side of the story. He already had done some film for the documentary that he wanted to do. Sean and Dana Stone figured that they could ride into the jungle and get the story. What they, like the other journalists that were captured, hadn't figured on was the Khmer Rouge. Sean and the other journalists were victims of circumstance, and if rumors are to be believed among the first victims of the "Killing Fields."
Sean Flynn was a man trying to do something he believed in, and he had the courage to go out and try to accomplish something that would get at the truth of what was really going on in Cambodia. Cambodia was a dangerous place, and the U.S. involvement there at the time, was little known. The Khmer Rouge was beginning to rise to power and the Cambodian government was beginning to fall. Sean knew that the Cambodian people were suffering. He wanted to get their story. If he and the other journalists had been able to do this, maybe something would have been revealed about the Khmer Rouge and all the genocide might have been prevented. Alas, that was not to be. I like to think of Sean being a man of principals and courage, who risked his life doing what he believed, not as someone with a deathwish.
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