What kind of man does Errol Flynn play in his debut on screen? The kind of man you like. A man with money. Not only did this film launch Flynn, it also launched 8 more movies where Flynn and Olivia de Havilland would share romance (and a little swashbuckling). It’s a fantastic example of the genre with big set pieces, great action, and a salty amount of fun. Oddly enough, it was also the first of 12 films where iconic director Michael Curtiz would work with Flynn, a man he hated (and who hated him right back). Funny how business works out.

One odd thing about being a child of the 80s is that you learn movie history backwards. In watching anything from Animaniacs to Pulp Fiction, I became acquainted with references and homages to classical Hollywood cinema long before I ever watched the movies referenced or the moments paid homage to. Thus, my knowledge of cinema’s past was framed through cinema’s present: I learned about old movies because of what new movies did with them. One of the most formidable moments of this backwards cinematic education occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s when major event kids’ movies became especially preoccupied with 40s film noir in movies like Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) or Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990). These movies embodied a world of double crosses, femme fatales, and cynical detectives without requiring their viewers, young or old, to have seen any of the films these genre tropes are indebted to. Thus, because of my exposure to new tweaks on an old form, conventions became familiar to me long before I could name the films from which such conventions originated. But one movie was exceptionally influential in formulating a distinct impression of film noir in my childhood imagination, and that movie was – oddly enough – Home Alone (1990).