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With over five-dozen interpretations of the legendary Robin Hood having been brought to the screen, the single most exuberant and vital version came to DVD on the occasion of its sixty- fifth anniversary.  And now we have an even more satisfying release in high definition on Blu-ray Disc (it’s second in HD; it was released earlier to the now defunct HD DVD format).  This is the original men-in-tights, arguably Errol Flynn's most satisfying onscreen performance. Specially restored 35 mm Technicolor prints of the film made brief appearances in motion picture theaters in August of 2003.  Now, BD player owners benefit from that restoration.

This 1938 film is based on Robin Hood's core legends with a touch of class warfare for motivation. It's highly romanticized and charmingly naive. King Richard (Ian Hunter) is off on one of his crusades, fighting to reclaim the holy land in the name of Christianity. He's left William of Longchamps, his trusted Chancellor, as Regent, essentially withholding governing power from his younger brother, Prince John (Claude Rains). When Richard is detained in Austria and held for ransom, John delights in his brother's misfortune and seizes power. He imposes brutal taxes on the Saxons in the guise of a ransom collection to free the imprisoned Norman King. Saxons unwilling or unable to pay are systematically maimed or killed, which causes the rift between the conquering Normans and the subjugated Saxons to widen. A Saxon nobleman, Sir Robin of Locksley (Errol Flynn), is appalled by the Normans' abuse and declares an open revolt. He becomes Robin Hood, organizes a guerilla army, and takes shelter in the impenetrable depths of Sherwood Forest. Robin and his band harass the Normans, steal back the ransom taxes with which John actually intends to buy his way to the throne, and give shelter to Saxon families ruined by Norman cruelty.

We're treated to familiar vignettes from Robin Hood legendry: Robin meets Little John (Alan Hale) at a stream crossing and challenges him to a quarter-staff duel for the right of way; Robin discovers Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette) asleep in the forest and toys with him as a prelude to recruiting him for his band of merry men; and, Robin and Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland) meet and slowly fall in love as she begins to understand the nature of the Normans' uncivilized behavior and Robin's rough nobility. The High Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper), a bit of a buffoon, is powerless to stop Robin and his men. It falls to the evil Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) to capture the outlaw. Ironically, it's the Sheriff who devises the irresistible archery contest that will cause Robin to be captured and sentenced to death by hanging.

The most expensive film Warner Bros. made to that date and the most popular film of 1938, The Adventures of Robin Hood is another of those synergistic marvels that just happened to benefit from ideal casting, skillful filmmakers including two directors, wonderfully innocent screenwriting, a splendid score, and the magnificent process of three-strip Technicolor. It is the quintessential swashbuckler, a costumed action-adventure piece laced with good humor and briskly paced. Errol Flynn was made for the role, athletic and game to perform many of his own stunts and swordplay. Olivia de Havilland literally glows - she's simply radiant - and compliments Flynn remarkably well (they would co-star in eight films). I admired how she wordlessly expressed her growing admiration for the outlaw as they spoke about the very unromantic Norman oppression. Basil Rathbone - my Sherlock Holmes of choice - is splendid as the cold, malicious Gisbourne. And I cannot fail to mention another star of the show, the Technicolor process. The costume designs overflow with bright, vivid colors. Reds, purples, greens, yellows… The saturation and color depth is quite remarkable; that the film could have been brought back to this level of visual quality after sixty-five years is nothing short of amazing.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Over the course my seemingly interminable coverage of the emergence of high definition on disc, more than one reader wrote to ask if a motion picture in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio or the 1.37:1 Academy Format would benefit from a high definition transfer.  I explained that the pillared transfer would have 1080 horizontal lines rather than 480, and the number of pixels on each of those horizontal lines would increase by 267%.  So I answered an emphatic yes; such motion pictures would be greatly improved in a high definition presentation.  This is a nice example.

I was dazzled by the colors. There's a chromatic richness that really stands out from the single strip films of decades later. Flesh tones are quite natural, yet vivid colors are painted to the screen with exceptional depth and subtle gradations. Shadow detail in the day for night scenes is excellent. Small object detail and fine textures are very good, outstanding for a film of its age, but it cannot compete with the most modern of films. The presentation is so revealing that despite my having seen this film many times before on commercial television and on DVD, I noticed subtle details that I'd never seen before: the candle blowing itself out after the arrow hits the back of a Norman soldier at 0:26:36; one of the hangmen falling on a rubber spear tip at 1:07:13; and, a car driving by in the far background at 1:27:33 as Will Scarlett (Patric Knowles) dismounts to help Much (Herbert Mundin). The high definition transfer excels in scenes that reveal the exceptionally large sets or intricate glass mattes.  The textures of the simulated stone walls of the interior of the grand hall of Gisbourne’s castle are crystal clear. A modest level of grain runs through the movie, but the presentation rarely betrays any flaws in the film elements. This is a splendid transfer of a great-looking film, limited by the source elements and a modest bit rate that averages a bit over 20 Mbps. I suspect compression was high to make room for supplements.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The 1938 monaural audio was originally recorded optically, a notoriously distortion-prone medium. The Dolby Digital monaural track is not stressed by the obsolete technology its limited fidelity one whit.  As with many such audio restorations, equalization has helped tonal balance and, to a limited extent, timbre, but the inherent limitations of bandwidth and dynamic range, and the audible distortion mechanisms all remain. The wonderful orchestral score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold suffers the most. Messy and nasal, the viewer can only glean a hint of the grandeur of this Oscar winning composition. (See the supplement section for more on the score; there's a music-only track.) Deep bass and shimmering highs are, of course, not an issue, nor are surround effects. Dialog is quite intelligible and while voices do not possess anywhere near the transparency required to create the illusion of in-the-room, the spoken word remains clear throughout.

Alternate mono tracks are in Spanish and French. The audio is supported by subtitles in French, Spanish, and English SDH.
 
Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Warner Home Video had put together an extremely generous collection of extras spread over two discs for the DVD release. They’ve been ported over to this Blu-ray Disc, but certain notable improvements have been made.

To accompany the film, film historian Rudy Behlmer may be heard in a feature-length commentary. Like his commentaries for Casablanca, Notorious, The Invisible Man, and Frankenstein, Behlmer delivers a non-stop cornucopia of dense facts and anecdotes. He delves into the historical evidence that vaguely points the way to the existence of Robin Hood and contrasts the events in the film with British history. He offers many details about the cast, the crew, the filming, and the use of the Technicolor process. I find his remarks consistently fascinating; this is one of his better contributions.

The second supplementary audio track is music only. It's here that you'll be able to better appreciate the complex tapestry of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Oscar winning motifs and musical expression. It's been said that John Williams' film scores owe a great debt to Korngold, and that Korngold's sweeping romanticism was an influence. After years of such speculation and comparisons, Williams may have paid homage to Korngold in his score for Hook, in which a stringed opening to a musical segment sounds like it was based on a thematic motif from Korngold's The Sea Hawk. For those who enjoy Korngold's Robin Hood score and understandably prefer modern, low distortion sound, an abbreviated score rerecording of Varujan Kojian conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra is available on a Varese Sarabande CD, VSD- 47202.

Warner ported over its Night at the Movies feature, so the film may be played in one of two ways. You may choose the play the feature in the normal fashion, or you may navigate to the Special Features screen and select the Night at the Movies option. You will then be able to experience a movie theater program dating from 1938. You'll see a trailer for the James Cagney film, Angels With Dirty Faces. Two newsreel stories are next, followed by a jazz musical short subject, Freddie Rich and His Orchestra. A very early Merrie Melodies cartoon entitled Katnip Kollege completes the pre-feature show. With the possible exception of the Cagney trailer for his fans, there is little entertainment value here, but do try this clever feature just to appreciate the American culture of over sixty-five years ago.

There is the Flynn Trailer Gallery where you'll find theatrical trailers for: Captain Blood; The Prince and the Pauper; the 1938 original and the 1946 re-release of The Adventures of Robin Hood; Dodge City; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex; The Sea Hawk; The Dive Bomber; They Died With Their Boots On; Objective, Burma!; Kim; and, The Master of Ballantrae.

Glorious Technicolor (1:00:04 and eleven chapters) is the first of many featurettes. It's a 1998 Turner Entertainment television documentary narrated by Angela Lansbury and written, produced, and directed by Peter Jones. It traces the history of color in cinema and the development and application of the three- strip Technicolor process in particular. I found the first half of this featurette illuminating (no pun intended), but would have preferred more technical depth - nothing sleep inducing, perhaps on the level of PBS's NOVA. When the tone of the featurette changed to cite example after example of films (mostly musicals) that were captured in Technicolor, my interest began to drift. Regardless, this short had enough historical and technical content to make it very worthwhile.

Welcome to Sherwood: The Story of The Adventures of Robin Hood (55:42 and eighteen chapters) is an historical piece that traces the making of the film. Rudy Behlmer is prominently featured and the content is somewhat duplicative of the material discussed in his commentary. But the short is punctuated with visuals and in many ways offers more complete explanations and descriptions that were only briefly mentioned in his commentary, for example, the topics of postproduction, scoring, sneak previews, and the impact of the release. This is a fine featurette that is intended to inform rather than encourage the viewer to go see the film. This is substance, not fluff.

A real treat is the inclusion of two Looney Tunes from Warner's golden animation years. Each is thematically related to Robin Hood. The first is Rabbit Hood (7:58), made in 1949 with the great Carl Stalling as musical director, a story by the clever Michael Maltese, voice characterizations by the incredibly agile Mel Blanc, and directed by the talented Chuck Jones. This cartoon was made at the peak of Warner Bros. Animation creativity; the wit, timing, and absurdity of the finest Warner cartoons have never been bested. In the first short, Bugs has trespassed in Sherwood Forest and has stolen one of the King's carrots. The Sheriff of Nottingham catches our favorite bunny in the act and the battle of wits is on. The cartoon is notable for its live action cameo. The second Looney Tune is a bit more recent, but still first-rate; it's Robin Hood Daffy (6:39), in which the lisping duck plays Robin Hood and is unable to convince a friar played by Porky Pig of his identity. Again written by Michael Maltese, with voice characterizations by Mel Blanc, and Chuck Jones directing, Milt Franklyn takes up the musical chores. This 1958 cartoon's animation isn't as rich as the first (background plates tend to be simpler), but both are remarkably well conveyed. And Warner presents these two cartoons in pillared high definition video compressed with the VC-1 CODEC, just like the feature film.  The results are spectacular.  I have never seen such color purity and clarity in a Looney Tunes presentation before.  Just remarkable.

Vintage Short Subjects include two featurettes: Cavalcade of Archery (9:24) and The Cruise of the Zaca (19:56). We learn from other supplements that the expert archer on the show was a man named Howard Hill. I was surprised to learn that for arrow hits, neither the technique of pulling an arrow stuck in a hidden cork under an actor's clothing and reversing the direction of the film, nor the technique of a wire to guide an arrow shot with an air gun was used on the shoot. On this shoot, the stunt men were shot. Howard Hill was so accurate with a bow that he was permitted to shoot arrows at stuntmen wearing special materials under their costumes to capture the arrow without injury. This lovely looking Technicolor short highlights his formidable archery skills. The second short was shot and directed by Errol Flynn. It's a hokey little real life adventure onboard his schooner, the Zaca, collecting specimens in the Pacific and the Caribbean for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Some of the scenes are obviously staged and are a little silly, but the piece does highlight an aspect of Flynn's life of which I was not previously aware.

The inappropriately entitled Robin Hood Through the Ages (6:52) is actually a Rudy Behlmer narrated comparison of the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks' silent production of Robin Hood with the 1938 version featured on this disc. It's historically interesting; for example, an odd factoid is that Alan Hale played Little John in three productions: with Fairbanks in 1922, with Flynn in 1938, and in another film in 1950. Fairbanks was the Jackie Chan of his age, and it's fun to watch him perform some of his own outrageous stunts.

A Journey to Sherwood Forest (13:18) is a rare behind the scenes look at the production shot in both color and black & white with 16 mm home movie cameras. Once again, Rudy Behlmer narrates. Since the short is a montage of home movies, it's a bit crude, but the content is absorbing. We get to see a level of detail unavailable elsewhere; for example, some principle photography was captured from a completely different angle, revealing some cinematic secrets. And you can't beat the candid nature of this short.

There is a collection of Outtakes (8:26) that I find truly amazing to have survived for sixty-five years. Sound is absent, but Behlmer joins us to narrate once again. We see scenes that didn't make the final cut, mistakes, goofs, and alternate takes. They aren't very amusing, but they are terribly interesting. For a little humor, Warner has included Breakdowns of 1938 (14:23), a compilation reel of flubs from all the Warner productions from that year, and shown at an annual dinner-dance for the Warner Club. I never get tired of watching actors screw up their lines, and I don't think I've ever seen a Humphrey Bogart flub caught on film. Fun.

There are two eclectic audio-only features. The first is a 78-RPM transcription of the National Radio Broadcast (28:33) of Korngold's score, conducted by the composer, with a voiceover by Basil Rathbone narrating the story of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Clearly a publicity gimmick to promote the film, it rather reminded me of a narrated version of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. The second audio feature is odd but rather unique, Erich Wolfgang Korngold Piano Session. It's a series of recordings that sound like they could have been made in Korngold's home. The composer is at the keyboard, playing themes from his various scores. There are twelve selections with an aggregate running time of 16:23. Korngold was an opera composer; that might explain his wordless singing as he plays (then again, composer Jerry Goldsmith also liked to vocalize with the orchestra).

Splitting the Arrow Galleries is a collection of stills in the form of sketches or photos or publicity materials. There are twenty-one examples of Robin Hood related Historical Art, thirty-nine Costume Design sketches, twenty Scene Concept Drawings, thirty-one photos of Cast and Crew, and sixteen posters in a variety of languages. Very complete. The supplements collection found on these two discs is exhausting and surprisingly thorough; be prepared to invest quite a bit of your time.

The 102-minute feature is organized into twenty-nine chapters.

Final Thoughts

This is a delightful film, the quintessential Robin Hood; it's much more satisfying than the most expensive version ever made, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Like Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood is a serendipitous blend of all the right ingredients to make movie magic. The visuals on this disc are impressive and the generous supplements impress with their depth and breadth. The unavoidable limitations of the audio aside, I recommend this fabulous release very highly.