Michael Curtiz, William Keighley (1938)
It’s always fair weather in Warner Bros’ The Adventures of Robin Hood. The quality of light in Sherwood Forest – the sunlight filtered through the trees – is magically nostalgic. It evokes the world of your childhood when you first read Robin Hood stories – or, at least, what you now feel that childhood world was like. (A memory that’s more definitely genuine: as a young boy, I found Robin particularly accessible because our next-door neighbours’ surname was Hood.) The ornate script and graphic curlicues of the opening credits and scene-setting legends have a quality that’s heraldic in both senses of the word: the whole lustrously Technicolored movie turns out to be like a richly illustrated old storybook come to life (or – again – how you like to imagine such a book). Antiquated phrases such as ‘splendidly caparisoned in gold and scarlet’ are given new meaning through what Hollywood put on the screen here: the colouring of the costumes (by Milo Anderson) is often intensely gorgeous. Some of the compositions also suggest art-historical references though, needless to say, I can’t identify the specific paintings in question …
The action sequences – mainly fights but including other contests too (Robin’s first encounter with Little John on the bridge, the archery competition) – function rather as the song-and-dance highlights in a musical: these set pieces are splendidly choreographed. The alliance of Claude Rains’ Prince John (would-be usurper to the absent Richard the Lionheart’s throne), Basil Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne and Melville Cooper’s Sheriff of Nottingham also invite musical analogy: they’re like an orchestra section in supplying complementary notes of malignity and cravenness. The picture’s score, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, is justly famous (and, as Neil Brand explained in his 2013 BBC 4 series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, proved highly influential on later generations of film-music composers). Because Errol Flynn is legendary in swashbuckling roles, it’s interesting, watching him as Robin, to be reminded that Flynn isn’t all about imposing physique and light-on-his-feet athleticism: he has a mobile, humorous face and a voice which, although it’s not greatly expressive, is supple enough to keep self-conscious heroism at a safe distance. As Maid Marian, Olivia de Havilland is very beautiful, able to suggest plenty going on behind the wimple and, characteristically, a little bossy: the combination is a delight. Patric Knowles’s Will Scarlett is upstaged by his outfit and it’s rather an anti-climax when Ian Hunter’s King Richard removes his ‘disguise’; but other supporting performances – especially from Alan Hale (Little John), Eugene Pallette (Friar Tuck) and Herbert Mundin (Mutch) – more than compensate. Marian’s maid Bess is played by Una O’Connor and Marian’s horse by an uncredited animal called (at the time) Golden Cloud. This was one of the first movie roles for a future equine celebrity: Roy Rogers’ Trigger.
Although Michael Curtiz and William Keighley shared the directing credit, the former actually took over from the latter. The screenplay, ‘based upon ancient Robin Hood legends’, was by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I Miller. The cinematographers were Tony Gaudio, Sol Polito and W Howard Greene. Korngold, Ralph Dawson (film editing) and Carl Jules Weyl (art direction) all won Oscars. The film is a triumph of secure and appealing tone. All concerned – behind the camera and in front of it – are aware of telling a tall story in a broad style: they do the job so wholeheartedly and sympathetically that The Adventures of Robin Hood is irresistibly cheering.
28 July 2016
