TV review – "Errol Flynn Theatre – Wife for a Czar” (1956)

Set in Russia 1670 with Errol Flynn as a widowed Russian Czar Alexis who goes looking for a wife. He has all the well-born virgins in the land to choose from and settles on Patrice Wymore. He romances Wymore as an ordinary noble and fall in love – so when he tries to marry her as ahe Czar she doesn’t want to because she doesn’t know who he really is. That’s not a bad story, the sort of thing Norman Krasna used to write all the time. The most interesting scene is where Wymore’s ward, Latvia, insists Flynn marry her the proper way or else his enemies will have her killed – maybe seeing one of the enemies and having some real stakes would have made it better (what's here is kind of a light drama).

There is lots of fun here for Flynn fans – Errol playing a czar, Errol demanding vodka, the Flynns playing love scenes opposite each other. Errol isn’t that well cast – watching this you get the sense of what some of his work for Northampton Rep must have been like. He seems to be having fun but the piece never quite gets its tone right – its not funny enough to be a comedy, or serious enough for a drama. Maybe had it been able to run longer than 30 minutes these problems would have been conquered.