In this year of the two Robin Hoods-the Fox TV movie and the Kevin Costner big-screen version-Timothy Dalton may yet have the last laugh as the princely thief you love to hate.
In ”The Rocketeer,” Dalton plays bad guy Neville Sinclair, an Errol Flynn sendup who just happens to be starring in a movie-within-the-movi e that looks a lot like Flynn`s 1938 ”The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
”We called ours `The Laughing Bandit,` didn`t we,” Dalton said with a chuckle. ”It would have been nice to have called it `Robin Hood` and come out a week earlier, wouldn`t it-to be the first one seen.”
As it turned out, ”The Rocketeer” opened a week after ”Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves,” but Dalton is certainly no laggard in the critics` corner with a show-stealing performance that pays homage to everyone`s favorite swashbuckler and generates more than its fair share of laughs.
”You`ve got to enjoy a villain, I think,” Dalton said, still brimming with enthusiasm at the midpoint of a daylong series of interviews at a West Hollywood hotel.
”I mean, in a certain kind of movie, a bad guy can be just a really hateful sort of guy, but in this kind of movie, you know-it`s entertainment, it`s a wonderful sort of show … you`ve got to like the villain.
”The difficult thing for me was how to create a situation where you don`t like him too much.”
A veteran British stage actor who gained international prominence as successor to Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the last two James Bond movies, Dalton said he turned down ”The Rocketeer” when one of the early drafts of the screenplay was presented to him over a year ago.
”I loved the story, but it just seemed to me that the script was too one-dimensional,” he said. ”And then I was asked to do it again (last)
summer, and I still said, `I don`t think so, no, the script needs a lot of work.`
”And the studio (executives) actually were wonderful. (Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures president) David Hoberman said `Yeah, we know-we`re developing it with the writers, we`re going to embark on a creative process, we`ve got a good story,` and he invited me to join in that-sit with the director and the writers once a week or once a fortnight.
”So I said OK. And we had a great time. We had a wonderful time. There`s nothing more exciting than sitting down with a bunch of talented, creative people and just batting ideas around. … You have a lot of fun and you actually get somewhere.”
Director Joe Johnston says Dalton contributed greatly to the development of his character. He ”came up with a lot of his subtleties, a lot of the little things that he did, like the stuff in front of the mirror where he`s cleaning his teeth,” Johnston said.
Although the character Sinclair obviously was inspired by published-though unproven-rumors of Flynn`s Nazi sympathies, writers Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo said the character was not meant to vindicate the rumors.
”It`s a pastiche-we didn`t do any Errol Flynn research,” Bilson said.
”It was just, when we tried to find a villain, five or six years ago, we thought it would be fun to have a movie star like Errol Flynn who was working as a Nazi spy, and it came out of the necessity that we didn`t want to have any Nazis running around the movie. … We knew about the rumor, and it just sort of sparked the idea.”
Dalton, for his part, doesn`t believe Flynn was ever in cahoots with the Third Reich.
”It doesn`t make sense,” he said. ”If Flynn is a Nazi agent, what was he stealing? What was he doing? He wasn`t stealing anything in Hollywood that was going to help the German war machine. That`s nonsense.
