The recent item at The Thinking Housewife about the “heroic” movie house in East St. Louis provoked me into remembering the many heroic films that Hollywood produced in the decades before World War II that thrilled the audiences who attended those glorious cinemas.  The movies used to belong to a healthy popular culture, which began to erode after the heady victory of 1945 and which disappeared apace in the tumult of the late 1960s.  Contemporary popular culture tends to be sexually and violently gross, morally relativistic, and intellectually so degraded that its mindlessness beggars description.  Recently, when I had the opportunity to teach a course on the history of American popular culture, I asked my students to watch a number of pre-1950 movies of the type that drew people out of their homes by the millions in the 1930s and 40s.  One of them was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn. 

Ascriptions like “the greatest film ever” are dubious, but in the case of The Adventures of Robin Hood, what would usually be hyperbole seems justified.  (Sample the original theatrical trailer.)  If, as I argued to my students, the European directors employed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s saw in film a continuation of grand opera on the Wagnerian model – a type of unified total artwork involving all the subordinate arts from costume- and scene-design through dramatic dialogue to musical accompaniment – then one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary instance than the Flynn-Curtiz Robin Hood.  The critic René Girard has argued that all effective narrative turns on moral conversion and that reading is itself a type of conversion experience.  So it is also in film.  One of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’ superbly directed medieval epic is that the story turns on a moment when two paths of moral conversion intersect one another and intertwine.  Robin must let love temper his passion for justice and Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland) must give up her Norman superciliousness to become reconciled to the English virtues embodied by Robin.

Drawing on legends that go back to the thirteenth century but that refer to the twelfth century and the reign of Richard Lionheart, The Adventures of Robin Hood concerns the usurpation of legitimate authority by schemers, confiscatory taxation that punishes ordinary people, and a host of related injustices.  Claude Rains plays the chief malefactor, Richard’s scoundrel of a brother, Prince John.  Mr. Rains was a great character actor.  Under Curtiz’ direction, he brings off a thespian tour-de-force of nefarious egomania.  The story of The Adventures of Robin Hood also concerns the social and political urgency of reconciling the Saxon yeomanry of England with its conquering Norman elites.  John, a Norman, is a divider and Robin, a Saxon, is a unifier.  In the more prominent of its two conversion subplots, the film follows the changing moral disposition of Marian, ward of the absent Richard, from her initial haughtiness and total identification with Norman superiority, to her confrontation with Prince John’s cruelty, to her identification with Robin’s opposition to the usurper.  Marian must fall in love with Robin. 

In the other conversion subplot, the film follows Robin himself in his career from wisecracking, risk-taking guerilla-leader, with a just cause, to a genuine political leader who, on Richard’s return to England, finds a way at last to integrate himself back into a reconstituted society.  The film treats justice, not sentimentally, but realistically.  Robin acknowledges at one point Marian’s aggrieved remark that he has killed for his cause – “But only those who deserved it,” he answers.  Marian’s love importantly prepares Robin for the time after his cause has triumphed, when, with Richard restored to the throne, he will need to put aside his longbow to exercise wisdom and compassion as a baron of the rightful king.  The accurate assessment of masculine and feminine traits is one of the film’s merits. 

The Robin Hood story had appeared on screen before, most notably, in the silent era, in the Douglas Fairbanks project, Robin Hood (1923), a splendid film, with lavish sets, which – when Curtiz inherited the Warner Brothers endeavor from its first director William Keighley – must have seemed a hard act to follow.  The Adventures of Robin Hood would be a “talkie,” of course.  Because Curtiz wanted to make his film as historically accurate as possible, he might have requested screenwriters Norman R. Maine and Seton I. Miller to lace the dialogue with archaisms, but the director rightly saw that this would stultify the action.  On the other hand, Curtiz did not want dialogue in a bland, contemporary idiom. 

The compromise takes the somewhat Shakespearian form of much witticism-laced low-comic dialogue in alternation with serious exchanges that combine upper-class vocabulary with a variety of literary syntax.  The villains speak in good grammar but of wicked plans.  Thus quite without any thee’s or thou’s, a formality of diction prevails that, never calling undue attention to itself, settles an aura of dignity on the good guys, and emphasizes, by a contrast between aristocratic locution and dastardly deed, the blackguardism of the schemers.  The good guys often speak colloquially, but always in good heart, aware of justice, and with a sense of civic conscience. 

Curtiz chose to make The Adventures of Robin Hood a visually sumptuous movie, from the gorgeousness of the fabrics used in the colorful costumes to the artificially painted-on greenness of Sherwood Forest (in Stanislaus, California), to the stony interiors of John’s Nottingham castle, where Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) imprisons Marian in the dungeon.  A number of critics have commented that The Adventures of Robin Hood makes an exceptionally persuasive case for Technicolor, the process that Curtiz used.  I agree, despite the fact that I much prefer black-and-white to color.  Robin Hood’s color-values, while vivid, serve, rather than distract from, the story and they contribute meaningfully to the operatic spectacle of the production.  A fine example comes with the archery contest, about halfway through the film’s ninety minutes, by which John would entrap Robin. 

I invoke “operatic spectacle” not merely as a figure of speech.  In appreciating The Adventures of Robin Hood, one must remark on its amazing, symphonic score by the expatriate Austrian composer Eric Wolfgang Korngold.  Korngold fled Nazi persecution in 1938, after the Anschluss, accepting a providential offer by producer Hal B. Wallis that he should score the new Flynn film.  A late romantic in his musical style, nourished on the brilliant orchestrations of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, Korngold had already scored one Flynn vehicle, Captain Blood (1936).  Korngold treated the film as an opera without singing parts, assigning Leitmotifs, or immediately identifiable musical gestures, to each main character, and creating a continuously running symphonic commentary on the action.  The score won an Oscar for its composer and has gradually gained an independent reputation as a listenable, convincing symphonic composition. 

Here, for example, in soundtrack only, is the delightful little orchestral scherzo, incorporating the medieval tune “Sumer is icumen in,” that accompanies the meeting of Robin and John Little.  And here, disarmingly aware of its own preciosity, is the accompaniment to one of the love scenes between De Havilland and Flynn.  The complementary fitment of music and scene belongs to the film’s perfection.  It is the music, rather than the dialogue, that tells us when Marian and Robin have fallen in love. 

No better acting has ever graced any film – even any ostensibly more serious film.  The image of an egocentric swaggerer dogs Flynn’s reputation, but the image proves false.  Flynn’s Robin speaks softly to the point of shyness, except when confronting evil.  De Havilland’s progress from spurning the rebel while looking down her Norman nose at him to confessing at last her love for the defender of justice will never be surpassed in its convincing, heartfelt reversal.  The supporting cast members, especially Alan Hale as John Little and Eugene Palette as Friar Tuck, contribute just the right balance of comic relief.  Robin’s quarterstaff fight with John Little codifies the paradigm of a fair contest, with Flynn’s Robin letting Hale best him in the best possible humor. 

None of my fifty or so undergraduates had seen The Adventures of Robin Hood before, as amazing as that fact might seem.  (It used to be staple fare on local television, but nowadays appears only on the Turner Classics cable-channel, which students do not watch.)  Almost all of the students admitted that they dreaded, in advance, the prospect of “having to sit through” what they dismissed prejudicially as “an old movie.”  Almost all of them felt compelled by honesty in the aftermath to express their surprise and pleasure over how swiftly and completely the film drew them in and won them over.  The moment when Robin first kisses Marian brought from the female side of the enrollment what was to me a highly satisfying, involuntary sigh.

                                          — Comments —

Jill Farris writes:

I don’t know about college students these days but twenty years ago Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood was our four-year-old’s absolute favorite movie. He checked it out at the library at least twice a week and carried it around under his arm like a security blanket (when he wasn’t watching it or practicing his swashbuckling moves).

These days the film still satisfies and entertains our four teens as well as a visiting Korean exchange student. I have always loved the beautiful woodland scenes. It is simply a delicious film.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Jill Farris’ remark about how much her four-year-old loved Flynn’s Robin Hood (and how much her teenagers loved it) brings up an important point about the film. There are no teenagers or children among the characters, except in a few crowd scenes as extras. The persons of the drama are all adults, but that does not stop children and teenagers to appreciating the film. Filmmakers before 1950 or so did not believe that it was imperatve to pander to the youth segment of the audience. Nowadays it seems as though filmmakers pander almost exclusively to the youth segment of the audience, which has ceased to be a segment and is now the whole of the envisioned audience.

Laura writes:

The persons of the drama are all adults, but that does not stop children and teenagers to appreciating the film.

Great point.

Alan writes:

Regarding Dr. Bertonneau’s observation that modern motion pictures pander to youth:   

Late in his life, the actor Richard Widmark said he hated most movies from the 1980s-‘90s,which he said were made mostly for teenage boys.    

I suggest that what we are seeing is an effect of the convergence of advanced technology and people whose chief characteristic is their moral vacuity.  Like much of American culture, the movie industry is now run by people with the mindset of teenage boys.   

Older Americans have often said, “They don’t make them like they used to.”  Truer words could not be spoken.  In the 1930s-‘40s motion picture producers did not have advanced technology, but they had restraint and esthetic judgment.  Today they have such technology but no restraint and the esthetic judgment of teenage boys.   

In those years, moviegoers were treated to well-written stories, characters who spoke English clearly, scenes of extended dialogue where the camera lingered, and the effective use of background music and the fade-to-black.  And classical restraint was always in evidence throughout such pictures.  [For more on this, I recommend Spencer Warren’s 2003 article “Classical Greece and Classical Hollywood”]

Today, moviegoers get:  In-your-face violence, gore, profanity, loudness, “special effects”, gimmickry, and – worst of all – the idiotic and relentless rapid cutting whereby no scene is permitted to remain on screen for more than a second or two.   Such movies are spectacles of motion, commotion, gimmicks, and noise.  People who agree to sit through such things have surrendered any capacity for moral or esthetic judgment.   

Dr. Bertonneau is also right about such movies being shown often on late-night TV in years long past.   That is how – in the 1960s – I discovered and enjoyed movies like “The Sea Hawk”, “The Sea Wolf”, “Madame Curie”, “These Three”, “Random Harvest”, “Going My Way”, and “If Winter Comes”, among many others from the 1930s-’40s.  Those years were a golden age of local late-night television for people who might otherwise have never seen such movies from the golden age of Hollywood.  

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

I much appreciate Alan’s comments about Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s.  Alan calls attention to that most annoying of contemporary filmic techniques, rapid staccato cutting from scene to scene.  Classic directors sometimes used this trick, but always to emphasize the climax of the drama, or to emphasize a moment of mayhem or disaster, never as the ceaseless rhythm of the whole film.  But contemporary Hollywood has no stories to tell, so “effects” become the aim of filmmaking; the less “narrative” the “effects” are, the better they are, as far as the director is concerned.  The style and intention are both anti-cognitive; they are the equivalent of inviting the film viewer to snort a line of cocaine, which might well be the attraction for the intended audience. 

I am glad to have the Richard Widmark reference.  I have another one, from the Jack Lemon movie Save the Tiger (1973).  Waiting in a bar for a shady business deal to work out in its details, the Lemon character says to the bartender words to the effect that, Maybe I’ll go see a film.  The bartender answers back (this was forty years ago), “Why bother – they haven’t made a decent film in twenty years”!

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