| Collector's Corner March 2005
 The
Adventures of Robin HoodStarring: Errol Flynn,
Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Raines, Alan Hale
Directed by: Michael Curtiz
Theatrical release: 1938
DVD release: 2003
Video: Fullscreen
Sound: Dolby Digital mono
Released by: Warner Home Video
The total population of the US was 122 million in 1929, and
in that year more than 95 million Americans visited the movie theater each week. Hollywood
producers were rolling in money, and it seemed that nothing could get in their way. Then
came the Great Depression, and the filmgoing audience decreased by a third. The dramatic
rise in the numbers of home radios (shades of today’s home theaters) also bit into
the movie audience, and Hollywood had to fight back by offering things never before
experienced. Talkies were the first to come along and change everything. Suddenly, the
film musical was born. Theater owners, noting the public’s love for musicals, began
hiring music acts to perform between films. But when even these tactics failed to separate
enough Americans from their money, Hollywood turned to the man who not only offered one of
the most beautiful palettes ever offered artists, he also saved the film business. You may
not know his name -- Herbert T. Kalmus -- but you know his invention: Technicolor. And you
probably know Technicolor’s masterpiece, The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Warner brothers -- Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack -- had
been some of the more progressive studio bosses during the upheaval. They had been the
ones who brought Al Jolson to the screen with the first synchronized film sound, in The
Jazz Singer (1927). Warner Bros. also discovered the American audience’s abiding
love of the gangster flick, and made stars of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G.
Robinson. But in 1938, led by Jack Warner, the brothers decided to risk their largest
budget ever for a single film, $2 million, on a swashbuckling story of the legendary Robin
Hood. The attention-grabber would be Kalmus’s Technicolor.
In the tricky Technicolor process, three strips of film --
one sensitive to red light, one to blue, one to green -- are exposed simultaneously. The
three strips are then transferred to a single piece of film. That last step is
complicated; Kalmus wanted to be sure it was done perfectly, so he required of Warner
Bros. that one of his own scientists handle the transfer. He was also concerned that his
cameras be operated and maintained correctly, so he refused to sell them, agreeing only to
lease them. When The Adventures of Robin Hood began filming, all 11 Technicolor
cameras then in existence were used for the shoot. The one substantial roadblock was that
the color balance of every Technicolor film had to be approved by Natalie Kalmus,
Herbert’s estranged wife, who up till then had allowed only muted colors. The Warners
wanted colors that would pop off the screen.
As cinematographer Vitorrio Storaro notes in Glorious
Technicolor, an excellent extra included on this DVD, black-and-white photography had
evolved over the years into a wonderful art form with a delicate interplay of light and
shadows. In the beginning, because of Natalie Kalmus’s iron grip on the new medium,
Technicolor was mostly light and almost no shadow. It’s odd that today, when most
serious cinematography seems to lean toward the darkness of film noir, the three main
early Technicolor masterpieces -- The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone With the
Wind, The Wizard of Oz -- delight us primarily because they are so brightly lit
and strongly colored. If it weren’t for the incredible success of Robin Hood,
the world might never have seen the ability of the three-strip Technicolor process to
provide the most deeply saturated colors ever seen on the screen.
A movie worth watching over and over
That success included Robin Hood’s being the
No.1 box-office film of 1938 as well as being nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. And
while the film’s unparalleled beauty is an important aspect of its achievement, it is
by no means the only one. While researching the film, I came across a startling fact.
David Thomson, the most notoriously cynical curmudgeon in the realm of film criticism,
admits in his book, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, that he watched The
Adventures of Robin Hood 20 times in a single year. What would make Thomson, known for
loving nothing so much as carving up film icons and dumping them in the trash heap of
critical history, watch any film 20 times?
 Thomson attributes Robin Hood’s appeal
to its "rippling action" and "stained-glass Technicolor," but more
than anything to the actor who played the title role. Errol Flynn -- 6' 2", 29 years
old, and blessed with athletic moves and a slyly treacherous smile -- appealed to women
and men alike, and defined the role of the swashbuckler through this film and several
others (Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk). Sadly, no one has appeared since who
could take up his mantle. Show me an actor today who can magnetize the screen as Flynn
does in chapters 4-6, when he shows up at a banquet at the castle of Sir Guy of Gisbourne
(Basil Rathbone) and impudently tosses a dead deer on the table in front of Prince John.
Minus a few falls, Flynn himself performed the entire ensuing fight scene, with all its
incredible legerdemain -- no CGI, no stuntmen. Like many a Hollywood star of the day, he
was trained in fencing, and his natural acrobatic skills paid off. He was good with the
ladies as well. Watch chapter 20 for some genuine sparks between Flynn and his costar,
Olivia de Havilland. There was a true romance there, but no woman ever corralled Flynn. He
was such a notorious womanizer that two thinly veiled sexual terms of the era -- "In
like Flynn" and "swordsman" -- were based on his exploits.
Olivia de Havilland is dewy and sweetly gorgeous, but what
makes an actress great is having a splendid brain behind the beauty. Here she shows pluck
and a searing wit -- chapter 12’s slow melting of the ice between Maid Marian and
Robin shows some mental process going on behind those eyes. Interestingly, De Havilland
was the one actor in The Adventures of Robin Hood who ended up a true hero, one
worshiped even today for taking a stand against tyranny. After years of making silly
movies for Jack Warner, the demure De Havilland rebelled against her usurious contract and
sued to have it revoked. This was a great risk for a studio actor of that time -- studio
bosses had the right to put actors on waivers and basically freeze them out of work. Every
actor in Hollywood followed the case: If De Havilland lost, it would ruin her career; if
she won, they would all be free from the studio slavery that actors had faced since the
beginning of the film industry. Nor could the studio heads imagine a world in which actors
had the right to negotiate fees for individual movies. De Havilland spent two years out of
the business, but she won. To this day, the law limiting how long studios can control an
actor’s fate is called "the De Havilland Law."
The rest of the cast is perfect in every way. Basil
Rathbone plays the textbook bad guy -- sneering, mean, and greasy -- and his own
considerable abilities with a sword lend the culminating fight with Robin in chapter 27 a
sense of real danger. The fight is impressive, and again -- no CGI, no stunt men, and real
steel. Claude Rains as Prince John is equally creepy as a soft man with too much power
surrounded by too many sycophants. Robin’s gang are a stellar crew, particularly
Patric Knowles as Will Scarlet, Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck, and Alan Hale as Little
John. If the last actor’s name and face look familiar, he’s the spitting image
of his son, Alan Hale, Jr., who played the Skipper on TV’s Gilligan’s Island.
You should also recognize Maid Marian’s horse, Golden Cloud. Shortly after The
Adventures of Robin Hood was filmed, Roy Rogers bought the horse and renamed it
Trigger.
A masterly DVD
Warner Home Video has given The Adventures of Robin Hood
the Rolls-Royce treatment. The film has been remastered from the restored three-strip
Technicolor elements, and the result is the most beautiful picture you’ll have ever
seen outside of one of the repertory houses that has shown the film in the last two years.
The elements are so clean that I’m tempted to say that Robin Hood looks as if
it could have been filmed yesterday, were it not for the fact that no one makes films this
lovely any more (except, perhaps, director Zhang Yimou). The sound has been cleaned up --
you can hear the dialogue clearly, but more important, you can hear Eric Wolfgang
Korngold’s Oscar-winning score in excellent mono sound. Lovers of this music will be
glad to know that they can watch the film and listen only to the score, an object lesson
in how much a composer can add to a film.
The feature-length commentary track by author Rudy Behlmer
strikes a good balance between chatty informality and smartly scripted information. There
are also 11 Errol Flynn trailers, along with newsreels, outtakes (something rare for the
era), an excellent making-of documentary, an hour-long bitchy funfest about the history of
Technicolor, and a mock "night at the movies" program that shows The
Adventures of Robin Hood preceded by the newsreel, a musical short, and a cartoon you
might have seen at a theater in 1938. The most fun extras are two Warner Bros. cartoons --
one each starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck -- based on the Robin Hood theme.
Postscript
Errol Flynn’s high living got the best of him -- the
swordsman got in like Flynn a little too often. He used to say, half-jokingly, "I
like my whisky old and my women young." Flynn was tried three times for statutory
rape. For a while, the public let him get away with his peccadilloes, assuming a man that
handsome had to have certain appetites. But when the old whisky began to take its toll,
Flynn began to look awful. He died at 50, a sad old drunk who looked 70. Olivia de
Havilland went on to be nominated for five Oscars and won two. Now 89, she lives a happy
life in Paris, where she teaches Sunday school. She is still offered acting roles; for the
right one, she says, she’ll go back in front of the cameras with joy.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
