"Welcome to Sherwood, my lady!"

In a pretty interesting post in which he takes issue with Hollywood's casting of Orlando Bloom in films which are seemingly designed to be inaccessible to Bloom's natural audience (the early teenage girl set, basically the demographic that swooned over Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic), Lance Mannion links this wonderful post on Errol Flynn.

I'd point out that Flynn's three greatest films (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Sea Hawk) have one more thing in common than Flynn as leading man and Michael Curtiz as director. All three boast scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

(Funny story: when I was fifteen, I went to the video store and rented an Errol Flynn picture I hadn't seen, The Charge of the Light Brigade, figuring that Flynn as a British army captain couldn't be bad. My sister, though - - English Lit grad student that she was - - took one look at the title and said something like, "Geez, you had to pick a sad movie?" TO which I sagely replied, "Huh?" She then asked: "You do know what happened to the Light Brigade, don't you?" To which I again sagely replied, "Huh?"

So she dug out a copy of Tennyson's poem and had me read it. Oh well. I still liked the movie, even though it was certainly a downer of an ending.

And now that I think of it, that might well have been the first time I ever read anything by Tennyson - - which means that I owe my love of Tennyson to my sister. So she made me love Star Wars and Tennyson. Shit, I should send her a "Thank You" card...)