: You Can’t Take It With You :
Oh joy. Another “zany” one by Frank Capra. This one starred a young Jimmy Stewart, another of my favorite actors, but I actually fell asleep the first time through. It could not hold my attention in a positive way. The last zany Capra Best Picture winner was It Happened One Night.
Capra certainly had talent, and he certainly recruited excellent acting talent for his pics, but for all that, these two winners weren’t winners for me. I loved Lost Horizon the previous year and Capra managed to turn that all around for me with his later hit It’s a Wonderful Life but this one was a big miss for me. It was off-beat in a way that wasn’t fun but was plenty “wacky.”
: The Adventures of Robin Hood :
Robin Hood was nominated and filmsite.org posits that it should have won for best picture. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics score is a solid 100%.
Chronologically the first of the films I’ve seen to be shot in technicolor, the costuming crew went above and beyond to take advantage of it. Personally, I had a real hard time getting over the green tights. I just can’t get turned on by a man, even Errol Flynn, got up in green tights. This isn’t the type of movie I’m inclined to love, and I didn’t. It was campy and kind of silly. The idea of “taking from the evil rich and giving to the deserving poor” is a lot more romantic than this film. The political intrigue wasn’t very interesting. Give me Anne of the Thousand Days anytime.
As once again I seem to be in the extreme minority, below please find a review from someone who liked the film and, as far as films go, knows more than me. It doesn’t change my opinion however.
Filmsite.org: It expertly tells the story of the heroic Robin and his Sherwood Forest followers, who saved England from royal treachery by scheming nobles during the absence of the crusading and captured-ransomed King Richard the Lion-Hearted. And it tells the fairy-tale romance with nostalgic chivalry, colorful pageantry, simple righteousness triumphant over villainous and evil might, and spectacular action.
There were at least six silent era attempts at the story. The Reginald de Koven-Harry B. Smith light opera version of Robin Hood was originally presented in 1890. And Douglas Fairbanks starred as the infamous outlaw hero and Wallace Beery as Richard the Lion-Hearted in an early silent version of the film directed by Allan Dwan – Robin Hood (1922), reportedly the most expensive film made up to that time (at $1.6 – 2 million). In addition to his daring stunt work (sliding down a drapery, engaging in archery and swordsmanship, and other acrobatic feats), Fairbanks wrote the screenplay (with pseudonym Elton Thomas) for the fast moving, epic silent film filled with medieval pageantry.
The 1938 Warner Bros. film is expensively mounted (at $2 million, it was the studio’s largest budgeted film), and beautifully photographed in glorious and brilliant, three-strip Technicolor (Warners’ first use of color) by cinematographers Sol Polito and Tony Gaudio, especially in the Sherwood Forest sequence [filmed in Bidwell Park in Chico, California] and other scenes of costumed pageantry. [During preliminary plans for the film, it was originally expected that James Cagney would star as the legendary outlaw and contract player Guy Kibbee would play Friar Tuck.]
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