Warner Legends Collection: The Adventures of Robin Hood; Yankee Doodle Dandy; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Here’s Looking at You, Warner Bros.
November 2003 Reviewed by: Wes Phillips Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Warner Legends is a stupid idea; Warner Legends is a brilliant idea.

The three films collected in the box set have almost nothing at all to do with one another. Two of them (Robin Hood and Yankee Doodle Dandy) share a director, Michael Curtiz, but they all feature different stars and range from a compelling character study to a jaunty bit of propagandistic show-biz biography to rousing tales of derring-do. Yet, all three were products of the same studio at a time when the studio was king -- and all three are brilliant works of entertainment.

The box set collects all three in fabulous new double-DVD editions, packaging them with a seventh disc, a 1991 made-for-TV Warner documentary, Here's Looking at You, Warner Bros. Each two-disc set is packed with features -- and not just your typical fluff, but great stuff, including commentaries, audio-only files, and rare footage and newsreels. Other companies should pay attention to the way these things should be done.

The Adventures of Robin Hood is the jewel of the set. It was filmed in Technicolor, so soft and rich it practically glows, and the telecine transfer here is exemplary. Errol Flynn's dashing hero is perfectly balanced by Basil Rathbone's electrifying villain, Sir Guy of Gismond. The fencing scenes between the two at the film’s conclusion still rank among the best action sequences ever committed to film. Of the three movies included in the Legends box, only Robin Hood was omitted from the AFI's 100 Greatest American Films list -- although many of its admirers believe it properly belongs there.

There is no debate about Walter Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It definitely belongs on the list (it was ranked 30). The paranoid Fred C. Dobbs is unquestionably Bogart's greatest role -- as well as his greatest performance -- although the film is too intense to elicit the same passion as his portrayals of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. By the way, the film's most quoted line never was said. It isn't "Badges? We don't need no steenking badges," but rather "We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."

Yankee Doodle Dandy (No.100 on AFI's list) may be a revelation if you think of Cagney primarily as a "heavy." Here, he plays song-and-dance man George M. Cohan with an incandescence that is equal parts star power and sheer kinetic energy. Cagney's dancing is exhilarating, especially in a signature Cohan riff where he dances straight up the stage's proscenium and back-flips to land back on his feet. In the film's penultimate scene, he feels so good after an interview with President Franklin Roosevelt that he dances down the White House staircase. It is bound to be apocryphal, but it feels so right, we want it to be so. Actually, that could be said about the entire film.

You could buy these films in their individual, separate two-disc editions and they would still rate 4.5 across the board, but taken together, they've simply got to rate a 5. As good as the parts are -- and they are superb -- the sum of the whole comes about as close to perfection as filmmaking gets.

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