Remember Captain Blood ? That was the movie from 1935 where Errol Flynn played the outlaw Peter Blood. Peter was really only an outlaw because of the injustices some pretender to the throne kept laying on his subjects and deep down, Peter was a good guy who only wanted to serve his true king. He also wanted Olivia de Havilland to walk his plank, if you catch my meaning. Three years later, Warner Brothers decided that we had waited long enough and decided that what we needed was a remake of Captain Blood.

Those of you who are older than dirt will probably tell me that Captain Blood was first remade the very next year in 1936 when Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland starred in The Charge Of The Light Brigade (also directed by Micheal Curtiz who did Captain Blood and got a director credit with William Keighly on Robin Hood). I haven’t seen that movie yet, so I’ll just have to assume that it’s the same film, but with soldiers instead of pirates. I’m not bellyaching about the fact that Robin Hood doesn’t stray far from its mid-thirties Flynn/de Havilland formula, because it’s enjoyable enough in its own right. I’m just saying that it feels a bit like we’ve seen it all before, though this one has a big advantage over Captain Blood. Technicolor, baby!

I’m all for stuff like moody foreign films and film noirs being made in black and white with their shadows and atmosphere, but when you’re a guy in green tights leaping around the forest or when you’re the scourge of the seven seas after gold booty (as well as Olivia’s booty), I want to see ships get blown up in color and I want to watch Robin and his band of merry men in all their guady glory!

The only thing you could really mark Captain Blood down for was its lack of color. Movies like that demand that we be able to see the tropics and treasure in full-blooded Technicolor. Warners recognized this, as well as the fact that a guy named Will Scarlet wouldn’t have quite the impact if he was running around the woods like he hadn’t washed his red tights in Tide with Color Guard and we had to see him in some dingy grey leggings. So they decided to sacrifice any of the depth of Peter Blood’s character and distract us with glorious color and ample scenes of guys swinging on ropes and vines. I think you’ll agree it was a fair trade-off.

When the movie first started, I was thinking I was back in my third grade history class watching one of those awful films where some goofs dress up as Indians or pilgrims or Ben Franklin and stand around trying to trick me into learning stuff. It didn’t work then (memo to teachers: if you don’t want classroom hi-jinks to ensue, don’t put me in the front row and turn the lights off – especially if the film starts running over into my recess time) and I sure ain’t going to start learning about olden times now.

It was with a moderate amount of disdain then that I found myself reading some on screen text about this king and his evil brother and about Normans and Saxons and I was trying to give it all some context since the only Saxon I ever heard of was John Saxon from Cannibal Apocalypse and I thought there was a golfer named Greg Norman.

As near as I could make out there was this guy named Richard the Lion Heart who went off on the Third Crusade leaving his little brother John to linger around England plotting his big hostile take over. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Richard goes and gets himself captured by Leopold V of Austria and the ransom for his safe return is 150,000 gold marks! This shows us how dated this film is, because if the king of Austria ever kidnapped Prince Charles, he’d have to get his ransom in Euros! That and his asking price for Charles would be significantly less than for a guy whose nickname is Lion Heart.

Since Richard is otherwise engaged, John has taken it upon himself to fire the regent that Richard appointed to run the show in his absence and proceeds to raise taxes on the Saxons. He also sends soldiers into Saxony or at least the Sherwood Forest part of things and they go on a montage of terror where we see them taking food without paying for it, kissing local girls, torturing all the old men in the area, and generally behaving like the soccer fans their descendants would become.

Against this backdrop of government oppression, some guy shoots himself a deer in the forest, but it turns out that this deer was part of the king’s petting zoo or something because Sir Guy of Gisbourne rolls up and tries to bust his chops for doing it. This is where Robin Hood shows up and takes credit for killing the deer and tells Sir Guy to hit the bricks. Sir Guy behaves about how you would expect a guy named Sir Guy to behave – he gets a case of the limbertail and hauls arse out of there. Later at dinner with all the bad guy nobels and John, they babble about how Sir Guy got punked by a guy in green pantyhose.

Any doubts I had about this movie were immediately dispelled when there’s a commotion at the castle door during dinner and when they open it up, we see Robin Hood smacking guards upside the head with the carcas of the deer everyone made such a big to-do about killing. He dumps it on the table in front of John and basically makes him his bitch in front of everyone. He also manages to smart off to Maid Marion who feigns outrage, but you and I both know how these sorts of things go, so it’s only a matter of time before Robin Hood and her are shacking up in his secret tree house in the woods.

This is when you get the first of the movie’s big action scenes and it’s a jim dandy one! John tries to have Robin Hood captured, but since there were only a hundred and fifty or so of his men in the castle and because Robin was a whole two feet away from them at the table, the odds weren’t excatly in their favor and Robin escapes. The expected death warrant goes out for Robin and he uses his new found fame to round up a band of merry men.

The movie replicates a few of the more famous recruiting incidents such as the infamous Little John affair and the battle with Friar Tuck. Both of these are done with good humor and you can see that Robin is just testing these people when he tries to beat them up and humiliate them. That’s good management technique! Robin’s merry men actually get very little screen time excpet when there’s some big battles to be fought and whatever personality that Little John, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet may have had is lost since they cocentrate a lot of time on John, Sir Guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham (played for comic relief here) fuming over Robin’s latest stunt. Throw in the screen time where Marion pines away for Robin and the appearance of the now-undercover Richard the Lion Heart, and the hour and forty-minutes don’t seem like much time at all.

The movie barrels ahead, without much slow down, constantly buoyed by a sterling performance by Flynn. I’m not sure any other guy could get away with making Robin seem simultaneously dangerous, forthright, and good hearted all the while wearing his bright green tights and slapping Friar Tuck on the ass with his sword. Somehow Errol made it work and that’s what makes him a star.

The movie shows us Robin raising an army of common folk to fight the Norman oppressors and we get to see Marion become convinced that Robin is on the side of the angels. How much of that was because she was reading a lot editorials and going to a bunch of political rallies or just because she liked how Robin filled out his tights is still up for debate.

There is a silly sequence when the Sheriff decides to hold an archery contest in hopes of drawing Robin out in the open so that they can capture and hang him and by God if that dummy doesn’t show up and win the event! Watching Robin in disguise as a tinker or something and thinking he’s going to fool anyone because he’s wearing a hood makes you wonder whether his control-top pantyhouse is cutting off the blood circulation to his head. Eventually he teams up with Richard to defeat the evil John and alls well that ends well in Sherwood Forest.

This one is a good time with plenty of medieval action and wisecracking from the smiling Robin. Rathbone as Sir Guy and Claude Rains as Prince John are suitably nefarious in their roles and you get another big sword fight between Rathbone and Flynn (they had one in Captain Blood ) to close out the film. I liked this one, but this certainly isn’t what you would call a “gritty” adventure.

Robin and his group are presented as a carefree bunch that sit around in the forest having big feasts, occasionally going to archery matches and condcucting ambushes when they get bored and no one in this movie really feels like a person so much as an ideal. That being said, the movie is an enjoyable period adventure film whose lack of depth is more than made up for by the colorful presentation, the gigantaic sets, the star power of Flynn, de Havilland, and Rathbone, and Robin’s contagious good-naturedness.

© 2008 MonsterHunter