Flynnfest #35 - Mara Maru

Raymond Burr was gay? Who knew?

While working with Errol Flynn in their only film together, Flynn told Raymond Burr that if he died with ten dollars in his pocket he hadn't done a good job. This inspired Burr to always share his wealth, and he spent the rest of giving away vast amounts of money to charity.

Mara Maru also starred Ruth Roman, a pretty actress whose career never really took off. Too bad. The movie actually isn't too bad, all things considered. This was Flynn's last Hollywood movie for Warner Brothers before heading off to do films in Europe and Cuba for the next six years. At this point in his career, Flynn's relationship with Jack Warner was so caustic that it seemed as if Warner was practically going out of his way to give Flynn lousy roles in second-rate pictures. In Mara Maru, the story actually isn't too bad, though it's typical of the cheaper, "second movie of the twin bill" of the early 1950s (Mara Maru was released in 1952).

As for Flynn's nasty relationship with the studio head, here's an anecdote:

Every day during filming Errol Flynn would drive on the Warner Bros. lot wearing a windbreaker with no shirt, slacks with no underwear and shoes with no socks. The wardrobe people would provide him with a shirt, underwear and socks, and at the end of the day's filming he would wear them home. The next day he would arrive on the lot, again with no shirt, underwear or socks, and again he would be supplied those items by wardrobe. Co-star 'Paul Picerni (I)' noticed it after several days, and asked Flynn what he did with all the shirts, socks and underwear he'd accumulated after several weeks of filming. Flynn replied that he threw them in a closet when he got home. Picerni asked, "But what do you do with them?" Flynn replied, "Nothing. It just gives me pleasure to steal from Jack Warner."

There's also an urban legend that the film bombed in Japan because the name Mara Maru translates into Japanese as "shit boat", but I doubt that's really true - although "mara" is one expression in Japanese for "penis" apparently (I joke Errol surely would have loved if he'd known it).

Errol looks a little worn around the edges in Mara Maru, showing some wrinkles and not exactly looking too fit and trim. The film is B-movie stuff, for certain. But not too bad, and certainly not deserving the bad reviews it generally received from critics. Not all that bad, but it could of been so much better.