The Adventures of Marco Polo with Gary Cooper.  Venetian explorer Marco Polo (Gary Cooper) travels to China to secure a trade agreement with Kublai Khan.  There he discovers spaghetti, gunpowder, and coal.  He also woos the Emperor's daughter.  Kublai Khan sends Polo to spy on the leader of a rebellious province.  Kaidu, the leader of this province, catches Polo and forces him to distract his hectoring wife so that Kaidu can make whoopee with a servant girl.

 

Familiar faces: Basil Rathbone as Khan's evil advisor; Alan Hale as Kaidu the rebel; Binnie Barnes as Kaidu's wife, and Lana Turner as the amorous servant girl.  Also, H.B. Warner (Mr. Gower from It's a Wonderful Life) plays the Chinese man who introduces Marco Polo to spaghetti and gunpowder.

Alan Hale and Lana Turner

The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.  At last, a true color movie (The Drum, my other color movie, was very muted).  I can't imagine I can tell you too much about this one, except that if you haven't seen it in a while it holds up as good as the memory.  I would really love the opportunity to see this on the big screen sometime.  This is my third Errol Flynn movie, my second Olivia de Havilland movie, my second Basil Rathbone movie, and my second Patric Knowles movie.  My queue is still full.

The Dawn Patrol with Errol Flynn, David Niven, and Basil Rathbone.  This is a WWI British aviator movie.  It is a remake of a 1930 Howard Hawks movie of the same name.  Basil Rathbone is the commander of a flying unit who is forced to send his men on horribly dangerous missions.  On each mission 30% or more of his men do not return.  He is sent a steady stream of replacements with little flying experience and no combat experience.  Most of these men do not survive their first combat flight.  Errol Flynn and David Niven are two of his best pilots.  During the movie Flynn is promoted to replace Rathbone and then Niven is promoted to replace Flynn.  The same scenario is played out again and again with the new replacements ever younger and more inexperienced.  One of these is Niven's younger brother.

This is a dark but very interesting movie.  It is supposedly very true to the 1930 original but probably has a better cast.  Apparently to save money the aerial scenes were all borrowed from footage shot for the 1930 movie.