William Walton's music for Paul Czinner's 1936 film As You Like It was among the most distinguished elements of a well-intended but deeply flawed movie. The second of the composer's 14 film scores, it was also his score for a screen adaptation of Shakespeare, and, for the first time, it brought Walton into professional contact with Laurence Olivier (who portrayed Orlando in the movie). Olivier produced, directed, and starred in three far-more significant Shakespearean movie adaptations over the ensuing 20 years on which Walton served as composer. Although it never achieved the stature of his music for Olivier's Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), or Richard III (1956), which were adapted into concert suites and recorded during the composer's lifetime, Walton's score from As You Like It was arranged by Christopher Palmer into a five-movement suite (subtitled "A Poem for Orchestra") in 1989, which has been performed in concert and recorded. Rather than adopt a deliberately archaic Elizabethan style, Walton retained his own compositional "voice" while adapting period melodies to his needs. The composer saw the necessity (perhaps better than the director did) of exciting audiences by opening the prelude with a bracing extended horn call heralding wonder, romance, and mystery. It was accompanied by flourishes on the flutes and running scales on the strings and laced with lilting melodies, as the brass replies to the horns, all giving way to a jaunty, rustic dance that draws toward the forest of Shakespeare's story, its beauty and mystery evoked by the muted calls on the reeds and the receding horns. The second movement, "Moonlight," carries into that forest in a gorgeous nocturne for French horn, reeds, and muted strings, whence the tale of mismatched loves and identities will unfold. In the third movement, "Under the Greenwood Tree," Walton directly quotes an Elizabethan-era folk tune that was deleted from the film. "The Fountain" opens with flourishes on the flutes and clarinets embellished with harp glissandos, all yielding to a hauntingly beautiful English horn solo that leads into a delicate minuet for a small string orchestra. The tone becomes bolder, as the rest of the orchestra joins the now much-augmented strings and directly leads into the "Wedding Dance" finale. This graceful yet jaunty dance brings the full orchestra into play in a triumphant and joyous finale.

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