Coming relatively late in the life of movie theatre serial (starting in October of 1946!), the production values on this version of the Robin Hood story are remarkably high, but one has to question Columbia's cynical(?) choice of their title after MGM had so famously exploited the Molnar play THE GUARDSMAN - both with Lunt & Fontanne repeating their Broadway roles in a 1931 film and again in 1941 when, with great publicity, they had out maneuvered the great George Bernard Shaw (the 1938 Oscar winner for his screenplay for PYGMALION who was asking "too much" to release the rights to his play ARMS AND THE MAN which served as the plot for the operetta THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER which MGM intended to film) by using the Molnar play as the on screen plot for their screen version of the operetta (using only the score from the original).
If MGM had basically used THE GUARDSMAN to hijack a work which Shaw had an obvious interest in, I suppose there is a certain rough justice in Columbia using the title to hijack audience interest for their new Robin Hood story - but one has to pity any literate kids in the audience who looked in vain for a follow-up to the famous story of an acting couple where a jealous husband masquerades as a lover to trick his wife! I recently found a second or third generation DVD of the serial (to be honest, having not heard of it, MY interest was piqued because of that apparently Molnar related title), and despite feeling a little misled, thoroughly enjoyed the strong production and narrative values Columbia found in the classic story they chose to hang their series on. I grew up on the old syndicated Richard Greene ROBIN HOOD TV series, and found this version - while as loose with the original story as the TV series was (or, for that matter, bearing as much relation to it as the John Wayne THREE MUSKETEERS movie serial had to Alexandre Dumas' famous novel!) - even more entertaining.
SON OF THE GUARDSMAN is well worth a look despite the sometimes frustrating "serial" format which moves in all too brief fits and starts. This was, for the ones I've seen so far, among the best of the Columbia serials, and one of the few which actually holds the interest as well as the classic Flash Gordon episodes which may be the nonparallels of the serial genre.
If MGM had basically used THE GUARDSMAN to hijack a work which Shaw had an obvious interest in, I suppose there is a certain rough justice in Columbia using the title to hijack audience interest for their new Robin Hood story - but one has to pity any literate kids in the audience who looked in vain for a follow-up to the famous story of an acting couple where a jealous husband masquerades as a lover to trick his wife! I recently found a second or third generation DVD of the serial (to be honest, having not heard of it, MY interest was piqued because of that apparently Molnar related title), and despite feeling a little misled, thoroughly enjoyed the strong production and narrative values Columbia found in the classic story they chose to hang their series on. I grew up on the old syndicated Richard Greene ROBIN HOOD TV series, and found this version - while as loose with the original story as the TV series was (or, for that matter, bearing as much relation to it as the John Wayne THREE MUSKETEERS movie serial had to Alexandre Dumas' famous novel!) - even more entertaining.
SON OF THE GUARDSMAN is well worth a look despite the sometimes frustrating "serial" format which moves in all too brief fits and starts. This was, for the ones I've seen so far, among the best of the Columbia serials, and one of the few which actually holds the interest as well as the classic Flash Gordon episodes which may be the nonparallels of the serial genre.
