IN 1959, Errol Flynn unveiled My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a scandalous bestseller and one of the few really great movie-star autobiographies ever. In sensationalist terms, it certainly gave readers their money's worth: here was the screen's beloved Robin Hood bemusedly noting a virulent case of gonorrhea or witnessing a "braying donkey mounting a French girl" at a private establishment in Marseilles. (Indeed, he could have written a Michelin guide to international whorehouses.)

Flynn admits "touring" the Spanish Civil War simply to evade a wrathful first wife. Their marriage had just combusted for good (during a row in a Paris lesbian bar, no less). His romantic attention-deficit disorder, sexual compulsiveness, penchant for cruel juvenile pranks, abuse of the casting couch ("I often asked myself, was this ethical? So what?"), stupid neck-risking bravado, related perpetual drunkenness, and the hapless consequences of all the above ("As far back as I can remember, I always seemed to have needed a lawyer") are laid out with a jauntily self-flagellating air.

Debauchery took its toll. Exhausted, broke, ill, his career in tatters at age 50, Flynn died of a heart attack the same year his book was published. It's perhaps saddest that, of all the legends from Hollywood's so-called golden age, this articulate libertine didn't live to see the turbulent '60s. Instead of being dismissed as a camp figure, he might have been celebrated by an emerging counterculture as its surprise ally. After all, Wicked says yes to recreational drug experimentation, admitting that alcohol is a far worse danger. Crowing that "the Christian concept of monogamy is a travesty on human nature," Flynn was more "now generation" than 1959 could handle.

For a while, however, the industry, the public, and the man himself knew just what to do with Flynn. The undeniable peak of this late-'30s honeymoon was 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, a Warner Brothers superproduction that, like Flynn's breakthrough role in Captain Blood two years earlier, had been intended for another star (originally, James Cagney, of all people, was to play the prince of thieves). Fortunately, things didn't go as planned – initial director William Keighley was also replaced, by Michael Curtiz – and what emerged was, like Curtiz's later Casablanca, a movie that blithely set a standard.

Still an escapist joy, The Adventures of Robin Hood bottles Flynn at maximum ripeness. Managing to carry off even a glitter-edged Peter Pan tunic with green tights and go-go booties, he's gay in the old sense, fleet, forthright, lewd, droll (when told "Why, you speak treason!," he replies, "Fluently"), courageous, and as full of male oomph as nature and artifice could produce. Whether he was a real actor or simply a personality was beside the point. At his early best – here or in 1942's Gentleman Jim – Flynn seemed to be sharing his good fortune with the audience, enjoying himself hugely (even if he never liked Curtiz, with whom he'd be teamed 10 more times).

The action begins with Richard the Lionhearted off at the Crusades, and his poncey black-hearted brother Prince John (Claude Rains) taking the opportunity to tax the poor Saxons into poverty and prison, abetted by baleful strong-arm Sir Guy (Basil Rathbone). Ergo the rebellion spearheaded by decommissioned aristo Sir Robin (Flynn), whose Merry Men (notably Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck and Alan Hale as Little John) treat Sherwood Forest like a big jungle gym: every so often they gallop out, swagger right into the enemy's clutches, drop trou, wiggle it a bit, then traipse happily back into the shrubbery. These antics do not immediately endear Robin to royal ward Maid Marian (suffering, succulent Olivia De Havilland, so apple-cheeked you might wonder if they had collagen back then). But she soon realizes which side is right, not to mention which titled suitor is cuter.

Newly restored and upgraded with digital sound, The Adventures of Robin Hood boasts Technicolor that – as the film's tagline proclaims – "Only the rainbow can duplicate!" The Crayola rainbow, perhaps, but so much the better. Not unlike current throwbacks such as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (but better, of course), it pauses only briefly between big set pieces that deliver the goods and then some. The script is robustly funny, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Oscar-winning score cavorts definitively, and the court costumes are eye-poppingly o'er the top.

Often cast as public playboy and screen scamp, filmdom's most famous Robin Hood was privately ambivalent about being little more than – to quote My Wicked, Wicked Ways – "a piece of chalk [used] to provide the world with a dab of color." So much of the world was, and is, drab; Flynn and Robin Hood are so not. Their job may be frivolous, but we should still be grateful for a job well done.