Errol Flynn exudes exuberance that can’t be understated as the beating heart of the film.
Flynn makes The Adventures of Robin Hood a joy to watch.
Not only did the film get the legend of Robin Hood, of medieval heroes and villains, right, it got them so right that its distillation of the myth is still the gold standard almost a century later.
In 2003, Roger Ebert wrote:
The ideal hero must do good, defeat evil, have a good time, and win the girl. The Adventures of Robin Hood is like a textbook on how to get that right.
“Though he was Australian-born, Errol Flynn was one of the United States’ most popular commodities during World War II.
Flynn made a name for himself swashbuckling across the silver screen in such classics of the 1930a as 1935’s “Captain Blood” and 1938’s “Adventures of Robin Hood,” but during the early 1940s few Hollywood stars made more of a splash in war pictures than Flynn. Films like 1941’s “Dive Bomber” and 1942’s “Desperate Journey” cemented him as one of Hollywood’s greatest stay-at-home warriors.
One of Flynn’s most overlooked pictures “Northern Pursuit” comes from the same era and is set against a World War II backdrop as he stars as Steve Wagner, a former corporal in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that goes undercover to root out a covert Nazi scheme.
The film, which Turner Classic Movie channel is scheduled to play at 7 p.m. (CT) Tuesday was Flynn’s first movie after being acquitted of two statutory rape charges in 1942. Though Flynn’s was never as popular after the trial as he was before, he still knew how to carry adventure movies and romance pictures alike.
“Northern Pursuit” is a solid thriller, directed by the capable Raoul Walsh, who also directed Flynn in the Gen. George Armstrong Custer biopic “They Died With Their Boots On” in 1941.
Walsh amps up the tension and leaves the viewer questioning whether Flynn is a turncoat or not through much of the movie which co-stars Julie Bishop, Helmut Dantine, John Ridgely, and Gene Lockhart.
“This classic American technicolor tale is considered by many to be the best Robin Hood film of all time and for good reason. It stars Errol Flynn in the best role of his career as the valiant archer and Olivia de Havilland as his love interest, Maid Marian. The story follows the legend of Robin Hood more closely than any other on this list and the action is excitingly inventive. You get the real sense that the creatives behind this masterpiece wanted to push boundaries and test limits with every sword-fight, archery-contest, and all-out battle. It’s a must-watch if you’re a fan of the source material and it would’ve ranked number one if it weren’t for… ”
“A film does not have to have to take place at Christmas to qualify as a Christmas film. It takes something more. And to this list I would add The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938), starring Errol Flynn, the template for every ‘Robin’ that came after him.
This movie, for me, was like a big Christmas bauble itself. Shot in glorious colour, with lots of green and red, like a Christmas tree itself, it featured the forest, a place to be free. It had a jolly man at the centre who delivered the gifts of his own presence and joy.
It had a dreamer (Maid Marian) waiting for the promise of her life to be fulfilled. And that score. That glorious score, like the feeling of the carols in church, voices sweeping to the ceiling and through the nave, giving us one more moment of the promise of the year to come and a good feeling about the year gone by.”
——-
One can also watch on Little Christmas – in Cincinnati, with Flynn on the Big Screen:
To be fair, when you’re dealing with something as culturally ingrained and cliché-ridden as Robin Hood you might as well go for something fresh, and go for broke. But for all its stylistic ambition, and its efforts to reference modern concerns (the Sheriff of Nottingham’s anti-Islamic invective), Robin Hood misfires thanks to a crucial absence of internal logic. This world just doesn’t work.”
NEW YORK TIMES
“The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.”
THE GUARDIAN
“This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.”
LITTLE WHITE LIES
It’s a love story devoid of romance, an action flick severely lacking in spark and spectacle, a historical epic filled with flagrant inaccuracies and wrongheaded revisionism. There is nothing particularly fresh or inventive about the film, and, setting aside the wildly incongruous accents, jarringly modern, machine-stitched costumes and ugly CG render of a vaguely medieval setting, it is a simple fact that no one has ever looked cool shooting a bow and arrow while pirouetting backwards off a ledge.”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“The action here is too phony and mechanically cranked up to believe that anything is on the line. Mendelsohn’s villain is boringly one-note, Eve Hewson’s Marion uses an incongruous Yank accent and always looks as though she’s just stepped out of the makeup trailer, F. Murray Abraham swans around in fancy cardinal’s vestments looking sinister and Foxx seems pissed off that he’s not somewhere, perhaps anywhere, else. As for Egerton, he’s a boy doing a man’s job.”
Ouch.
However, it’s not all terrible news as there are some positive reviews out there, such as in Variety who state it “shouldn’t work, but it’s more honest fun than the Kevin Costner or Russell Crowe versions”.
So there’s that, at least.
All reviews above are quoted in the Digital Spy link below:
Flynn and Custer, a perfect match – brilliant, discipline-proof, dashing, and destined for greatness.
THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON
(Benton Harbor News-Palladium, December 29, 1941.)
Monroe- The premier of the motion picture “They Died With Their Boots On” depicting the career of General George Armstrong Custer, was shown here Sunday. Seven members of the Custer family residing here attended the performance. Brigadier-General Custer, slain in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, attended school and married here.
ERROL FLYNN PLAYS GEORGE CUSTER
(Benton Harbor News-Palladium, January 10, 1942)
Custer’s last stand is an epic of the old west, but the rest of Custer’s life is a Michigan story. As shown in They Died With Their Boots On, the new Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland film opening Sunday at the Liberty, George Armstrong Custer’s adventures were intimately concerned with his native state.
He made a name for himself in the Civil War at the Battle of Gettysburg depicted in the film by leading a series of charges by gallant Michigan regiments. Thrown back time and time again, they kept up the fight under his inspirational leadership and finally turned the tide of battle.
After the Civil War ended, Custer like so many brilliant young officers of the Union Army, was retired. A peacetime Army had no use for the vast number of officers developed by the war. Young General Custer settled down with his wife in their native Monroe, Michigan, to live a life of peace.
It was from the same Monroe that Custer had gone before the Civil War to become the most discipline-proof cadet that West Point had seen in years.
According to the film, the most famous song of Custer’s Seventh Regiment, the Gary Owen, was taught to the General in Monroe by an English soldier who was a Union veteran. When the regiment rode forth in battle on the Little Big Horn, the song Custer learned in Monroe, sped them on their way.
George Custer was only 37 when he died. Life in Monroe had bored him. In order to get back into active Army service, he accepted colonel’s rank. He was sent to the most dangerous territory in America, Sioux Country. The Indians called him “Long Hair.” The tribute they paid him in his last stand shows the esteem in which he was held, even by his enemies. Every man killed in the battle was scalped – except Custer.
GENERAL CUSTER AFYER 45 YEARS
(Detroit Free Press, June 27, 1921)
It has been remarked that George Armstrong Custer’s chief contribution to the history of his country was his personality. Such a statement looks like a truism, but in his case it was more peculiarly true than in most. An operose, impetuous spirit, his tepidity, his dash, his verve, has passed into legend while there are still people living in these states who thrill to the memory of the day when Custer fell, who remember the clash of opinion that arose before his gallant blood had cooled.
The forty-five years that have passed since June 25, 1876, have not settled the argument. Was Custer’s death with his three brothers, his nephew, and all of the old fighting Seventh Michigan Cavalry , due to mis-wisdom, an untutored impetuosity, or were the trap and the barbarous slaying inevitable? How much of the mistake can be placed on the two commanders under him, Benteen and Reno, and was the natural indignation of the country justified? The exact facts are obscure, for we are unwilling to accept the only evidence which came from an Indian.
The significant thing now is that Custer’s story is not allowed to die – it is too romantic, too fraught with the perilous spirit of the frontier days which have rapidly dimmed and receded. The story has been woven into pageants, it has been vividly acted before the camera in its own historic setting. Today, out in Hardin, Montana, it is being commemorated again, re-enacted with Indians, some of whom are from the fierce tribe of Sitting Bull. Tamed now and submissive, forgetting the hot rage of the warrior, they are acting for the pleasure of the conqueror and perhaps for the lost glory of their tribe, scenes which were part of the destructive tide that swept them from their last entrenchments in the badlands of the prairie.
What history will do with Custer a hundred years, hence it is impossible to judge; it is probably that no matter what the historian of the future makes of his case he will be handed along in the legends which gave the thrill to cold facts as the perfect cavalry type, the temerarious General of Horse. The nation will remember him as Edward Clark Potter has pictured him when in that significant moment during a lull in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, he spurred forward from the line, and hat in hand, his golden curls flowing from a head thrown back, he stood for a moment surveying enemy lines. His striking uniform, his youth, his daring, combined to make him a glorious, a charmed figure.
The nation will remember him too, however much they may doubt his judgment, as the general who immensely brave, immensely daring, overpowered twenty to one, stayed with his men and died fighting in place. They will honor him as the Sioux honored him, Sitting Bull’s warriors who killed him but held his body inviolate because he was a warrior of whose prowess they stood in awe.
