All of these were only the forerunners for what was to be the first great Robin Hood film – the 1922 version starring Douglas Fairbanks. The actor was then at the height of his success and, in films such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921), had demonstrated a talent for athletic swashbuckling that had made him one of the biggest stars of the day. He was looking for another historical costume role and Robin Hood might have appeared an ideal choice. In fact, Fairbanks was initially reluctant to play what he called ‘a flat-footed Englishman walking through the woods’ but he was soon persuaded that the part could be tailored for his particular brand of energetic heroism. Vast sums were spent on creating a huge castle set and a reconstruction of twelfth-century Nottingham in the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio in Hollywood and Allan Dwan, who had worked with Fairbanks’s wife Mary Pickford on several pictures, was hired as director. The film premiered at the recently built Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in October 1922. Reviewers liked it and it became one of the big commercial hits of the year. The film divides neatly into two halves. For its first hour, an idle viewer, chancing on the movie without seeing the opening titles, might be forgiven for not realising that it is about Robin Hood at all. The focus is on Richard the Lionheart, presiding over a great tournament before he departs for the Crusades, and on the champion jouster, the Earl of Huntingdon, winning the tournament prize and becoming the bashful target for the admiring attention of the court ladies, including the Lady Marian Fitzwalter. The names might alert the knowledgeable to the fact that this is a Robin Hood film but otherwise it simply seems like a hugely ambitious reconstruction of what silent-era Hollywood imagined medieval England to be.
It is only in the second half of the film, with the Earl of Huntingdon exiled to Sherwood through the machinations of Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne, that some of the more familiar Robin Hood motifs (although, even now, not as many of them as might be expected) begin to appear. The vast sets, which Fairbanks had earlier worried would dwarf him, become a giant playground for his acrobatics. No Robin Hood in cinematic history, not even Errol Flynn, has moved with the grace and energy he does. He races around the castle battlements, sending the Sheriff of Nottingham’s soldiers skittling as he does so; he abseils down an enormous curtain that has been conveniently hung in one of the castle’s loftier rooms; he uses a descending drawbridge as his personal climbing-frame. In the climactic scenes, Robin’s men invade Nottingham Castle in huge hordes (he seems to have gathered half the country’s male population in the greenwood) and comprehensively thwart the villains’ plans. Ninety years on, Fairbanks’s Robin Hood remains one of the most significant of all films to be made about the legendary outlaw. Many of what are now the most familiar features of Robin Hood on screen may be missing from it but, to a large extent, it defined the Hollywood ‘swashbuckler’ genre and created a template for screen stories of Robin that was influential for decades to come.
So successful was the Fairbanks movie that it deterred other filmmakers from attempting to put the Robin Hood story on the screen. How could they match the scale and spectacle of the 1922 film? During the rest of the silent era and the first ten years of the ‘talkies’, there were only two Robin Hood films made in the US and Britain, both of them now very obscure indeed. Robin Hood Junior from 1923 was an American movie, starring a then popular child actor named Frankie Lee in the role of the outlaw as a boy. The Merry Men of Sherwood was a thirty-minute short, now lost, produced in 1932 by a maverick English director with the delightfully ludicrous name of Widgey Newman. This neglect of the Robin Hood story was to end in 1938 with the release of the Technicolor Warner Bros movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. Difficult as it is to credit now, the role was originally intended for James Cagney, one of Warners’ biggest stars at the time, but commonsense prevailed and the part eventually went to Flynn, already a successful swashbuckler in films like Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade. The original director was William Keighley but, when Keighley fell behind schedule and out of favour, he was replaced by Michael Curtiz who had directed Flynn in both of those films.
More than seventy years after it was made, The Adventures of Robin Hood remains the archetypal, swashbuckling screen version of the story. There are other films which are more self-consciously realistic in their reconstruction of the medieval past. There are other re-tellings which work harder to bring out the continuing relevance of the legend to the present day. However, there is no version which is as richly colourful, as energetic and lively, as fast-moving and romantic. In short, there is no screen Robin Hood which is as much fun as the Flynn film. Flynn himself is exactly right for the part. At the height of his physical charisma, before years of indulgence bloated and coarsened him, he is a brilliant embodiment of Robin as both a fighter for justice and a trickster of the greenwood. He is supported by a brilliant cast of regular Warner players, from Olivia de Havilland as his Maid Marian and Basil Rathbone as a forcefully villainous Sir Guy of Gisbourne to Claude Rains as wicked Prince John and Alan Hale, repeating his role as Little John from the Fairbanks film twenty years earlier.
The plot is founded on the Saxon v. Norman conflict that dates back to Scott and the audience is thrust into it from the very first scenes in which Robin saves Much the Miller’s Son after the latter has poached one of the king’s deer. Robin himself, however, is the gentrified Robin, a Saxon noble who believes in fair play and tolerance. ‘It’s injustice I hate,’ he says, ‘not the Normans.’ The filmmakers find space for many of the most familiar set-pieces from literary sources (the confrontation on the log bridge between Robin and Little John, Robin’s first meeting with the Curtal Friar/Friar Tuck) and they create memorable versions of them. They also introduce new scenes which have an instant impact. After first seeing it, who can forget Robin’s entrance into Prince John’s court, strutting into the room with a cocky grin on his face and a deer across his shoulders which he hurls onto the dining table? Or the carnivalesque feast in the forest at which Robin and his men entertain a reluctant Sir Guy, and the outlaw leader shows Marian the realities of Saxon poverty which her sheltered Norman upbringing has hidden from her? The Adventures of Robin Hood is both a brilliant embodiment of earlier motifs from the legends and the source for new ideas about them which echo down the decades since it was made.
In the forties, almost any film where the plot focused on a noble thief who stole from the rich and gave to the poor was likely to be given a Robin Hood title in the hope that it would be able to bask in the reflected glory of the still-popular Flynn film. Thus we have Robin Hood of the Pecos in 1941, Robin Hood of the Range in 1943 and both Robin Hood of Texas and Robin Hood of Monterey in 1947. None had anything to do with the English outlaw hero; nearly all were Westerns. However, there were two movies in that decade that dared to be compared with Warners’ brilliant swashbuckler even if neither could hope to come close to matching its mix of wit and action-packed entertainment. Both of them emerged from the studios of Columbia Pictures. In The Bandit of Sherwood Forest from 1946, Cornel Wilde is a poor man’s Errol Flynn as Robert of Nottingham, son of the original Sherwood outlaw (Russell Hicks), who gathers together his father’s ageing comrades to fight new injustices when England’s ancient liberties are threatened by a greedy Regent. An attempt to reprise the success of the earlier film on a fraction of its budget, The Bandit of Sherwood Forest soon loses its way and ends up as no more than a competent and mildly enjoyable variant of the story. As is often the case in such movies, the villains are given more chance to impress themselves on the memory than the heroes. Henry Daniell is sneeringly malevolent as the Regent and he is ably assisted by George Macready as his accomplice in plotting treason. Robert of Nottingham and his merry men seem a bit pallid in comparison, although Wilde, as a former fencing champion, makes the most of his opportunities to cross swords with his foes. Two years later Columbia released The Prince of Thieves, starring Jon Hall, an actor largely forgotten now but familia
r at the time from Technicolor Arabian Nights romances such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. As Robin, Hall occasionally looks the part but he lacks any real acting talent and the story into which the scriptwriters thrust him – a dull variant of the ballad tale of the outlaws helping a young man to rescue his true love from the clutches of a rival suitor – gives him little chance to shine.
Like The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), also a Columbia production, is an attempt to create a new Robin Hood story by focusing on the outlaw’s son. If Cornel Wilde, in the earlier film, is a poor man’s Errol Flynn, then the star of this movie, John Derek (future husband of Ursula Andress and Bo Derek), is a poor man’s Cornel Wilde who has nothing much to recommend him beyond his improbable good looks. The charisma-free Derek plays Robin, Earl of Huntington who reforms his father’s band of merry men to combat the oppression of King John, played by George Macready. Diana Lynn in the Maid Marian role, a ward of the king who becomes Robin’s spy at court, is as colourless as her lover. In his last role, Alan Hale, who had played the part opposite Douglas Fairbanks in 1922 and Errol Flynn in 1938, is Little John, although his presence does little more than remind viewers of how much better those earlier films were than the one they are currently watching. Plump vaudevillian Billy House is well cast as Friar Tuck; one-time silent comedian Billy Bevan plays Will Scarlett; Paul Cavanagh enjoys himself as Sir Giles, the king’s villainous sidekick. The plot culminates in a version of the signing of the Magna Carta that never made it into the history books.
Two further Robin films followed in quick succession. Tales of Robin Hood, a pilot for a TV series that was never made, was released as a B-movie in 1951. The outlaw leader was played by Robert Clarke who went on to become the star of low-budget SF films with titles like The Astounding She-Monster and The Hideous Sun Demon. Cheap and cheerful, the film has few pretensions but, within the huge limitations imposed on it by shortage of cash, it tells its tales quite well. The following year Disney turned its attention to the outlaw of Sherwood and the result was The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men. Few of the budgetary constraints that affected Tales of Robin Hood applied to the Disney Studios and, on paper at least, the movie had a lot going for it. The strong cast was headed by Richard Todd as Robin, Peter Finch as the Sheriff of Nottingham and the suitably hulking James Robertson Justice as Little John. It was directed by Ken Annakin who made a number of live-action feature films for Disney including The Sword and the Rose (also starring Todd) and Swiss Family Robinson. Much of it was shot on location in the English countryside. And yet somehow The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men doesn’t quite work. Todd, who was to become best known for stiff-upper-lip roles in war movies like The Dambusters, looks uncomfortable in Lincoln Green and rarely exudes the charm and confidence required to carry off the part. The script makes extensive use of familiar stories (the initial confrontation between Robin and Little John is particularly well done) but it never really comes together to form a coherent narrative. In one sense, the filmmakers are too reverential towards the old legend. The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men might have been a better film had they been prepared to trust their own imaginations a little more. Instead, it feels too familiar and too staid an interpretation.
After this Disney version, Hollywood in the fifties and sixties showed no further interest in the Robin Hood stories. In Britain, Son of Robin Hood was released in 1958, a curiously titled film since the son turns out to be a daughter, played by June Laverick. Directed by the imported American George Sherman, a specialist in Westerns, this was a re-run of the idea that Robin’s former merry men are brought together again by a chip off the old block, with the added variant that, in this instance, Hood Junior is a girl. Described by one film historian as ‘cheaply produced, appallingly written and woefully acted’, Son of Robin Hood has very little to recommend it. It was left to Hammer Film Productions, best known for their Dracula and Frankenstein films, to put halfway decent versions of the story onto the larger screens.
Over a period of nearly twenty years, Hammer was responsible for no less than four Robin Hood movies. The first of these was The Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), directed by Val Guest and starring Don Taylor, an American actor who moved behind the camera twenty years later and was in the director’s chair for a number of films in the seventies and eighties including Escape from the Planet of the Apes and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Notable as the first film Hammer produced in colour, this in an intriguing Robin movie, if only because it makes little attempt to re-tell the familiar stories from the legend but instead focuses on a single, new narrative. The plot, focusing on an attempt by a villain called Sir Guy (but not of Gisbourne) to assassinate Richard the Lionheart, is neatly constructed and a welcome change from the often episodic nature of other Robin films. As the hero, Taylor shows why his change of career from actor to director was a wise one and is rarely more than adequate but he has sterling support from a number of familiar British character actors of the period. Reginald Beckwith is particularly effective as Friar Tuck. Sword of Sherwood Forest, which was released in 1961, was an attempt to cash in on the success of the ITV series starring Richard Greene as the outlaw. By the time this moderately enjoyable swashbuckler was made, Greene had been playing Robin Hood so long he could take on the role in his sleep and there are times in the movie when he appears to be doing exactly that. A miscast Peter Cushing seems only half-heartedly villainous as the Sheriff of Nottingham and the scriptwriter hastens him out of the plot before its conclusion, replacing him as chief baddie with the Earl of Newark, played by Richard Pasco. Nigel Green makes an effective enough Little John but Niall MacGinnis is a poor Friar Tuck and Sarah Branch, an actress who appeared in only a handful of films in the late fifties and early sixties, is out of her depth as Maid Marian. In supporting roles, Jack Gwillim plays a fighting archbishop, as eager for a bout of swordplay as he is for a religious service, and a young Oliver Reed is a camply menacing sidekick to the wicked Earl. The unnecessarily complicated plot involves a fatally wounded man with a dying message of danger to deliver, the Sheriff’s attempts to confiscate land when the true owner dies in the Crusades and a conspiracy to assassinate the archbishop. Greene as Robin strides through it as if he’s seen it all before and can hardly wait for the climactic swordfight in which the good will triumph and the bad will meet a sticky end.
At the time Hammer made A Challenge for Robin Hood in 1967, some of the energy and inventiveness that had characterised the company in the fifties and early sixties was beginning to dissipate. Their horror films were losing their vigour and, on the evidence of this Robin movie, so too were their historical swashbucklers. A Challenge for Robin Hood is a much poorer film than either The Men of Sherwood Forest or The Sword of Sherwood Forest. The plot, which has Robin as a Norman lord falsely accused of murder who flees to the forest and takes over the leadership of the band of outlaws there, is dull and predictable. The action sequences are leaden and unconvincing. The actors playing the Merry Men look distinctly unhappy. Only James Hayter as Friar Tuck, reprising the role he had taken in the 1952 Disney film, looks as if he is enjoying himself. By far the biggest problem with the film, however, is the casting of Barrie Ingham as Robin. Ingham has had a long and successful career in the theatre and he holds the distinction of being one of the few actors to have played roles in both Dr. Who and Star Trek but nature never intended him to play Robin Hood. Not to mince words, he looks and sounds ridiculous as the hero of the greenwood. Thirty-three at the time the film was made, he appears older and he has been equipped with one of the most unflattering medieval hairstyles ever to hit the silver screen. Combine these disadvantages with a voice seemingly more suitable for drawing-room comedy than the wilds of Sherwood Forest and we have a Robin memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Wolfshead: The Legend of Robin Hood, the last of the Hammer Robin movies, was originally made in 1969 as a pilot episode for a proposed series on London Weekend Television. The TV company deci
ded not to go ahead with the series and the pilot looked likely never to gain an audience until, several years later, Hammer bought it and gave it a theatrical release as the lower half of a double bill. Only an hour long and with a familiar enough plot in which Robin the honest Saxon is outlawed by a wicked Norman lord and forced to fight back, this is not, in most ways, a major addition to the canon of Robin Hood movies. Narrative coherence has been lost in the transformation from TV pilot to cinematic second feature and the film is clearly not a self-contained story but the first in what was originally planned as a series of episodes. Lady Marian would doubtless have had more to do had the series been commissioned but, in the film we have, she seems superfluous to requirements. However, there is much of interest in Wolfshead. Seen in the context of the history of Robin Hood on screen, it is the first film to move entirely away from the romantic swashbuckling tradition of Fairbanks and Flynn and strive instead for some degree of realism. It is interesting to speculate about the possible success of the series had it been made. Would 1969 have been a good year in which to launch a realistic Robin Hood TV series? In fact, as we shall see, there was no series on the small screen featuring the outlaw leader between the end of the nineteen fifties and the middle of the nineteen seventies. David Warbeck, who played Robin in Wolfshead, would have made an interestingly brooding hero in any ongoing series but fate had another path in store for him. He went on to become a regular performer in cult Italian horror films of the 1980s.
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