The Adventures of Robin Hood

What a badass fucking movie guys.  It had been a long time since I had seen this one and I remember it being good but I forgot how ballsy Robin is.  The guy walks right into villainous Prince John’s castle all by his lonesome, throws a dead royal deer down on the table in front of John, sits down, gnaws on some gamebird and makes incredibly pugnacious remarks about how bad of a person the Prince is.

Robin doesn’t give a fuck and that’s why I love him.  He doesn’t doubt his own ability or his morality for a second.  He believes it’s his divine duty to protect the people of England.  And his band of merry men are his cult followers that keep the singular goal of defying Prince John at every turn until King Richard returns from the Crusades at the fore.

To anchor this piece you have a marvelous trifecta of acting talent.  Errol Flynn (Captain Blood) as Robin Hood keeps you on your toes with his sharp tongue and bold feats, Basil Rathbone (The Hound of the Baskervilles) as Sir Guy of Gisbourne is a stuffy douche that serves as Robin’s main opponent, and Claude Rains (The Invisible Man) is the haughty and egomaniacal Prince John who plays it with just the right amount of wimpiness so that you know he’s really some wiener behind all his power.  And sure, you also have Olivia de Havilland (Gone with the Wind) as Robin’s love interest who does very well and even saves Robin’s life at one point (in fact she almost does it twice if it weren’t for that piece of shit Guy of Gisbourne).  So a great cast all around.

Now I know what you’re all thinking, “this is from 1938, it’s probably boring and filled with terribly staged scenes of nothing but trite dialogue”.  And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  This thing is almost all meat.  There’s a ton of action including several sword fights, a hand to hand tussle, a chase on horseback, arrows are flying all over the place including into henchmen’s chests (for real too, they hired an expert archer to shoot arrows into actors chests that were heavily padded, I mean holy shit that’s a fucking crazy thing to do for just a movie) and there’s an archery contest.  It’s kinda unbelievable how many people Robin kills throughout the film without thinking twice.  And the non-action stuff is fantastic too because they’re always advancing the story and shit keeps escalating.

Jeez, Robin's about to shoot that guy at point blank
range with his arrow, what a crazy sonuvabitch

I’ll fully admit that this is sort of a hammy picture.  Errol Flynn especially tends to deliver his lines in an over the top cartoony way.  But his performance is still cool because he backs his shit up with very aggressive and athletic action.  You know, I was gonna mention something about having the mindset that this is like a 30’s version of a comic book movie but fuck that.  This is just an awesome film.  I don’t care if it feels a little hokey at times, it’s a fuckin’ balls out adventure and a beautifully vivid colorful picture to look at.  If you’re an action connoisseur like I am then this is a must see.