Review of Robin and Marian (1976) by Harry E — 14 Jan 2010

This movie ponders some pretty deep questions about what heroism really is and the price of being a legend. Here, Robin Hood is aging, past his prime, and wrestling with the need to live up to his myth. There's great poignancy to this film; it recognizes that violence is not to be taken lightly, that lives are actually at stake. This isn't all rollicking fun, since people are getting killed, and it doesn't really seem like there's much of a cause behind all the fighting; Robin and the Sheriff resume their fighting seemingly more out of habit than anything else. When the people join Robin's band, they do so because they want to be part of the legend - they expect the fun and excitement we associate with the storybook Robin Hood (and the most popular previous film versions) and aren't prepared for the very real risk of being killed. The final duel between Robin and the Sheriff is great: two tired men heaving blows at each other with all the might they have left. Battered, broken, and bleeding, they push on in a fight to the death. The reason for their feud, if there was one, doesn't matter; by now it's become fighting for its own sake, and it's soberingly effective. The downside to the film is that it's uneven. Richard Lester is too deeply rooted in fun and physical humor to abandon those things, so there are comedic fights in here too, and they don't really mesh with the seriousness - though he still laces them with a hints of brutality: the good guys don't just knock the bad guys over as in sight gags; Robin clearly dispatches one by slitting his throat. Lester did a better job integrating the funny with the serious in How I Won the War, in which the absurdity of war was exactly the point to highlight the tragedy. Also, the character of Robin Hood isn't fully cohesive: early in the film he seems to want to just stop fighting, weary of 20 years of bloodshed in the Crusades, but later on he's addicted to the warrior lifestyle and becomes the attacker. His development from the one to the other isn't adequately fleshed out. Overall, though, largely due to the magnificent chemistry between Connery and Hepburn, the film mostly succeeds as a wryly affecting elegy for popular myth and the people behind it.

Random observations: I'm not a scholar on this, but I think that depiction of the Middle Ages in film changed a great deal after Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Since Richard Lester's crowd in large part paved the way for Python, I think it's fitting for me to make these observations while looking at this film, which he directed the year after Python's Grail film was made. The Python film gave Medieval outfits an irreversible sense of silliness; in Robin and Marian as well, you can't help but notice that those cylindrical helmets are awfully clunky-looking (in the opening scene, as two knights bend down facing each other to pick up a large rock, their helmets bump against each other - a wonderfully Pythonesque image), and that one guy's armor looks awfully like chicken feathers, which I'm sure Lester noticed, as it's very much in keeping with his style of accentuating - mildly, but just enough - the absurd little details in his scenes. (Perhaps the multiple close-ups of the heads of fowl in the film are meant to complement the featherlike armor.) This strikes me as a particularly Lesterlike way of making a point that the popular myths are a tad too rose-colored; real life just couldn't have been quite as smooth and dashing as those stories make it seem. (My other favorite touch was the prominence of Connery's balding head in his love scenes with Hepburn.) It seems to me that the alternative to embracing the silliness in depicting Medieval combat is to go the Ridley Scott route and be all-out brutal and hardcore. Since he and Russell Crowe are just now revamping Robin Hood, I think it may be apt to bring up a comparison.