A near-perfect movie

I've mentioned The Adventures of Robin Hood briefly a few times in the past. It's airing again tonight at 8:00 PM ET on TCM as part of Claude Rains' turn as Star of the Month. It's a movie that deserves every mention it gets, because everything about it is so good, and it's one of a very small number of movies that I find difficult fo spot any real flaws. Rains, in the foreground of the photo, plays Prince John, who's ruling England as regent while Richard the Lionhearted is being held captive on his way back from the Crusades.

Of course, you probably know the rest of the story; Prince John is taxing the people of England into penury, allegedly to pay for Richard's ransom; Errol Flynn's Robin of Locksley prevents that by "stealing" from the Prince in order to give the money back to the people. Both Flynn and Rains are perfectly cast, as is almost everybody else in the movie. Olivia de Havilland is radiant as Maid Marian; Una O'Connor is suitably matronly as her governess; Patric Knowles is dashing, but not upstaging of Flynn, as Will Scarlett; Eugene Pallette is almost as cuddly as an overgrown teddy bear in the part of Friar Tuck; O'Connor gets a love interest in Herbert Mundin, the innkeeper Much. Throw in Alan Hale Sr. and Basil Rathbone among others, and you've got a cast that looks as though it's having an enormous amount of fun making the movie.

The ancillaries are also pitch-perfect. Erich Korngold's score fits like a glove, and The Adventures of Robin Hood is precisely the sort of movie for which Technicolor was made to order. The action scenes are auitably active and thrilling, and there's a lot of action. There are maybe a few scenes, mostly with Marion and the governess, that come close to dragging, but that's about the biggest "flaw" the movie has. The Adventures of Robin Hood is, in short, an outstanding movie, and one that's perfect for the whole family. But you already knew all of this anyhow -- it's one of those movies that has rightly earned its exalted status in Hollywood history.