No, we’re not talking about the version with the clever cartoon fox and his trusty bear companion. Professor Thomas Bertonneau had a slightly different film in mind when asked to teach a course called “Modern Media and Culture”. The 1938 “Flynn” (Errol, that is) version had something worth showing to his class of undergrads—film as art has something to say about the culture that produced it, and the culture that is still producing…

As the holder of a hard-earned doctorate in comparative literature and as a confessing paleo-conservative in politics and culture, I bring to the academic innovation of popular culture studies no little skepticism. Because my conservatism entails a spirit of cooperation, however, I could hardly turn down my department chair when he requested me to take over, for one semester, the local version of the popular culture course, called “Modern Culture and Media.” In a mood of modest insurrection, I did alter the course-title slightly, shifting the terms to make it, on my syllabus, “Modern Media and Culture” rather than “Modern Culture and Media.” I had a reason. Based on the course-description, it seemed to me that the semester should address the effect of technical innovations – photography, radio, motion pictures, and television – on the traditional cultural arrangements of Western Europe and North America, as these stood at the beginning of the last century. The “media” are the transforming agencies.

I organized the curriculum around the disjunction between traditional culture, including the literate high culture of the nineteenth century, and modern, “mediated” and mass-entertainment culture. I wanted to students to get a sense of the drastic, if gradually imposed, alterations in sensibility and taste that have accompanied the vulgarization of the performing arts by means of the technical innovations.

The movies, which begin with the sometimes-racy “Nickelodeon” reels of the 1890s, were one such innovation. The movies shaped the new cultural environment of the first half of the twentieth century like no other force. In the silent era, film retained a link to literate culture since in the absence of spoken dialogue, spectators needed to read the inter-titles in order fully to keep up with the unfolding plot. In this sense, sound-film represents even more of a break with literate culture and silent film does, but this is not to say that numerous classic sound-films from the mid-century are not, in a manner, literate. The ones that begin with fully literate scenarios and richly realized screenplays qualify as such – and subtle, well-crafted dialogue requires a type of listening that literate people are best equipped to undertake. I wanted my students to see one or two such films as part of their semester, not least because a characteristic of contemporary popular culture since the 1960s is to forget even the immediate past of popular culture itself.

After thinking about what films might best serve my purpose, I selected two, director Michael Curtiz’s Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and director Michael Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going (1944). On the present occasion I wish to describe the merits of The Adventures of Robin Hood, an Errol Flynn vehicle, and say something about how my students reacted to it.

Ascriptions like, “the greatest film ever,” run to doubtfulness, but in the case of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I incline to allow the hyperbole. If, as I argued to my students, the European directors employed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s and 40s saw in film a continuation of the Wagnerian, operatic Gesamkunstwerk, or “unified total artwork” involving all the subordinate arts from costume- and scene-design through dramatic dialogue to musical accompaniment – if so, indeed, then one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary instance than the “Flynn” version of Robin Hood. From my point of view, one of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’ superbly directed medieval epic is that, at its heart, the film is a moving conversion story. The critic René Girard has argued that all effective narrative turns on plausible conversion and that reading is itself a type of conversion experience. Why not also in film?

The story of The Adventures of Robin Hood, drawing on legends that go back to the thirteenth century but that refer to the twelfth century and the reign of Richard Lionheart, concerns the usurpation of legitimate authority by schemers, confiscatory taxation that punishes ordinary people, and a host of related injustices. Claude Rains plays the chief malefactor, Richard’s scoundrel of a brother, Prince John. Rains, a great character-actor, brings off a thespian tour-de-force of nefarious egomania in the role. The story of Robin Hood, in addition to being about the usurpation of legitimate authority,also concerns the social and political urgency, in the historical context, of reconciling the Saxon yeomanry of England with its conquering Norman elites. John is a divider and Robin is a unifier. In the more prominent of the film’s two conversion subplots, the narrative follows the changing moral disposition of Lady Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland), ward of the absent Richard, from her initial haughtiness and total identification with Norman superiority, to her confrontation with Prince John’s cruelty, to her identification with Robin’s opposition to John. This last gambit entails Marian’s falling in love with Robin.

In the less prominent, but just as important, of the film’s two conversion subplots, we follow the career of Robin himself from wisecracking, risk-taking guerrilla-leader, with a just cause, to a genuine inspirer of men who, on Richard’s return to England, finds a way at last to integrate himself back into a reconstituted society. The film treats justice, not sentimentally, but realistically. Robin acknowledges at one point Marian’s aggrieved remark that he has killed for his cause – “But only those who deserved it,” he answers. Marian’s love importantly prepares Robin for the time after his cause has triumphed, when he will need to put aside his longbow and exercise wisdom and compassion as a baron of the rightful king. The accurate assessment of masculine and feminine traits is one of the film’s merits.

The Robin Hood story had appeared on screen before, most notably, in the silent era, in the Douglas Fairbanks project, Robin Hood (1923), a splendid film, with lavish sets, which – when Curtiz inherited the Warner Brothers endeavor from its first director William Keighley – must have seemed a hard act to follow. The Adventures of Robin Hood would be a “talkie,” of course. Because Curtiz wanted to make his film as historically accurate as possible, he might have requested screenwriters Norman R. Maine and Seton I. Miller to lace the dialogue with archaisms, but the director rightly saw that this would stultify the action. On the other hand, Curtiz did not want dialogue in a bland, contemporary idiom.

The compromise takes the form of a witticism-laced film script whose many serious exchanges exhibit the screenwriters’ superbly calculated combination of a rather high-register upper-class vocabulary with the moderate complexity of a distinctly literary syntax. Without any thee’s or thou’s, a formality of diction prevails that, never calling undue attention to itself, creates a sense of dignity in the protagonists, and that emphasizes, by a contrast between aristocratic locution and dastardly deed, the blackguardism of the villains.

Curtiz chose to make The Adventures of Robin Hood a visually sumptuous movie, from the gorgeousness of the fabrics used in the colorful costumes to the artificially painted-on greenness of Sherwood Forest (in Stanislaus, California), to the stony interiors of John’s Nottingham castle, where Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) imprisons Marian in the dungeon. A number of critics have commented that The Adventures of Robin Hood makes an exceptionally persuasive case for Technicolor, the process that Curtiz used. I agree, despite the fact that I much prefer black-and-white to color. Robin Hood’s color-values, while vivid, serve, rather than distract from, the story and they contribute meaningfully to the operatic spectacle of the production. A fine example comes with the archery contest, about halfway through the film’s ninety minutes, by which John schemes to entrap Robin.

The elaborate outdoor set has the advantage of Southern California’s sunlight, but it well represents the heraldic splendor of the tournaments, as the medieval sagas describe them. Only the later Ivanhoe (1952), directed by Richard Thorpe, comes close to matching Curtiz’s scenic audacity.

I invoke “operatic spectacle” not merely as a figure of speech. In appreciating The Adventures of Robin Hood, one must remark on its amazing, symphonic score by the expatriate Austrian composer Eric Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold fled Nazi persecution in 1938, after the Anschluss, accepting a providential offer by producer Hal B. Wallis that he should score the new Flynn film. A late romantic in his musical style, nourished on the brilliant orchestrations of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, Korngold had already scored one Flynn vehicle, Captain Blood (1936). Korngold treated the film as an opera without singing parts, assigning Leitmotifs, or immediately identifiable musical gestures, to each main character, and creating a continuously running symphonic commentary on the action. The score won an Oscar for its composer and has gradually gained an independent reputation as a listenable, convincing symphonic composition.

No better acting has ever graced any film – even any ostensibly more serious film. The image of a swaggerer dogs Flynn’s reputation, but the image proves false. Flynn’s Robin speaks softly to the point of shyness, except when confronting evil. De Havilland’s progress from spurning the rebel while looking down her Norman nose at him to confessing at last her love for the defender of justice will never be surpassed in its convincing, heartfelt reversal. The supporting cast members, especially Alan Hale as John Little and Eugene Palette as Friar Tuck, contribute just the right balance of comic relief. Robin’s quarterstaff fight with John Little codifies the paradigm of a fair contest, with Flynn’s Robin letting Hale best him in the best possible humor.

None of my fifty or so undergraduates had seen The Adventures of Robin Hood before, as amazing as that fact might seem. (It used to be staple fare on local television, but nowadays appears only on the Turner Classics cable-channel, which students do not watch.) Almost all of the students admitted that they dreaded, in advance, the prospect of “having to sit through” what they dismissed prejudicially as “an old movie.” Almost all of them felt compelled by honesty in the aftermath to express their surprise and pleasure over how swiftly and completely the film drew them in and won them over. The moment when Robin first kisses Marian brought from the female side of the enrollment what was to me a highly satisfying, involuntary sigh.