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Product Description ------------------- The ultimate swashbuckler film starring Errol Flynn in his most famous role. This lavish, fast-paced version of the Robin Hood legend won three Academy Awards (Best Film Editing, Interior Decoration and Original Score). Doing many stunts himself, Flynn is at his athletic, romantic best in a role intended for James Cagney. Olivia de Havilland (Maid Marian) as well as consummate screen villains Basil Rath and Claude Rains round out the all-star cast. .co.uk Review ------------- Dashing Errol Flynn is the definitive Robin in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, the most gloriously swashbuckling version of the legendary story. Warner Brothers reunited Michael Curtiz, their top-action director, with the winning team of Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (Maid Marian) and perennial villain Basil Rath as the aristocratic Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and pulled out all stops for the production. It became their costliest film to date, a grandly handsome, glowing technicolour adventure set to a stirring, O-winning score ( /exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000BX5L0/${0} ) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold--music that became a template for countless later movies, notably John Williams' Star Wars and Indiana Jones scores. The decadent Prince John (a smoothly conniving Claude Rains) takes advantage of King Richard's absence to tax the country into poverty but meets his match in the medieval guerrilla rebel Robin Hood and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, who rise up and, to quote a cliché coined by the film, "steal from the rich and give to the poor". Stocky Alan Hale Sr plays Robin's loyal friend Little John (a part he played in Douglas Fairbanks' silent version), Eugene Palette plays the portly Friar Tuck and Melville Cooper is the bumbling Sheriff of Nottingham. Flynn's confidence and cocky charm makes for a perfect Robin and his easygoing manner is a marvellous counterpoint to Rath's regal bearing and courtly diction. The film climaxes in their rousing battle-to-the-finish fight, a magnificently choreographed scene highlighted by Curtiz's inventive use of shadows cast upon the castle walls. --Sean Axmaker