How Hollywood keeps reinventing Robin Hood

Is Hugh Jackman’s guilt-laden Robin a betrayal of the legend, or just the evolution of a myth?

Since the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks silent version got the ball rolling, Robin Hood has been a cinematic staple. Most renderings have hewn to some flavour of the heroic model, but not so with the latest outing. The Death of Robin Hood is apparently a different beast altogether.

Full disclosure: Because its theatrical release was so limited, I haven’t yet had an opportunity to see the film (that’ll have to wait for streaming availability). So what’s observed here comes from critical reviews and material published by the distributors.

Shot in Northern Ireland and premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in June, the movie is set in the year 1247 and features an elderly Robin facing his final days burdened by guilt for his earlier criminal activities. By all accounts, “robbing the rich to give to the poor” wasn’t his modus operandi. Or, to quote the promotional material, “He was no hero.”

If you’re wondering whether this is contrary to the “true” Robin Hood, bear in mind that there’s no conclusive historical record of any such person. A Gest of Robyn Hode—circa 1450—is perhaps the oldest documented rendering, but variations of the legend were apparently in oral circulation for a couple of centuries prior to that.

Were they descriptions of a real historical character, a composite of several real characters, or a completely fictional creation? To tell the truth, we don’t know.

Academic medievalist Lesley Coote has noted that similar tales were popular in other parts of Europe, also observing that the bawdy Robin of the early ballads doesn’t quite fit with the sanitized version so familiar to 20th-century audiences. And this latest rendering eschews heroism entirely in favour of a walk on the dark side.

Over recent decades, cinematic expressions of the genre have been very much a mixed bag.

Director Ridley Scott’s 2010 epic had a big budget and high-powered cast—Russell Crowe as Robin and Cate Blanchett as a maturely sexy Lady Marian. It was also beautifully photographed with lots of spectacular action. In other words, all the ingredients for an amiably diverting summer movie.

However, it was gratuitously marred by the insertion of a historically inaccurate chronology and narrative concerning Richard the Lionheart’s return from the Holy Land, thus deliberately getting the only genuine historical bit wrong. Why did Scott do this? I imagine it was to facilitate reprising the anti-crusader riff from his earlier Kingdom of Heaven.

The 1991 rendering starring Kevin Costner—Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves—was successful commercially but less so artistically. In retrospect, it really only had two things going for it. One was Alan Rickman’s delightfully over-the-top portrayal of the evil Sheriff of Nottingham; the scene where he declares his intention to “cancel Christmas” is a joy. And the other positive was the theme song—Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It for You.

But if you’ve a yen for the classic heroic tale, the generally accepted gold standard is still the Errol Flynn version from 1938. Although originally conceived as a black-and-white production, it was ultimately shot in glorious Technicolor, an extravagant undertaking for Warner Bros. at the time.

Not yet ravaged by the alcoholism and self-neglect that ultimately proved his undoing, Flynn was at his flamboyantly athletic best; Olivia de Havilland was a convincing Lady Marian; Basil Rathbone did the business as the dastardly Guy of Gisbourne; and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s dramatic score won an Academy Award.

It’s also a movie that often shows up on TV. So what’s not to like?

That said, I must confess to a personal soft spot for The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, the 1952 action-adventure version shot in England. With British post-war currency controls curtailing Hollywood’s ability to repatriate revenues earned in Britain, some studios—Disney included—opted to put the stranded funds to use by making films there. Disney’s first such effort was the highly successful Treasure Island (1950) and Robin Hood was the second.

Using authentic locations—Sherwood Forest being one—and drawing on a wide selection of talented British actors, what emerged was a lively, colourful romp that constituted my first cinematic exposure to the legend. For the imagination of an eight-year-old, the Dublin-born actor and D-Day veteran Richard Todd was everything a Robin should be. And first impressions never quite disappear.

Back now to where we came in, The Death of Robin Hood.

More than one reviewer has drawn comparisons to films about aging protagonists dealing with their violent pasts, examples being Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and John Wayne’s The Shootist. In the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith describes Hugh Jackman’s Robin portrayal as that of a “rageful murder machine” who becomes “a study in repentance who finds a certain peace and salvation with the aid of Christian benevolence.”

As for me, I’ll be interested in how it stacks up against the bittersweet Robin and Marian (1976), in which a tired, middle-aged Robin (Sean Connery) returns to England after a 20-year absence and finds Lady Marian (Audrey Hepburn) has become an abbess.

That was certainly a movie worth seeing!

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical—well, perhaps just a little bit.