BEST remembered for swashbuckling epics such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” Australian-born star Errol Flynn also graced eight popular sagebrush sagas at the peak of his stardom.
“Virginia City” (1940), the centerpiece of the four titles collected in “The Errol Flynn Warner Bros. Westerns Collection” (out today), is a follow-up to Flynn’s enormously popular Technicolor Western debut “Dodge City,” which was also directed by the studio’s top director, Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Mildred Pierce”).
Like Flynn’s other 1940 Western (“Santa Fe Trail,” long in the public domain), “Virginia City” is very loosely inspired by a historical incident: an attempt by Confederate sympathizers to smuggle millions of dollars worth of gold out of the Union stronghold of Virginia City, Nev., during the waning days of the Civil War.
Flynn plays a Union officer – his accent explained by making him Irish – who goes undercover to stop the plot.
Because the handsome actor had a large female following, Flynn’s character is romantically distracted from his mission
by dance-hall singer Miriam Hopkins.
Completing a romantic triangle is Flynn’s former jailer, another spy (Randolph Scott) behind the smuggling plot who is in cahoots (and possibly in love) with fellow Southerner Hopkins – though, truth be told, the two guys have more chemistry together.
Humphrey Bogart, sporting an amusing Mexican accent and a pencil moustache, turns up as the leader of a bandit gang whom Scott hires to foil Flynn.
The plot twists may not stand up to close scrutiny, but the sumptuously produced and gorgeously photographed (in black and white) movie is a whole lot of fun, boasting a pair of epic gun battles and a deus ex machina named Abraham Lincoln.
The other three movies are in Technicolor. Alexis Smith is cast as the dance-hall girl in David Butler’s “San Antonio” (1945), and Flynn plays an Aussie sheepherder in “Montana” (1950), again opposite Smith.
Flynn switches sides to the Confederacy in his final Western, the lower-budget “Rocky Mountain” (1950) co-starring Patrice Wymore, who became his third wife.
The collection doesn’t include the best of Flynn’s post-World War II Westerns, Raoul Walsh’s “Silver River” (1948) – yet another Civil War yarn that is expected to turn up in a future Flynn set as restoration work continues.