Sherwood Week: This saucy fellow

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD

1938

Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley

Written by Rowland Leigh, Norman Reilly Raine, and Seton I. Miller

Spoilers: N/A

The Adventures of Robin Hood can feel downright inevitable: Erroll Flynn as Robin Hood is just one of those incredibly natural castings, whilst reuniting Flynn with so many personnel from his 1935 blockbuster swashbuckling debut, Captain Blood, and this time setting them up with a lush three-strip Technicolor production in contemplation of the pop art kaleidoscope of a legendary medieval England, would hardly strike you as any less of an obvious path.  So it's easy to imagine it as the kind of thing that simply coalesced at a certain point in the history of cinema, when the right people were around at the right time and the technology had evolved to match their potential, and in a deterministic universe, I guess that's what happened.  Yet on any humbler philosophical level, it was only the much more usual case: a bunch of jerks flailing around and colliding with one another, at best half-purposefully—and making something immortal out of the chaos anyway.

When a Robin Hood was conceived at Warner Bros. in the mid-30s, their first thoughts weren't of Flynn, but James Cagney, which seems monumentally ill-conceived to me, but such was the man's box office appeal.  I suppose Robin Hood was, also, a public enemy, but the main goal was to satisfy Cagney's desire to break free from his typical "gritty contemporary" roles, and undoubtedly it would've happened if Cagney had stayed put: the only thing that did avert the prospect of a 5'5", sour-faced, and potentially-psychopathic Robin Hood was Cagney simultaneously suing and quitting Warners that year.  This backburned the project until they remembered Captain Blood (at some point during its development, they'd realized they held the rights to a Robin Hood operetta, and after toying with the idea of doing it themselves, they sold it to MGM to make a musical, in exchange, primarily, for MGM keeping out of Warners' way and not making that film until Warners had made theirs; sadly, MGM's musical never came into existence at all).  So Flynn was in, but this did not conclude the drama, for Flynn would've preferred not to have reunited with his Captain Blood (and, more critically, his Charge of the Light Brigade) director Michael Curtiz, whom Flynn hated, and who in fact didn't even make a substantial fraction of this film that forms one of the key pillars of his reputation; instead, Curtiz only made or at least gets credit for all the really good parts of it (which is also to say, "most of it"), replacing its original director, William Keighley, much to Flynn's displeasure.  As for that other key component of the Flynn/Curtiz action-adventure partnership, lauded real-deal composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, he was set to head back to Europe, tired of producing film scores and disinterested specifically in Robin Hood, before wisely deciding he was at least more interested in that than he was in trying to return to a now-Nazi Austria.  Even the decision to make one of the quintessential Technicolor movies in Technicolor came very late, only some three months before shooting began.

But it all came together in 1938, this Adventures of Robin Hood becoming one of the highest-grossing films of that year (and Warners' own biggest hit), and acclaimed enough to win more awards (original score, art direction, and editing) at the 11th Oscars than anything else, and even if it didn't win its nomination for Best Picture, it is likely to be, today, the most frequently-screened of the ten nominees.  Most importantly, certainly for our purposes here, it was the definitive Robin Hood of its era, inspiring a generation of direct knock-offs—perhaps a score of films not merely "about" Robin Hood but expressly patterned on this one—and serving as an influence forevermore for literally any film that could be reasonably held to contain "swashbuckling" in it.  (Including other Flynn/Curtiz films: my very favorite of their collaborations, The Sea Hawk, is at least as much a maritime refinement of The Adventures as it is a follow-up to, or an adaptation of another novel by the guy who wrote, Captain Blood.)  It has virtually eclipsed Douglas Fairbanks's 1922 film in the public memory (and for good reasons to the side of the 1922 film being silent, as The Adventures proves an inestimable improvement on Fairbanks's astonishingly wrongheaded characterization and story structure), and, arguably, it's still the definitive screen Robin Hood.  Even that's only barely arguable, and not arguable at all if you constrain the discussion to live-action, because for anyone born long enough before, or anyone who simply isn't cartoon-brained enough to prefer, Disney's 1973 anthropomorphic fox Robin Hood—and, for the record, I'm not saying I don't fit those categories myself*—there is unlikely to be any other image conjured by the words "Robin Hood" than Errol Flynn's man in green tights.  And so, even though Robin's tenure on the big screen is nearly as old as the movies themselves—and especially since I already reviewed the 1922 film—it is right to begin our little survey of the major entries in the screen history of Robin Hood here, because that's what we're into this week, partially because another Robin Hood is coming out next month—in this one he dies! oh! (turns out they'll have done that already, too)—though maybe I'll let you in on the real impetus later, as it's much stupider.

So if there are those who, when asked to picture Robin Hood (as a man), do not picture Errol Flynn, it's probably because they are literally medievalist scholars, who likely see the vast majority of Robin's films as fanciful nonsense.  But they'd also be the first to tell you "Robin Hood" was always such—it is indicative, I think, to compare him with that other great creature of British legendry, Arthur, and note how much less effort there seems to be to "find" the "historical Robin," even though he "lived" half a millennium later—which means that the figure who perhaps arose from the hazy narratives of May Day plays can be just about anything, so long as he's an outlaw for justice who shits in the woods, preferably in the North, though not necessarily in Nottinghamshire, or that shire's then-primordial woods, i.e. Sherwood.  The key inflection points, though I'm sure I'm not exhausting the important twists on the lore, are the ballads committed to print in the early 16th century, though they were already centuries old; at some point in the 15th century the figures of "Robin and Marian," likely of 13th century French origin, were beginning to be identified with Robin Hood and his babe (still a shepherdess), and this was reasonable enough, given what a Mary-worshipping freak Robin is in the earliest ballads, excessively holy in an excessively Catholic way, something that has not really managed to survive in more recent cultural depictions; by the 17th century, Robin had been retconned to have been of the nobility, which has definitely survived in recent depictions, though in latter days he's been nudged more towards "class traitor," with a reduction in rank from a dubious earldom in Huntingdon to a knighthood or maybe anachronistic baronetcy in "Locksley," which Loxley would own as true.  Likewise surviving is the effort to fix Robin to a particular period, the turn of the 13th century, attempting to forge a "historical" Robin by interpolating the historical antagonist of the historical Shropshire rebel Fulk FitzWarin, a certain John Plantagenet, into Robin's legendry, though note well that Fulk's John was England's king already and Fulk's cause was merely his own patrimony.

The real kicker happens much later than seems feasible, and that's just Randolph Scott's Ivanhoe—in 1818!—which so securely manacled Robin to specifically the 1190s that alternatives seem somehow "wrong" now.  In this respect, The Adventures follows the Fairbanks film, though Robin isn't a crusader himself, in fact he thinks crusades are stupid, making Robin, appropriately enough, woke before his time; meanwhile, it's taking more than only a timeframe from Ivanhoe, and this movie made in 1938 is maniacally invested in the idea of a 12th century conflict between colonizer Normans and, er, indigenous Saxons, such as Scott imagined could have existed but basically no longer did, because by that point your normal Norman had thoroughly Anglicized, and if people wanted to tell stories about Hereward (indeed, another "historical Robin" candidate), the doomed 11th century Anglo-Saxon resistance, or the Harrying of the North, they could—though maybe they couldn't in the 12th and 13th centuries, and prototypical tales of Robin served a similar function.  The upshot is that our Robin here—and, film-wise, it's a fairly unique take—believes that Saxon lives matter while simultaneously, and a little awkwardly, though to its credit the screenplay by Seton I. Miller and Norman Reilly Raine is highly aware of this awkwardness, rebelling in the name of his absent Norman king against his evil Norman government.  (It does not, however, contemplate anyone ever asking, "then aren't you a Norman?  You're an aristocrat with a Norman name.")  Anyway, I hope you enjoy those words, "Saxon" and "Norman," they're in the movie twenty or forty times apiece, and it's a savvy enough dodge to obscure the simplicity of "stealing from the rich to give to the poor," an ethos which even Warners, Old Hollywood's most left-leaning major, wasn't likely to fully endorse, when if you failed to muddle it with something like a "Norman-Saxon conflict," it might start to sound too much like pure communism.  It kind of does anyway, though the insistence on specifically Prince John—for all his treachery still the destined heir to his brother Richard's throne—as Robin's archenemy has ever nettled me; it makes sense because of John's persistent unpopularity, and I guess it lends itself to the sequel that never seems to come, but am I supposed to get the impression that Robin gets beheaded no later than the 28th of May, 1199?

So: in 1191, that unloved prince (Claude Rains) seizes his moment.  Richard (Ian Hunter) has been kidnapped on his return from the Third Crusade, and John, who's already illegally taken the regency of England, sets about gathering from all the yeomen and churls a "ransom" to pay for his brother's release; but as he tells his co-conspirator Guy of Gisbourne (selected from the legends, perhaps, because his name sounds the Frenchest, while his performer, Basil Rathbone, was of course chosen to make it a rematch with his Captain Blood co-star), this is just an excuse for the prince to gather a mighty warchest with which he'll secure the loyalty of the corrupted Norman aristocracy and establish himself as England's only king.  Oppression of all sorts ensues, as we see when Gisbourne and the sheriff (Melville Cooper), on their way through Nottinghamshire, witness Much, the miller's son (Herbert Mundin), attempting to poach one of the king's deer.  Gisbourne would be pleased to execute Much on the spot, but Sir Robin of Locksley (Flynn) and Will Scarlet (Patric Knowles) have watched this scene unfold through some stroke of fortune, and, more to the point, by way of some remarkably bad editing let alone for a movie that won an Oscar for it, with each of this scene's successive participants seeming to exist in some higher-dimensional space than the ones before, so that, Flatland-like, Much cannot be aware of Gisbourne, and Gisbourne cannot be aware of Robin, despite occupying the same half-acre of sunny, flat, not-especially-dense "woodland" that comprises this park in Chico I mean forbidding, mysterious Sherwood.

This is where we impose some more "production history" on the thing, and note that Keighley's contribution to The Adventures' filming (he of course oversaw much pre-production, which was surely as crucial here as anything) was mostly, if not entirely, confined to the first weeks of location shooting in the North (of California), whereupon Curtiz took over and did the studio interiors.  And it's undoubtedly unfair, but it makes it way too easy to declare that anything bad about The Adventures must be Keighley's fault—failure to get truly suitable footage for our hero's first appearance, or some even-for-1938 unconvincing day-for-night a bit later—and even when we have perfectly awesome exterior footage, we also know that Curtiz went back outside for some reshoots.  So while Robin is going to get a couple more entrances that are exceedingly grand, and would make for better introductions, including one outdoors (just one beautiful Tarzan-style swing in the vine-covered rainforests of Sherwood, while even our actual introduction may suffer from a late-changed script where the poacher who became the legendarium figure Much originally wasn't rescued, but died), one's starfucking instinct may well be to attribute that good stuff to Curtiz.  Regardless, let's get all the nitpicks out, because one benefit of writing about Robin Hood movies is that you don't have to pretend your reader requires a pristinely-presented plot: so besides that day-for-night chase, I also don't like the staging of Robin's seduction of Richard's ward, Marian (Olivia de Havilland), towards Saxon goodness with a visit to the nearly entirely-separate camp he keeps for the traumatized losers who aren't his Merry Men (a name I'm confident goes unspoken in this movie), again practically in another dimension as the tone grindingly shifts from "arrogant japery" to "social tragedy"; and I don't like it when Robin forcibly recruits Friar Tuck (the lawnmower-voiced Eugene Pallette) because he comes off too much like a dickhead in ways he did not come off like a dickhead but rather like an affable jock when Little John instead challenged him (this is Alan Hale, not quite inaugurating his frequent screen partnerships with Flynn, which happened in the previous year's The Prince and the Pauper under Keighley, but The Prince and the Pauper hardly counts for anything, including that).

Back to the adventures in progress, at a banquet at Nottingham Castle, attended by John, Marian, and Gisbourne, amongst much other Norman scum, we get a far badder-ass entrance for our hero, who storms in with that dead poached stag on his back and deposits it upon John's own dinner table (originally this was going to be the poacher's corpse! which, admittedly, wouldn't have worked for this scene).  John is impressed, Marian is intrigued, and Gisbourne is incensed, but John's indulgence runs out, and the battle between Robin and authority begins in earnest, with the outlaw having already built an elaborate intelligence network and soon establishing a resistance army operating out of deepest Sherwood.  The expected vignettes follow, some of which are expected precisely because of this movie, with Marian coming around to Robin's side,** convinced by his chivalrous treatment of his enemies when he's made her and Gisbourne his captives (while Much even gets a cute parallel romance with Marian's nurse Bess (an un-annoying Una O'Connor)), eventually leading to an archery tournament as bait for the great archer—then Robin's capture, Robin's rescue, Marian's capture, and the return of Richard and a battle that narrows itself down to who stabs who first, Robin or Gisbourne.

It's tremendous, maintaining a surprisingly excellent balance between episodic adventure and actually putting these characters through an escalating, coherent struggle, and balancing characters, plural—the Merry Men are not so backgrounded as they can sometimes get—with the needs of a Flynn star vehicle.  And we get that star vehicle, so even if this isn't quite his swasbuckling final form, it's very close and, whatever else, its remains the most iconic—that such a ridiculous fraction of Robin's dialogue must have been transcribed [LAUGHS, HEARTILY] (and somehow not a dozen "ha! well met!'s") makes certain of that.  (The first time I saw this movie, I'll confess I found Flynn slightly aggravating; that's still sometimes true, but the performance has grown on me, and there's a big countervailing force in his Norman-redeeming romance, which, as expected from screen lovers as frequently paired as Flynn and de Havilland, works utterly well, and for a movie with much more obvious priorities, it's heartfelt.  So it's not my very favorite of Robin's entrances, but it could be, when we find our hero on Marian's windowsill, having been sitting there the whole time and hearing her confession that she's fallen in love with the rogue.  Maybe it helps that Marian is a genuinely active force in the action plot, too.)  The supporting performances are themselves great stuff, especially the villains, with Rains, customarily, snaking in some evil horniness for "this saucy fellow" (even if it's arguably weird to cast such a middle-aged man as John in 1191), while Rathbone gets to be cold fire, frequently humiliated by Robin but benefiting from the comic functions necessary to a Robin Hood villain being offloaded to a subordinate Nottingham sheriff.  He's also a big dude, and a superb screen swordfighter—you can sort of tell that Rathbone could have murdered Flynn, even if Gisbourne couldn't be allowed to so readily murder Robin.

And manslaughter, at least, was a possibility on The Adventures.  For is it not a Michael Curtiz film?  Happily, to my knowledge there were few injuries (and only minor ones), but boy, is this an action film such as they made in the 30s.  The swords are real (albeit aluminum, to allow a seemingly superhuman agility; and one of my favorite, maybe accidental grace notes is that by the end of the finale, Robin's sword has taken so much punishment it's actually visibly bent), and the swordfights, under the supervision of Fred Cavens, are basically real, with Cavens moving away from fencing-as-sport and towards an increasingly-modern-feeling brutality here in his stunt coordination, especially for the climactic duel between Robin and Gisbourne that likewise benefits from Curtiz and DP Sol Polito's typical muscular camera technique, and that arch-Curtizian abstraction of his thrills into the form of shadows thrown upon a far pillar.  More shockingly still, the arrows are real, and not a cinematic magic trick: they really did shoot arrows at (however well-protected) human bodies on this movie, which pays off with some pretty queasy-feeling dangerousness (I don't know if I'd have signed off on it myself); and thanks to the film's archery master, Howard Hill, we have that, plus Robin famously splitting an arrow in his tournament (which was apparently also quite real, merely clarified with some in-camera effects), as well as one of the foundational elements of action film sound design, inventing, right here, that classical arrow "whoosh" with a set of special arrows of his own manufacture.

Maybe above all—"maybe" only because the action and characters are that strong—we have how The Adventures looks, and there is hardly more splendor in all the annals of Technicolor.  And that is why we cannot discount Keighley's pre-production; both Keighley and Curtiz had made one previous Technicolor film apiece, a fact trivially ascertainable because The Adventures was only Warners' third and they'd made the first and second respectively, God's Country and the Woman and Gold Is Where You Find It, both fine films (I actually love God's Country) that use Technicolor to capture American landscapes, that still aren't really at all preparations for the very particular spectacle that The Adventures has wrought and since made synonymous with that color process at its best, both previous films being extremely reticent about actual having too many colors, lest they blow your eyes out.  The Adventures blows your eyes out: metal with an almost molten glow, wine the hue of blood, the greenest trees, freakish saturation throughout, even in the exteriors and especially in the interiors.  We can applaud its two cinematographers (Polito replaced Tony Gaudio during the directorial changeover), but then, much of it's been dictated to them by Milo Anderson, whom I think we can safely assume would have won The Adventures a fourth Oscar if Best Costume Design existed yet.  He's assisted a bit by art director Carl Jules Weyl, whose sets let these colors pop (I particularly love the chilly grays of his Norman castle set, which would work on any terms to establish the Normans' cruel regime, and also has some great geography for swordfights with its fat pillars and spiraling stairs; likewise, it contains another of my favorite grace notes, a falcon perch for these Norman assholes that reads as the medieval aristocratic equivalent of a place to hang your hat while you eat).

But Anderson has committed one of the supreme acts of costume design in film history, all so extraordinary I could possibly write just as long a review (yes, I know) solely about them.  The Normans naturally get the best of it, for they're the gaudy parasites and Robin is a homeless person (Will Scarlet clearly isn't, he's slathered in the richest imaginable beetle goop, while even the regular losers have more access to dyes generally than I think they would've), but amongst the Normans, Marian is creation after creation from Anderson, adjudging that de Havilland is so beautiful she really does only require her face to be so, and thus sticking with accurate-enough-to-the-12th century Norman conventions of veils, circlets, and full-body covering that, nevertheless, comes off like unhinged high fantasy in every other respect, including one dress only describable as "pyrite mail."***

I could not in conscience say she's truly beating out Rathbone, however, who has almost as many incredible looks (and doesn't have anything as legitimately tasteless as de Havilland's flavorstripe deal, though it goes to my wider point that even a garish misstep of a gown is still worth mentioning); these include the searingly bright blue-and-red number he dies in, and he always looks like a Jack Kirby Asgardian, which itself is probably testament to The Adventures' influence.  (It would make for a most believable adaptation of "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne," with its ruse that relies upon Robin first mutilating Gisbourne into unrecognizability—it's a pretty metal poem—before trading clothes with his victim.)  Flynn, mind you, is not left out: Anderson makes his forest spirit the soul of the movie, though I think I like Robin the very best when he's darker and slightly more plausible, in his disguise at the tournament, this tall and very intentional pile of burgundy rags, topped with one irritatingly smug hat.

That is, then, the real legacy of The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the reason it accomplished its "important" legacy of being the defining case for the Robin Hood legends in modern times: it's so much damn fun to watch, a collection of larger-than-life performances, inside a color space larger than anything anyone had seen before, a true storybook of a movie with all the visceral kineticism of a kick-ass action flick.

It's not my favorite Flynn, I said, which remains true—not my favorite Flynn/Curtiz, nor my favorite Korngold score for a Flynn/Curtiz film, and I'd even say that Korngold's score only kicks in hard in the final battle, even as it's always at the work of establishing the Germanic grammar of symphonic film compositions that would eventually take us to Star Wars and beyond—and there's enough in it that's bothersome to me that it's taken me some time to acknowledge that it must be a masterpiece; but I've arrived there at last, and a masterpiece it is.

Score: 10/10

*If I must square all this with my six year-old opinions regarding Disney's Robin Hood, and I am so obliged, then let's put it this way: if Disney's Robin Hood has my favorite idea of Robin Hood, that does not mean it must always stay my favorite movie with Robin Hood.

**Alright, one thing that's definitely Curtiz that I don't like is the staging of Marian "spying" on John et al in the castle, in the back of a shot on a stairwell around a pillar, completely unobscured inside a giant empty room.

***Though I'm curious about how much fidelity went into 12th century underdress, in consideration of lighting for Technicolor, given that our records indicate de Havilland survived.