This year happens to be the ten-year anniversary of when I first saw and immensely enjoyed the 1938 Technicolor glory The Adventures of Robin Hood, with a charming-as-all-hell Errol Flynn in the title role and Olivia de Haviland as Marion, in only the 22nd of her eventual 104 years on this planet. To say nothing of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone as mustache-twirling villains, though neither of them in the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham (who only has a minor role here). Since that day in May of 2015, I have been longing for a second viewing of a movie I gave an enthusiastic 4.5 stars. When it comes to 4.5 stars, is there any other kind?
Seeing that it won the Oscar for best editing in 1938, I dubbed it a logical candidate for the first movie in Understanding Editing that I'd already seen prior to the series. (I am alternating each month, and going in chronological order overall.)
Its drawback as a candidate? Well, it's debatable how much the craft of editing would have changed in the year that elapsed since the first movie I watched in this series, 1937's Lost Horizon. Which is certainly something of a consideration, when I plan to watch 12 movies that span the entire time from then to now.
Beyond their editors both hoisting golden statues at the end of Oscar night, it may be that these two films could not have less in common. The older is black and white and has such a foot in the past that it's not even available in its complete original form, as there were seven minutes of footage missing, which had to be filled with production stills to accompany the audio. The newer is so bright and colorful that the first post I wrote about it, back in 2015, was called "1930's films that look like 1950's films."
How similar would my experience of their editing be? That remains to be seen.
At the start, I wondered if there would be more of the thing I noticed as a negative in Lost Horizon: the consecutive splicing of two shots where the angle on the action is not significantly different to flow naturally. I saw this a half-dozen times or more in that film, chalking it up to the infancy of the form and no one yet having realized that this is undesirable.
After I noticed one such shot in The Adventures of Robin Hood, though, there were none more to follow.
What did follow were a bunch of exciting action sequences, each of which benefitted in some measurable way from a talented editor. At this point, we should name him: Ralph Dawson. And it appears Dawson was essentially the king of his industry at that time, as Robin Hood marked his third Oscar win in four years, and ultimately his last despite one more nomination (a full 16 years later). No he was not the editor of Lost Horizon -- since I didn't check beforehand, I lucked into not picking the same editor for the first two movies in this series -- but he won the two years before that, for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony Adverse, in that order.
I noticed straight away how kinetic Dawson's action scenes are. I'm sure "kinetic" is an adjective I used in my first post, and unless I become overly conscious of it by talking about it here, it's probably not the last time in this series I will use it. But in Robin Hood it applies particularly.
We get thrilling sword fights, both mano-a-mano, and in some cases, amid a scene full of numerous other close quarters fisticuffs. We get a marksman competition, which Robin can't resist entering despite the likelihood that it will expose him (it does), with its arrows hitting their targets in a rhythmic sequence of consecutive shots. We get a great scene of Robin's cohorts jumping from the trees on an unsuspecting group of travelers below, the similar shots of descending bodies all flowing in the same direction.
"Flow" is a sense you are supposed to get from good editing, and I got it here, numerous times. Perhaps my favorite example was a sequence where Dawson (and the directors, Michael Curtiz and William Keighely, who I would usually credit as the film's authors) want to show the direction galloped by a couple of fleeing horses and their riders, as well as the passage of time and distance their galloping would entail. We get the horses going from left to right in each shot, but then the background changing, to show a steady progression out of a castle, over a drawbridge and into the forest, as if in one fluid motion. Then as if to show off, Dawson repeats it with the men on horseback who are pursuing them.
Another sequence I noted was the passing on of a message about a meeting being held in Sherwood Forest. The editing creates a sort of version of that old game of Telephone, as we see each point of contact between one new messenger and one new recipient of that message. Only in this case, the message doesn't get garbled in translation.
These are not breathtaking instances of the craft, by any stretch of the imagination. However, they are things you notice if you are watching a movie specifically to assess how its shots are being sequenced. It's probably best that you only notice them if you are looking at the movie through this lens, because the purpose of good editing is to disguise itself. Or rather, just to put you into a time and place and not require you to think how you got there or notice any of the technical details in the experience of being swept away. This is what The Adventures of Robin Hood does.
In my notes, I also observed that Dawson uses the dissolve a couple times. I doubt he pioneered the dissolve or anything like that -- in fact, the internet tells me even George Melies used the dissolve -- but I thought it was worth jotting down, as it could be that this was considered one of the techniques Academy voters thought made Dawson a worthy winner.
The movie overall? Still really liked it, still found it a fine example of its form. I think it earns the 4.5 stars more on that basis than on competing on a equal playing field with other films I would give such a high rating.
Since I already laid out my upcoming agenda in the first post announcing this series, it's no spoiler to tell you that in March we'll move just another scant three years ahead in time to Sergeant York in 1941, which will be back to another first-time viewing.
