Studios did not always trust movie theater managers to glance at the Pressbooks posted out to them, one of the initial functions of such marketing manuals being to tempt said managers into booking the film in the first place. So studios occasionally chose a more direct route of getting in a manager’s face and would lump the whole Pressbook into an American trade magazine. Sword of Sherwood Forest took this route.
The film was a very speedy attempt by British studio Hammer to cash in on the popularity of The Adventures of Robin Hood television series, especially by hiring its star Richard Greene. It was a bit of an uphill struggle, movie swashbucklers long out of fashion. In fact, it was only the British television industry that kept the genre alive, in the second half of the 1950s pumping out such series as The Buccaneeers, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, Sword of Freedom and The Adventures of William Tell. The 30-minute Robin Hood series ran in Britain on ITV in 1955-1959 and was picked up by CBS in 1958
This Presbook was a fold-out, the initial A4 sheets pulling out to form a giant A2 sheet. Hammer was relying on the fact that by the time the movie appeared in America, the series was being shown on various television stations. Some of the marketing ideas were straightforward enough such as utilizing toy stores that would likely have swords and archery sets among its inventory and it would be easy enough to sent a promotional girl or man down a main street decked out in tights and leather jerkin.
But it was a bit of a long shot to expect a theater manager in a small town to host a fencing tournament. The stars were little help – Richard Greene had virtually no marquee value not having made a picture in five years until his television success prompted Cold War thriller Beyond the Curtain (1960) but that was British-made with little American penetration. The public might be more familiar with bad guy Peter Cushing after his interpretation of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and horror pictures The Brides of Dracula (1960) and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958).
There might have been some mileage out of newcomer Sarah Branch as Maid Marian but she did not feature at all in the Pressbook. The marketeers appeared to be relying solely on the popularity of the Robin Hood legend and perhaps audience familiarity with old Errol Flynn pictures that popped up with regularity on television channels because, unusually for a piece of material that was meant to sell a picture to theater managers, this made remarkably little impact as a marketing tool beyond the fact that it was unavoidable in the middle of a weekly trade magazine.
The Magnificent 60s 
It’s a kind of fake help; it may not have made any difference, but supposedly ‘helped’ bring the crowds in. Always feel sorry for anyone roped into trying to implement the ideas in a press book.
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You would be surprised at the ideas they had of their own. I’ll need to dig some of those out.
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