As that swashbuckling smoothie of yesteryear, Errol Flynn stole more than the hearts of teen-age moviegoers. He also stole scenes from Leading Lady Olivia de Havilland. "He would do awfully naughty things," recalls the actress, who first starred with Flynn in Captain Blood (1935) when she was 19. "He would sometimes upstage me and take unfair advantage, which disturbed me deeply." Olivia, who went on to win two best-actress Oscars, was in New York to launch a seven-city eleven-week retrospective of Warner Bros, films—including three from the Flynn-De Havilland partnership (The Adventures of Robin Hood, They Died with Their Boots On and Captain Blood). "I really did have a crush on Errol," concedes Olivia. "And we were a great romantic pair on the screen. It was just some mysterious chemical thing."
There was little suspense but much good will in Hollywood last week when the French National Film Office dubbed Englishman Alfred Hitchcock, 76, Commander of the National Order of Arts and Letters. To add glamour to the presentation, the French called on the services of Jeanne Moreau, 48, the renowned French actress who has just directed her first movie, La Lumière, and is in the U.S. arranging for its distribution. After graciously getting permission from Mrs. Hitchcock, Moreau bestowed a delicate kiss on one Hitchcockian jowl. The beaming director returned the favor, responding, "J'embrace toute la France."
"If I had started out as a drawing-room comic, people would have typecast me as that," insisted Actor Clint Eastwood, 46, who instead made his mark as the gunslinging hero of corpse-strewn westerns (High Plains Drifter; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Last week he rode into Sun Valley, Idaho, for a screening of The Outlaw Josey Wales, his new film about a post-Civil War outcast on the run. In Eastwood's audience: some 200 academicians, actors and film critics who had gathered for a six-day conference titled "Western Movies: Myths and Images." And what of Eastwood's own image? "I've untyped myself to some degree," he says. But he hasn't dropped his gun. His next movie: an up-to-the-minute shoot-'em-down titled The Enforcer.
Although Jimmy Carter is against forced bussing, he did not have the cheek to turn down a kiss from Elizabeth Taylor when she rushed forward to greet him during a campaign fund raiser at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel last week. Nor did the likely Democratic presidential nominee have a vote in hand: Liz is a British subject.
While speaking before a group of Indianapolis businessmen, former South Viet Nam Premier Nguyen Cao Ky was asked why the Saigon government had been unable to unite the Vietnamese people. It was "weak, corrupt and made too many errors," he answered. And had Ky been a villain? "I was not corrupt," retorted the exiled leader. "Perhaps that is the only thing I regret, because I have realized, after 14 months in this country, the value of money, whether it is clean or dirty."