The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Official trailer

The Adventures of Robin Hood is Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s 1938 American Technicolor adventure film.

The film depicts Robin of Locksley returning from the Third Crusade to find Prince John usurping the throne and oppressing Saxon peasants while King Richard remains imprisoned in Austria. Robin assembles his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest to oppose Prince John, falls in love with Maid Marian, and restores King Richard to his throne. Errol Flynn plays Robin Hood. Olivia de Havilland plays Maid Marian. Basil Rathbone plays Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

Claude Rains plays Prince John. Eugene Pallette plays Friar Tuck. Alan Hale plays Little John. Patric Knowles plays Will Scarlet. Una O’Connor plays Bess. Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller wrote the screenplay. Warner Bros. produced the film on a budget of approximately 2 million dollars, which was major for the period, and it grossed approximately 4 million dollars on initial release. The work won three Academy Awards including Best Art Direction.

Every Robin Hood since has been measured against this one, and for me none of them has come close. It’s bright, fast and funny, completely unembarrassed about being an adventure, and Flynn looks like he’s having the time of his life.

The film is the definitive Robin Hood adaptation and one of the principal Technicolor adventures of the 1930s. The Errol Flynn performance defined Robin Hood for later decades and established Flynn as the leading swashbuckler of his era. Michael Curtiz replaced William Keighley as director partway through production after the studio determined that Keighley wasn’t delivering the action material at sufficient pace.

The combination of directorial replacement, full Technicolor photography, the Erich Wolfgang Korngold score, and the significant cast produced material that later Robin Hood productions have continued to measure themselves against. The work represents Warner Bros. at peak production capacity during the late 1930s studio system.

Flynn as Robin Hood

Errol Flynn plays Robin Hood with the athletic confidence and verbal wit that defined his career. The performance combines real swordsmanship, comfortable physical presence, and charm that conventional 1930s leading men didn’t typically combine.

Flynn was twenty-nine during production and at peak physical condition. The role established him as the leading swashbuckler in Hollywood, a position he maintained for the later decade.

I think Flynn is perfect in this. He laughs through sword fights, he flirts through treason, and he makes heroism look like fun. Nobody who’s played the part since has matched that ease, and I don’t expect anybody to.

Later Robin Hood productions have consistently failed to match the Flynn performance. The 1952 Disney Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men starring Richard Todd, the 1976 Robin and Marian with Sean Connery, the 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner, and other adaptations have all been measured against the Flynn original. The Flynn performance defined what Robin Hood looks and sounds like in popular imagination. Replacing that foundational image has proven impossible across nearly a century of later attempts.

The Technicolor Process

Three-strip Technicolor was expensive and technically demanding when The Adventures of Robin Hood used it. The Technicolor camera was three times larger than standard 1930s cameras and required considerable additional lighting. The process produced color saturation that later color cinematography wouldn’t match for decades. The Sherwood Forest greens, the Lincoln greens of the Merry Men, the reds and golds of the court scenes all appear with intensity that current color cinematography deliberately avoids.

The technical limitations of the process produced particular aesthetic results.

Skin tones tend toward orange. Shadows tend toward blue. The combination produces an artificial quality that contemporary cinematography typically rejects but that aligns perfectly with adventure film’s heightened reality. The Technicolor process matched the genre’s emotional tone. The combination of color technology and material hasn’t been replicated in later decades because the technology no longer exists and contemporary digital cinematography aims at different aesthetic goals.

I adore that orange-and-blue artificiality. It looks like a storybook come to life, and I’d take it over the drab palette modern cinematography keeps choosing.

The Korngold Score

Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed the score after fleeing Vienna following the Anschluss in 1938.

The composer had been one of the leading Austrian classical music figures before being forced into emigration. His Hollywood film score work during the late 1930s and 1940s remains among the strongest in American film history. The Robin Hood score combines romantic melody, action propulsion, and folk elements that the medieval setting suggested.

Korngold won the Academy Award for the score, his second after Anthony Adverse (1936). His later Hollywood career produced scores for Captain Blood (1935), The Sea Hawk (1940), and Kings Row (1942) among others.

The composer treated film scoring as classical composition instead of as commercial commission. The approach produced music that’s continued to receive concert performance independently of the films it accompanied. Korngold showed that film music could work at concert music seriousness without sacrificing dramatic function.

The score is what I’d rescue first if I could keep only one element of this film. Korngold writes the fights like a symphony and the romance like an opera, and his music does half the swashbuckling.

Does The Adventures of Robin Hood still hold up?

I give The Adventures of Robin Hood a 9, and it’s still the version every later Robin Hood has to answer to.

Flynn defined the part, the Technicolor gives it a color nothing since has matched, and Korngold’s score is my favorite thing in it. My one reservation is that the story is storybook simple, with good Saxons, bad Normans and very little in between, and that keeps it just shy of a 10. Watch it if you care about adventure films at all.

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