John Chard
Well buckle my swash son of Robin Hood!
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest is directed by George Sherman and Henry Levin and collectively written by Wilfrid H. Pettitt, Melvin Levy and Paul A. Castleton. It stars Cornel Wilde, Anita Louise, Jill Esmond, Edgar Buchanan, Henry Daniel, George Macready and Russell Hicks. Music is by Hugo Fridehofer and cinematography is shared between Tony Gaudio, William Snyder and George B. Meehan.
A wonderful spin on the Robin Hood legend, this finds Robin Hood (Hicks) enlisting the help of his son Robert (Wilde) in stopping the nefarious members of the Regency who seek to basically abolish the Magna Carta. What follows in narrative trajectory terms is the usual array of fights and face-offs, with bow and arrows skills supplementing the swordplay. There is of course some simmering passions at work, whilst loyalty and camaraderie is never ever far away.
There's such a sense of fun about the picture, it's like everyone is enjoying playing in a costume adventure. The Technicolor is luscious and the set design and art direction is impressive, more so when put into context the modest budget allocated to the production by Columbia.
The draw card is Wilde, a one time Olympic standard fencer, he utterly convinces as a swashbuckler and has charm in abundance. It's very unlikely anyone will ever fill a Robin Hood based film role with the panache that Errol Flynn did back in 1938, but Wilde most assuredly nails down a marker for one of the genre's best.
Not all the costuming strikes as period reflective, neither does one or two character accents, but it matters not one jot. A sometimes rousing and often engaging swashbuckling adventure, The Bandit of Sherwood Forest is one of the better "Hood" movies out there. 8/10
