Some months ago, Starlog contributor Gregory William Mank (along with Charles Heard & Bill Nelson) issued Hollywood’S Hellfire Club: The Misadventures Of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn & “The Bundy Drive Boys” (Feral House, tpb, $22.95). We’ve now bought and read it—and beyond its charming, dissolute Drew Friedman cover, it’s a joyful, wild party of a book, examining the alcohol-soaked misadventures of a coterie of hard-living actors and others in Hollywood’s 1930s and ’40s glory days.
In addition to those famed constant drinkers Barrymore, Fields and Flynn, the loose-knit Hellfire group included genre great John Carradine, Topper’s Roland Young, character actor star Thomas Mitchell (Stagecoach, Gone With The Wind), British thespian Alan Mowbray (the touring Shakespearean of My Darling Clementine), young Anthony Quinn, eccentric artist Sadakichi Hartmann and writers Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler. Near the tail end of the group’s existence, Vincent Price was also an ad hoc member.
In addition to those famed constant drinkers Barrymore, Fields and Flynn, the loose-knit Hellfire group included genre great John Carradine, Topper’s Roland Young, character actor star Thomas Mitchell (Stagecoach, Gone With The Wind), British thespian Alan Mowbray (the touring Shakespearean of My Darling Clementine), young Anthony Quinn, eccentric artist Sadakichi Hartmann and writers Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler. Near the tail end of the group’s existence, Vincent Price was also an ad hoc member.
- 8/28/2009
- by no-reply@starlog.com (David McDonnell)
- Starlog
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