THE FILM THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Bonnie Greer on
‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’

Release Date: 1938
Directors: William Keighley and Michael Curtiz

F ilmed in blazing Technicolor, and starring Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, this film came like an explosion into my life.

I can still see myself as a 10-year-old, sitting down on the floor next to my mother’s ironing board – she did her ironing in the afternoon – completely mesmerised by the story of a human being who lived totally free.

Before that, I had been growing up as a fairly quiet, maybe even timid, little black girl on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1950s, protected from the violence of the ghetto in which we lived by parents who worked day and night to pay for the tuition that allowed us to attend the safety of the local Roman Catholic school.