It was not just in Britain and the USA that Robin Hood movies were made. As far back as the silent era a Japanese film entitled Robin Hood No Yume was produced. More recently, there have been movies from Holland (Robin Hood en Zijn Schelmen, 1962), from Brazil (Robin Hood, O Trapalhão da Floresta, 1974), from Spain (Robin Hood Nunca Muere, 1975) and from Russia (Strely Robin Guda, 1975). However, during much the same period that Hammer was making its Robin Hood films in Britain, the country that was producing the most versions of the outlaw’s story was Italy. By the late fifties, the Italian film industry already had a rich tradition of costume drama and swashbucklers so it was perhaps no surprise that its movie-makers regularly turned their attentions to the subject of Robin and his merry men, although the results were decidedly mixed. One-time Tarzan Lex Barker played the outlaw in Robin Hood e I Pirati (Robin Hood and the Pirates) in 1960, an unlikely story in which Robin joins forces with a band of shipwrecked buccaneers to fight against a villain who has killed his father. Il Trionfo di Robin Hood (The Triumph of Robin Hood) was released two years later. Starring the Scottish actor Don Burnett in the title role, it was directed by Umberto Lenzi, later notorious for exploitation films such as Cannibal Ferox, one of the movies condemned as ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s. Lenzi’s film is a more traditional telling of the tale than Robin Hood and the Pirates and features most of the familiar Sherwood characters in a story involving attempts to ransom Richard the Lionheart from imprisonment in Europe. Il Magnifico Robin Hood, from 1970, was an Italian-Spanish co-production and starred a Spanish actor Francisco Martinez Celeiro, billed under the more Anglo-Saxon sounding alias of George Martin. The best of these Italian films is undoubtedly L’Arciere di Sherwood from 1971 which has Giuliano Gemma, better known as the star of spaghetti westerns, in the title role. Flashing improbably gleaming smiles for the Middle Ages, Gemma and Mark Damon, the American actor who plays an Allen-a-Dale given a higher profile than in other films, take on the assorted baddies with some gusto. The movie, unfathomably called The Scalawag Bunch in its only release in English, is a lively swashbuckler which adds little new to Robin’s cinematic history but entertainingly revisits some familiar scenes (the archery contest, Richard the Lionheart’s incognito return to England) from earlier films.
L’Arciere di Sherwood must have seemed old-fashioned even at the time of its release. The most thoroughgoing attempt in the seventies to give a new twist to the story, however, was fated to be a commercial failure. What happens to legends when they grow old? That is the question asked by Richard Lester’s 1976 film Robin and Marian, arguably the most unusual and the most affecting of all the many movies made about the outlaw leader. Other cinematic Robins tend to live in a fantasy world of swashbuckling heroism and perpetual youth. In Lester’s touching and beautifully acted film, he inhabits the real world in which time passes and men and women grow old. Sean Connery’s Robin Hood is no longer the dashing hero of the greenwood that he once was. He is middle-aged and beginning to feel his years in his aching joints and weary muscles. As the film opens, he and Little John, played by Nicol Williamson, are fighting with Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) in the Holy Land. Richard, in other films the epitome of the ‘good king’, is here shown as little more than a bloodthirsty tyrant and the two men have grown tired of giving their loyalty to a man who has no qualms about butchering men, women and children if they stand in his way. When the king is killed, they decide to return home to England. They have been absent for twenty years. Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn in one of the best performances of her later career) has long been the abbess of a priory near Nottingham but Robin’s return reignites the old love between them. She joins him in Sherwood once again. Meanwhile, Robin’s old enemy, the Sheriff of Nottingham, brilliantly played by Robert Shaw not as a villain but as a humane and intelligent man who recognises how much he and the old outlaw leader have in common, is still around to continue their feud. When Robin gathers a new band of men in Sherwood, everyone but him recognises that the days of swashbuckling heroism are gone. As the outlaws battle once again with the Sheriff’s men and Robin faces a bruising and bloody encounter with his old rival, even he realises that his time has passed. Robin and Marian becomes one of the very few films to depict the death of Robin Hood. James Goldman’s script for the movie and Lester’s direction include some of the comic, almost slapstick, touches that enlivened the latter’s Three Musketeers films but the prevailing feeling is one of melancholy and regret at the departure of youth and romance.
For all its many virtues, Robin and Marian was something of a flop at the box office. In fact, it is rumoured to have been the only Robin Hood film ever to lose money. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this, although the eighties saw the success on TV of Robin of Sherwood, it was not until the early nineties that the outlaw leader returned to the big screen. Unfortunately, when he did, it was Kevin Costner who played him. The 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has its good points and it remains a movie that is entertaining enough to watch. As it opens, Robert of Locksley is languishing in a Saracen dungeon in Jerusalem. With the assistance of a Moorish fellow-prisoner, played with his usual gravitas by Morgan Freeman, he escapes and makes his way back to England. Things have not been going well in his absence. His father has been killed by the Sheriff and his lands confiscated. Before he has the chance to say Jack Robinson, our hero is exiled to Sherwood Forest where he encounters a motley crew of outlaws who are skulking in its depths. Displaying both natural leadership skills and an obtrusive American accent he seems to have acquired during his years of imprisonment, Locksley inspires them to rise above the petty thievery they’ve been indulging in for years and to dream of freedom and the defeat of their enemies, principally (of course) the Sheriff of Nottingham. They steal the money the Sheriff has been gathering to bribe the barons of England into joining him in rebellion against Richard the Lionheart. The Sheriff retaliates by burning their forest community to the ground and taking some of their comrades to hang in Nottingham but Locksley, now the legend known as Robin Hood, organises a daring raid on the town. The men are rescued. So too is Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s Lady Marian, cousin to the King, whom the Sheriff is forcing into marriage as part of his plans to seize the throne. As the Sheriff, magnificently over the top in his pantomime villainy, Alan Rickman steals the show. Mannered and menacing, threatening to cut out Robin’s heart with a spoon rather than an axe because ‘it’ll hurt more’, Rickman’s Sheriff seems to be appearing in an entirely different (probably better) film than the one through which Costner’s Robin is heroically striding. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is often rousingly energetic in its action (the final duel between hero and villain is very well staged) but it is too long and meandering, and too sentimental to be a particularly good version of the legend. Most damningly of all, Costner is completely wrong in the central role. At his best as an actor when playing an American everyman such as the hero of Field of Dreams, he looks lost and ever so slightly ludicrous as Robin Hood.
By chance, the same year, 1991, saw the release in the UK and Europe of a better Robin film that was sadly overshadowed by the Costner version. Robin Hood, originally shown as a TV movie in the USA, starred Patrick Bergin in the title role and a young Uma Thurman as Maid Marian. Taking the familiar Saxons versus Normans rivalry as its focus but introducing a new villain in the shape of Sir Miles Folcanet (played by the German actor Jürgen Prochnow), the film has a kind of gritty authenticity that is noticeably absent from Prince of Thieves. Sherwood is not the sunlight-dappled never-never land in which Costner makes his impassioned, unconvincing orations in favour of freedom but a dark and dank forest in which medieval outlaws might well lurk. Bergin, although he is sporting an extremely unfortunate moustache, makes Robin a far more compelling and ambivalent figure than Costner’s improbably all-American hero, and Thurman, moving from coquettish spoilt brat to strong and resourceful woman in the course of the film, is excellent as Marian. It is just a pity that, whereas Costner’s film is and
always has been readily watchable, this Robin Hood has rarely found an audience.
In the two decades and more since Costner and Bergin entered the greenwood, Robin has appeared onscreen in a variety of incarnations, none of them very impressive. The 2001 made-for-TV movie, Princess of Thieves, had Robin (Stuart Wilson) as bad father to daughter Gwyn (Keira Knightley), absent at the Crusades during her crucial formative years and all too willing to dismiss her wish to fight against wicked Prince John, simply on the grounds that she is a woman. Gwyn proceeds to cut her hair and don male garb in order to help Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son Philip seize power from John in a coup d’etat otherwise unknown to history. Robin’s daughter proves herself as brilliant an archer as her father in yet another screen version of the famous archery tournament won when one arrow splits another in the bullseye. She also engages in a coy romance with the young prince after he spots that she’s not quite the boy she claims to be. Robin Hood: Prince of Sherwood (2008) is an embarrassingly inept and amateurish straight-to-video confection. It was made in Alabama and it shows. Beyond Sherwood Forest, another made-for-TV movie from 2009 proved a misguided attempt to fuse the Robin Hood stories with the sword and sorcery genre. Directed by Peter DeLuise, the son of Mel Brooks regular Dom DeLuise who appeared in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, it starred the Canadian actor Robin Dunne in the lead role. An uninspired CGI dragon shape-shifting into a naked woman and a gateway in the deep woods to an alternative world prove inadequate substitutes for an interesting script and a truly original take on the legend. The best that can be said of the film is that it shows how open the Robin Hood myth is to endless reinterpretations, even ones as misguided as this is.
The most expensive, ambitious and eagerly-anticipated Robin movie of recent years, however, has been Ridley Scott’s take on the story, released in 2010. Starring Russell Crowe as a character named, for no particularly good reason, Robin Longstride, Robin Hood also features Cate Blanchett as an independent and spirited Lady Marian. The whole film is an ‘origins tale’, describing how Robin took to the woods and became an outlaw. Many of the literary versions of the story have provided such an explanatory opening but they don’t usually extend to more than a chapter. This tale lasts close on two and a half hours. Robin fights in the armies of Richard the Lionheart and is present when the king dies while besieging a castle in France. Heading back home to England, he and his pals (a Welsh Will Scarlet, Alan A’Dayle and Little John) witness the ambush and murder of the knights bearing news of Richard’s death to London. They take the place of these knights, one of whom is Sir Robert Loxley. Masquerading as Loxley, Robin travels to the dead man’s home near Nottingham and is persuaded by Sir Robert’s father to continue his pretence. Warily, he does so and is welcomed back as the prodigal son and long-lost husband of the Lady Marian. As wicked King John squeezes the northern barons for tax monies they have not got and Philip of France, assisted by a traitor in English ranks, plots to invade, Robin becomes a leader of the resistance to tyranny of all kinds. He and the other northern noblemen make an alliance with John to defeat the perfidious French but, once they have won their victory, the king goes back on his word. Robin is proclaimed an outlaw. He and Marian and his comrades retire to the greenwood. The very last shot before the credits roll is of a title card, reading ‘And so the legend begins.’
Ridley Scott and his principal writer Brian Helgeland have thus turned their backs entirely on the traditional stories and fashioned an entirely new narrative about the outlaw hero. Unfortunately, it isn’t a particularly compelling or engaging one. Indeed, there are times when it seems to have little to do with Robin Hood at all. It could be any kind of lavish exercise in Hollywood medieval. The connection with the character of folklore sometimes appears slender indeed. This is certainly the most spectacular Robin Hood film since the Fairbanks and Flynn versions but it lacks most of the grace and fluency of those two movies. Like its star, who has a tendency to take himself very seriously indeed, it has little lightness of spirit. It is a ponderous film, filled with grunting action sequences and Crowe’s embarrassingly banal and anachronistic speeches about life, liberty and the Saxon pursuit of happiness. However, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood has been a box office success, despite its huge cost, and it has at least established Robin as once again a suitable hero for the big screen. There have been rumours that Scott himself might produce a sequel. This may seem unlikely, given that the director has never had a second bite at any movie cherry and has always moved on to new projects, but the ending of the first film certainly seems to suggest that others could be in the pipeline. What is almost certainly true is that Robin will continue to make his mark in the cinema.
TV
The very first person to play Robin Hood on British TV was the future Dr. Who, Patrick Troughton, who took the role in a six-part BBC series in 1953. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to judge how good or bad he was in the part because only one episode has been preserved and that one episode is very rarely seen. Troughton proved, however, to be merely trailblazing a path through Sherwood that was to be followed by one of the best-remembered and best-loved of all Robin Hoods to appear on either large or small screen.
In 1954, legendary British media mogul Lew Grade joined forces with the American producer Hannah Weinstein to finance a series of half-hour shows about the outlaw to be shown on the newly-launched ITV network in Britain and on CBS in the United States. The actor chosen for the title role in The Adventures of Robin Hood was Richard Greene. Greene was born in Plymouth, a member of a family that had been producing stage actors for generations, and was only twenty when his talent and good looks won him a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. He appeared in a number of Hollywood films (perhaps most famously, he played Sir Henry Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the 1939 movie that first paired together Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson) but the Second World War, in which he served as a British army officer, effectively put an end to his hopes of major stardom. His career was languishing in the doldrums of second-rate swashbucklers like The Bandits of Corsica and Captain Scarlett when he was approached to play Robin Hood. He went on to become identified with the role in a way that few other actors have ever been.
For its time, The Adventures of Robin Hood, first screened on British TV in September 1955, was clever popular entertainment and it remains very watchable. In the opening episode, Robin is the returning crusader forced into outlawry by the machinations of his Norman enemies but, as the series progressed, the circumstances which led him to Sherwood are almost forgotten. He and his usual gang are just there, ready at a moment’s notice to sally forth to right injustice and put the Sheriff’s nose out of joint. Greene plays Robin as an almost avuncular character, more dependable than dashing, but he also gives him real presence and personality. The regular supporting cast of Archie Duncan as a surprisingly Scottish Little John, Alexander Gauge as Friar Tuck and Bernadette O’Farrell (in the first two series) and Patricia Driscoll (in the last two) as Maid Marian all seem at ease with their characters. Many of the actors who appeared occasionally in the series went on to greater renown. Screening successive episodes today can become an enjoyable exercise in spotting the famous face. Both Steptoe and Son (Wilfred Brambell and Harry H. Corbett) were in the series more than once, although never in the same episode; Sid James, in pre-Carry On days, played a master silversmith; Donald Pleasence took the role of Prince John on four occasions; Leslie Phillips had several different roles; Jane Asher appeared as a child actress; Leo McKern, Rumpole of the Bailey many years in the future, played a villainous knight named Sir Roger DeLisle in the very first episode. Some of the directors were men of real talent. Terence Fisher, who directed eleven episodes in the first series, was soon to gain fame for his work on Hammer horror classics such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula; Lindsay Anderson directed five later episodes, although it would be a struggle to find much evidence in them of the sensibility of the future auteur who created
revolutionary British films like If and O Lucky Man!; Bernard Knowles was a former cinematographer who had frequently worked with Hitchcock; and Don Chaffey went on to direct Hammer kitsch classics One Million Years BC and Creatures the World Forgot.
However, in many ways, the most interesting participants in the series were the writers. Look in reference works or on websites such as the Internet Movie Database and the scriptwriters for The Adventures of Robin Hood very often seem to be people with few other credits. The reason is simple. Most of the credited names were either aliases or fronts. The real writers were American screenwriters who had been blacklisted in Hollywood after falling foul of the notorious, McCarthyite campaign against former Communists in the film industry. Howard Koch, who contributed scripts with his wife under the name of ‘Anne Rodney’, had worked with Orson Welles on the legendary radio adaptation of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds which had sent tens of thousands of Americans into panic-stricken flight across the country. He was also one of the writers of Casablanca, the 1941 Humphrey Bogart classic. Ring Lardner Jr, who wrote episodes from the beginning as ‘Eric Heath’, was one of the so-called ‘Hollywood Ten’ jailed for resisting demands to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee about their past political involvement. Waldo Salt, later an Oscar winner for his script for Midnight Cowboy, who endured many years in the Hollywood wilderness after refusing to testify to the committee, wrote episodes as ‘Arthur Behr’. Thus many of the stories of the famous English outlaw were written by Americans who had themselves been outlawed from working in their own country. In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the plots in the TV series keep returning again and again to themes of betrayal and treachery.
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