THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)

Has swash ever been better buckled? TechniColor pageantry as dewy fresh? A more plus perfect cast or a score so rousing, romantic & loaded with honest emotion? A collective effort that seems effortless and (in spite of two directors & three cinematographers) all of a piece. Everyone knows that this Warner Brothers classic on the old Sherwood Forest legend can’t be beat. Not by Douglas Fairbanks in 1922 or Sean Connery in ’76, just to name two. Here, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains et al. stamp their personalities on the archetypal roles; director William Keighley establishes character & Michael Curtiz (who largely took over) gives dash, while composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold supplies pomp & sentiment. But the film needs to look its best to really deliver. There were surprisingly fine, restored 16mm prints distributed in the ‘70s. A revelation at the time. Yet when Warners dug up 35mm theatrical prints for the studio’s 75th Anniversary Tour, the 3-strip TechniColor had fallen alarmingly out of register in copies available for projection. And though you could see just what the original prints were aiming for by pulling out N. C. Wyeth’s ROBIN HOOD illustrations,

that didn’t stop a recent MoMA restoration ‘rethink’ from sucking half the life out of the color saturation and doubling the grain. A real fiasco. Fortunately, current DVDs are in much better shape, and significantly improve in sharpness & definition in the last four reels. No doubt even better on Blu-Ray.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The DVD comes with the 1999 documentary GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR, allowing you to see how much better transfer techniques have gotten in just the past 20 years. The shots from ROBIN HOOD in it look spectacularly bad, totally misrepresenting the color scheme & film grain.

DOUBLE-BILL: Rougher, less polished, CAPTAIN BLOOD/’35, first of the Flynn/de Havilland swashbucklers (with Curtiz & Korngold already onboard), has a special feel of discovery about it. OR: For a more recent attempt at the form: Philippe de Broca gets smashing perfs from Daniel Auteuil & Vincent Perez on a late, unexpected success in the umpteenth version of LE BOSSU / aka ON GUARD/’97. (see both below)