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| Robin Hood enjoying a brew |
Starring Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery and Sam De Grasse
Produced by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures
The crowd waits anxiously as the joust is set to begin. King Richard offers his brother Prince John a friendly wager on the outcome. Richard is backing the heroic Robin Hood... er, Earl of Huntingdon. John's man is the lecherous Sir Guy of Gisbourne. It does not matter that Sir Guy straps himself to his saddle; our hero quickly dismounts him and wins the prize...
...which he must accept from Lady Marian. Now, that is a problem because Robin... sorry, the Earl of Huntingdon is afraid of women. So, as various maidens approach him following the contest, he races from them terrified, seeking refuge by jumping into the castle's moat.
Later that night, the king is hosting a fare thee well party as he and his troops prepare to head off to the Crusades. The king admonishes Rob... grrr, the Earl of Huntingdon for not having a woman to come back to. Conveniently, our hero sees Prince John and Sir Guy start aggressively hitting on Marian and Huntingdon makes the save. The guy who was afraid of women is now smitten.
Soon Richard is off to war with Huntingdon and Sir Guy in tow, leaving Prince John to run the kingdom. Little does the king know that his brother has plotted with Sir Guy to kill the king and make John the ruler permanently. Prince John is not waiting for that however. He's taxing everything he sees and grinding his foes beneath his boot heels.
Marian gets a message to Robin...DAMMIT, the Earl of Huntingdon about the situation in England. Huntingdon comes up with an excuse to return to his homeland to mount an opposition against the prince. Soon, word spreads of a robber knight named Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest and common men flock to his side to take on the army of Prince John. Will Richard be able to satisfy his brother's assassination attempt? And if he does, can Robin Hood hold out long enough to give the king a country to rule?
Okay, first, an acknowledgment. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is one of my favorite movies. Ever. It's movie perfection for me. The performances, action... it's just perfect.
So, I come into any retelling with a bias. That said, half of Robin Hood is a fantastic telling of the tale, complete with lavish sets and large action set pieces. The other half? Dull and nonsensical. And unfortunately, those two halves collide to give you a bit of a mess.
The opening scene with the joust should be thrilling, but it's just boring. It serves to introduce the main players. but it is just monotonous to watch. We also are shown that our hero Huntingdon is terrified of women. He is literally running from them after winning the joust. I get the comedy they are trying to go for here, but it really undercuts my view of the hero when he's behaving like a child.
The movie then crawls into the party and the political intrigue of what is happening in England and with Richard's war party. Unless you get really excited about people writing letters, this is slow. This is the first hour of the movie.
The movie picks up when Huntingdon leaves Richard to wage a campaign against Prince John. Huntingdon becomes Robin Hood and the movie starts humming. There are some good battles with the army leading up to the climactic battle between Huntingdon and Sir Guy. The end of the fight is actually pretty brutal considering the time period but I thought it fit well.
There are a lot of inconsistencies that bugged me. Huntingdon goes from battle-hardened warrior to prancing around in tights as Robin Hood. It's hard to reconcile his transformation into Peter Pan (complete with that legs apart-hands on hips pose). The Merry Men get no exposition. We are introduced to familiar names like Will Scarlett and Friar Tuck with no sense of who they are or how they got there. Little John fares slightly better only because in this version, he spends the first hour as Huntingdon's squire.
Robin Hood also wants to pretend it's a mystery who Robin Hood is, and then who the mysterious new Merry Man in armor is. The former is very obviously Huntingdon and the latter is obvious, but I will not spoil it.
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| Amazing sets |
Fairbanks is... Fairbanks. He's a physically agile hero with a bit of a comedic streak who (of course) gets the girl. He's fine in this role, though I still prefer his Zorro. The rest of the cast is good. However, Wallace Beery as Richard is... different. You expect the king character to be serious. Beery is as much the prankster as Fairbanks in his role. It works for the most part, but his jovial take on the character also undercuts the gravity of the movie's endgame.
The film ultimately takes too long to get to Robin Hood's story and that would be okay if it had something interesting to say. Sadly, it doesn't. What's left is half a good film and half a meh film.
*** out of *****
Photo from The Bioscope and Gone Movie
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