OVP: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Film: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Stars: Errol Flynn, James Brown, William Prince, George Tobias

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Film Editing, Score, Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Errol Flynn: click here to learn more about Mr. Flynn (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

To talk about Errol Flynn, you cannot ignore the almost cartoonish difference between the flawed-but-noble heroes that he perfected on the big screen, and the debaucherous nature of his real-life persona, which was brought to the foreground in 1942 when Flynn was accused of statutory rape by two teenage girls.  To note, Flynn at the time was still a huge movie star, having just finished releasing Desperate Journey with Ronald Reagan to enormous box office days before the accusations-Warner Brothers was not in a position to just cut him given the box office receipts.  But the scandal was huge, as the shocking details of what happened were spread in papers across the country.  Attorney Jerry Giesler, at one point the most famous lawyer in Hollywood, was able to get Flynn acquitted, mostly by destroying the reputations of the women who accused Flynn of rape.  But something happened in the wake of this scandal that would not be the case for a number of other figures (like those of Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, & later Ingrid Bergman): Flynn emerged with a different reputation, but one that largely still had box office draw even in the immediate wake of the scandal, and was still allowed to work regularly in Hollywood

(Spoilers Ahead) That can be seen in the movie Objective, Burma!, which was released just over two years after the trial, and was by pretty much all accounts a hit, and it wasn't Flynn's only one of this period.  Gentleman Jim was released during the height of the coverage to success, and both of the (now largely forgotten) movies that Flynn released in 1943 were also hits.  In fact, Flynn would be successful for much of the mid-1940's...but he'd do so in very different pictures.  Objective, Burma! is a good example of that.  The film is a fictionalized telling of the Burma Campaign during World War II, with Flynn playing an army captain whose platoon is trudging through the jungle, in near constant danger from the Japanese.  The film is one of several movies that were released during the Golden Age of Hollywood that favored realism over a more fictionalized, personalized storytelling method, in many ways resembling more a documentary film (which was a familiar format to audiences during WWII due to newsreels), than a more traditional storytelling technique.

As a result, the film is technically really impressive.  The special effects, especially during some of the early attack scenes when we see an entire army camp decimated by timed explosions, are wonderful, and the sound work & cinematography are strong.  But the movie itself is a bore.  With the exception of George Tobias (the future Mr. Kravitz on Bewitched), none of the numerous side characters stand out, and frequently you're left watching their deaths be mourned onscreen with an internal monologue of "which guy was this again?" all of which makes the film's three Oscar nominations (for editing, writing, and music) feel a bit like a head-scratcher: why are we awarding these when the special effects or sound work are the actual calling card here?

Flynn, as well, feels muted to the point of being boring, something that never crossed my mind during his Captain Blood and Robin Hood era.  Whether intentionally or not, much of the work that Flynn stars in that I've seen after his trial feels a bit too noble, as if the studio was scared to put him into films where he could be seen as a rake or a cad...because it suddenly felt too close to home.  This would cause his career in the late 1940's to suffer, as audiences who had been more than willing to give in to a controversial celebrity in the wake of his trials because they still loved him so much, weren't willing to give in to the studio wanting to clean up his image onscreen to protect them from the public confusing real life and fiction too much.  It wasn't until the studios finally let him play another sex-pursuing hero in The Adventures of Don Juan in 1948, that audiences truly returned home, and allowed him to be a dependable box office draw into the early 1950's.

This is all to say that Flynn's reputation, and much of his modern association (if you ask lay moviegoers what they know about him today, it will be the statutory rape allegations) did not have the impact on his career that later major movie stars like Mel Gibson or Johnny Depp would receive when they had scandals threaten their careers.  Gibson & Depp would see their careers largely evaporate, but despite some setbacks in the years after the war, Flynn largely got away fine from this scandal-it is only history that really hurt him, but if you look at what his career was like, he paid a surprisingly small price for one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood's Golden Age.