Kline is simply dashing in ‘The Last of Robin Hood’

Dashing, handsome and self-deprecating, Kevin Kline was born to play Errol Flynn. Here, Kline tackles the legendary actor and womanizer — in the final two years of his life, before he was felled by a heart attack at age 50 in Vancouver. At the time of his death the coroner said the hard-living Flynn had the body of a 75-year-old.

Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, "The Last of Robin Hood" centers on the actor's scandalous last romance with Beverly Aadland (a miscast Dakota Fanning), who was just 15 when the aging actor espied the underage chorus girl while he was on the Warner lot playing the dying John Barrymore in "Too Much, Too Soon."

Though her "audition" for a Broadway role with Flynn ends in rape, his "mentoring" is actively encouraged by Beverly's stage-struck mother Florence, a former dancer whose own career ended when she lost a leg in an automobile accident.

The hard-drinking Florence is played with relish, and a side of ham, by Susan Sarandon. When she's not flirting with Flynn herself, she permits her precocious daughter to accompany the star on long overseas trips — including to Cuba, where Beverly's movie career peaked, and ended, with the lead role in the infamously awful "Cuban Rebel Girls," featuring Flynn as a reporter who helps Fidel Castro lead his revolution.

Flynn's years of boozing and drugging are taking their toll, even as he proposes marriage to Beverly and dictates a will to take care of her (which he neglects to properly execute).

"The Last of Robin Hood'' was clearly produced on a penny-pinching budget, and even an actor of Kline's prodigious gifts can't totally convince you his Flynn (who had famously been acquitted of statutory rape in 1943) would risk jail for Fanning's Beverly, who is just not quite trashy enough for the part.

It's still campy catnip for fans of old Hollywood, particularly those of us obsessed with its more lurid scandals. (This one is handled as tastefully as possible under the circumstances.) It's hard to imagine even Bette Davis doing a better job than Sarandon as Florence, who cashed in on the scandal with a tell-all book.

Kline plays Flynn with equal parts predatory charm and self-destructiveness. There are a couple of great scenes, one a meeting with Stanley Kubrick (Max Casella) who offers Flynn the role of Humbert Humbert — but balks when Flynn insists on a package deal that would include Beverly, whom the filmmaker considers too mature to play the lead in "Lolita.''

And then there's Kline's last scene as the dying Flynn — who can't resist telling an audience the famous story of drunkenly discovering his pal John Barrymore's corpse in his easy chair, where it was placed as a ghoulish prank by their friends.

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