There were, amazingly, seven Robin Hood films made before 1914: four from Britain and three from Hollywood. These were basically continuous with the popular theatrical tradition, and the 1913 Eclair film has recently been discovered and restored: it combines action and comedy in the context of a distinctly American valuing of family and dislike of nobles and kings who are distant from the common people.
This early film tradition was apotheosized in the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie, which was as magnificent as it was lucrative. With a cast and set that still look very large, it opens at a major chivalric tournament and then Lord Robin leaves for the Crusades. When Marian calls him back to help restore order at home, natural law and American isolationism coalesce via Fairbanks’s sprightly theatricality. Sound and color were to create their own level of outlaw splendor in the 1938 Warner Brothers film (which won three technical Oscars, for editing, artistic direction, and Wolfgang Korngold’s stirring score). Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Claude Rains were a mighty cast; the pace and condensation of Michael Curtiz’s direction is a standard in media schools; and the film, though 70 years old, still dominates as a Christmas favorite on television. It also had a political voice, linking the goodhearted liberalism of Robin’s speeches to the unmissable links between the violent Norman solders and Nazi Brownshirt excesses on the streets of modern Germany.
It has been argued that film has been the master genre for the Robin Hood tradition, linking to and projecting further the theatricality of the ballads and the dramatic tradition. The hero’s brisk story and direct meanings may not be so well-suited to thoughtful novels or intense poetry, and there has been a continuous flow of outlaw movies and television. Low points have appeared, such as the outlaws on cowboy ponies in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946), June Laverick as a shrill daughter pretending to be Son of Robin Hood (1958), and the three dull, if occasionally ridiculous, British Hammer films from the 1950s and 1960s.
The immediacy of television has reshaped the outlaw tradition several times. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-58) was enormously successful around the world, attracting massive audiences and running to 143 episodes. Starring Richard Greene (an Irishman who had worked in Hollywood before World
War II) as a British-officer version of Robin, the series was made in the United Kingdom but was devised and scripted, and given a firmly democratic political edge, by blacklisted American writers, including Ring Lardner Jr. In the same resistant spirit was Robin of Sherwood, written by Richard Carpenter, starting in 1984 and combining anti-Thatcherite politics, mystical elements, and up-to-date technology with the youthful glamour of long-haired Michael Praed as Robin. Television introduced feminist outlawry, if diluted with comedy, in the 1988 Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, written for BBC children’s television, with a doughty Marian, a dress-designer outlaw named Robin of Kensington, and writer Tony Robinson in the choice part of the sheriff.
After years of television energy in the tradition, and reportedly in response to the success of Michael Praed in the United States, film made a comeback with Kevin Costner as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).3 This major entertainment was not popular with critics (they objected to Costner’s American accent, especially in the United States), but it turned out to be very successful at the box office. The film also, at the time of the first Gulf War, foregrounded American issues, starting with another return from Crusade and creating a new Little John in Azeem, a noble black Muslim, strongly played by Morgan Freeman. In the same year (1991) Robin Hood, written partly by the radical British playwright John McGrath, combined grittiness and mythicism and benefitted from the lively and wry figure of Patrick Bergin as Robin and from Uma Thurman, a Marian with unusual strength of personality. The longstanding tradition of outlaw parody (which goes back right to the beginning) was continued in 1993 in the farcical but also shrewdly referential Robin Hood: Men in Tights by, and including, Mel Brooks.
Visual media continued in the lackluster New Adventures of Robin Hood (1995), with a tendency toward Californian psychobabble, and the 2006 BBC series Robin Hood offered a somewhat over-rich combination of postmodern improbabilities, a strong Marian, a new man Robin, a sturdy Arab girl outlaw, and a distinct critique of the second Gulf War. Such lively variety seemed deliberately excluded from the 2010 film with Russell Crowe as a glum, soldierly Robin and Cate Blanchett as a determinedly unglamorous Marian and making a claim on historicity via outlaw democracy. That this lackluster epic achieved considerable international box-office success suggests the continued appeal of the Robin Hood tradition.
World History
