THE BANDIT OF SHERWOOD FOREST
1946
Directed by Henry Levin and George Sherman
Written by Wilfred H. Pettitt and Melvin Levy
THE SON OF ROBIN HOOD
1958
Directed by George Sherman
Written by George S. Slavin and George W. George (no, really)
So when one sets their mind to a retrospective of Robin Hood on film, one would likely start with Douglas Fairbanks's 1922 Robin Hood (unless one has already reviewed that film), and would move next to 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, but one would not be very likely to try to chase down every last bloody piece of Sherwood-related ephemera to feature the hero, because there is an enormous amount of it, and the thing about The Adventures of Robin Hood is that it was influential a little like Jaws or Star Wars were influential. It kicked off a knock-off cycle that of course included things "like" The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I obviously hold to be a good thing, and besides, for instance, tapping Fairbanks's other rural class warrior for Tyrone Power's exceedingly likeable remake of The Mark of Zorro, those "knock-offs of The Adventures of Robin Hood" would also include a substantial chunk of Errol Flynn's subsequent career. (I have a self-amusing suspicion, too, that Basil Rathbone's second Sherlock Holmes film might well have been called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to capture some kind of resonance with the Robin Hood.) But because Robin Hood is a folkloric character who belongs to the whole world, there was little incentive to not make knock-offs about Robin Hood himself, and little incentive for those to be anything besides cranked-out remakes of the popular film. The fad took a little while to get started, presumably to let people's memories of the good movie turn into nostalgia and, probably, also to let its awesome details soften in their minds (evidently nobody touched Robin again till 1946), but it lasted for so many years thereafter that there's a 1969 softcore porno called, well, The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood; and, the thing is, basically none of these movies "matter" in the film historical sense, and going by my sampling of the nearly dozen Robin Hood movies made in America and Britain during this period, they're all of them dull shadows of the masterpiece and bad on absolute terms. Maybe the Hammer ones are good, but I have my doubts; it's entirely possible The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood is the best of them because at least, perhaps, you could jack off to it, though I also said "softcore" so probably all it would do is send you off to watch real porn anyway.
So I don't think I could be blamed if I skipped to the next significant screen adaptation of Robin Hood, but then I reviewed that one already too (contra some animation buffs, I think it's great), and moving on to the next—if 1976's Robin and Marian is "significant" in the sense I described, anyway*—would have placed a yawning gap of damn near forty years in our study of the legend on screen, which would have troubled me in some inarticulable way. Accordingly, I had a mind that we'd at least look glancingly (ha ha, it won't be "glancing," I'm far too long-winded) at something from that period, which presented a challenge because, as I said, they tend to merge into an undifferentiated mass of cheap programmers, and I wasn't going to watch them all. We could have selected, then, 1952's The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, for that is probably the one with the most significance of the lot, simply thanks to being an early effort by Walt Disney at pure live-action filmmaking (the second Disney all-live-action film, in fact, after Treasure Island); except The Story of Robin Hood offers a man little to say about it besides "boy, The Adventures sure was more fun," and expresses no reason to even exist besides Walt's nominal goal of slightly "historicizing" Robin (which amounts to nothing much besides rationalizing the Huntingdon/Locksley confusion) along with what I intuit to be Walt's (well, maybe Roy's) actual goal, which was to convert Disney's British earnings, still trapped behind post-war currency restrictions, into a reproducible object that could earn the American dollars that that company has always favored. It filmed in the "real Sherwood," of 1951 or 1952, which in practical terms means it filmed in a well-kept park like all the rest of them do.
So instead I gravitated towards something that might be less tedious to watch—not to say to write or read about—a pair of films that at least did something distinctive, actually making sequels to the Robin Hood story, which isn't really something you usually think of as feasible without wholesale invention, because until the early modern period "Robin" was a corpus of vignettes that aren't even in continuity with one another (or even have a much firmer chronology than "the Middle Ages" attached to them in the first place), and after the early modern period the usual approach was to mix the ballads together with new suturing until you had a more-or-less functional narrative about Robin and company beating up some combination of Nottingham, Gisbourne, and/or Prince John. There is at least one ballad you can call "a sequel" to Robin's adventures, but they... probably weren't going to do that one. At least in this era.
This being the case, "wholesale invention" it was, and they are not even sequels in the usual sense, but very early examples of the legacy sequel; and hence both our subjects today offer something hypothetically quite fresh to the Robin Hood legendarium, by virtue (or whatever) of filling in what I think you could reasonably perceive as an exceedingly curious hole in the Robin Hood stories, which often enough give him a chick (not always Marian) but which never did give him offspring. And thus, the very first—as far as I can tell—Robin Hood to follow on from The Adventures concerns one such offspring. This is the diffidently and indeed rather uncreatively titled The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, centered upon the new adventures of the son of Robin Hood, who is himself named, also rather uncreatively, "Robert" (Cornel Wilde).
And boy would this like you to think of it as a sequel to The Adventures, despite having nothing to do with that film, industrially, and hailing from Columbia rather than Warners; to this end it actively rips off substantial elements of The Adventures, most outrageously with a Friar Tuck played by Edgar Buchanan in the kind of impersonation of Eugene Pallette you'd get if you held someone's family hostage, though it's present all over, from a montage of resistance to tyranny that comes at a similar time to the montage of resistance to tyranny in The Adventures and is by-and-large copying it, badly, or ending the movie with a sword duel that concludes on a flight of stairs and has, previously, cast some ridiculously large and Curtizian shadows upon the far wall. Now, writing a sequel to The Adventures would, you'd think, be automatic enough: in reality the villain of The Adventures, John Plantagenet, was not badly punished by his brother the king, Richard, for after all they were basically cut from the same kin-betraying cloth (not that you would ever learn this from Robin Hood movies, but they had previously teamed up to try to overthrow their own father), and upon Richard's childless death, John succeeded to the throne of England and other territories; John was a famously bad king whose rule actually is best known for the English nobility rising in revolt against him. In terms of a Robin Hood story, then, you'd think what would have happened is that starting on the very first day of his reign, John would have pursued vengeance against his greatest adversary, perhaps chasing Richard's champion straight back into the deepest gullies of Sherwood Forest where he may have waited (and mated) till the time was ripe to reemerge.
Well, apparently screenwriters Wilfred H. Pettitt and Melvin Levy, or somebody, felt completely differently, and what should be an exceedingly natural sequel concept becomes a mild distraction the entire time. Whatever it is, it's awfully clumsy; John is never even mentioned. So what does happen in The Bandit is that William, 1st Earl of Pembroke (Henry Daniell) has been made regent to "the young king," never explicitly called "Henry III" though "Pembroke" would necessarily and unmistakably make this child the son of and successor to John. This part is historical; what's not is that Pembroke is the leader of a secret conspiracy of barons to depose Henry and revoke the Magna Carta. So the exact opposite of reality (Pembroke was a leader in John's and Henry's forces against the English rebels and their French allies in the Barons' War and perhaps literally the crown's most trustworthy servant, which is why he was Henry's regent; meanwhile, the Barons' War happened because John and Henry were unwilling to comply with the Magna Carta, which Pembroke nonetheless magnanimously reasserted the legitimacy of following the Battle of Lincoln, at which the septuagenarian personally fought), which isn't really that important, though it means that we have the extraordinarily curious case of a Robin Hood movie where the fighters against autocracy are the bad guys and actually want autocracy for some reason, while the aging Robin—or rather the Earl of Huntingdon (Russell Hicks)—has apparently become in the intervening years John Plantagenet's biggest fan, which we can determine by the mutual respect and long friendship demonstrated in his relationship with John's wife, Isabella (Jill Esmond, though her character's name is also never spoken), with whom Robin the Shitlib undertakes a counter-conspiracy to Pembroke's apparently evil plans, smuggling the Queen Mother out of the castle with her best lady-in-waiting Catherine (Anita Louise). But then, Pembroke must be evil: just listen to Daniell's high, thin, brittle villain voice, which, to give the movie credit when it's earned it, marks his performance as by a considerable margin the movie's most effective one. Also later he hatches a scheme to Bran Stark Henry from the tower, so yes, evil.
It is on their incognito journey to Sherwood to join Robin that Isabella and Catherine meet Robert, who at present is just involved in anti-Pembroke activity but is not, evidently, aware of his father's strategies; in any case, he doesn't believe but seems indifferent to the idea that the noblewomen are scullery maids, and his primary impulse is to sexually harass Catherine whilst saving her and her queen from Pembroke's goons. And our hero is certainly starting off on the wrong foot; I suppose it's one way to differentiate the son of Robin Hood, by obviating one of the most ancient aspects of the Robin Hood myth, his chivalrous defense of women's virtue and innocence, and replacing that with rapey creepiness, and I'll state outright I don't think "differentiation" was even something that occurred to Pettitt or Levy. It was, to them, just an automatic expression of brash heroism. It even makes you appreciate The Adventures more, because even if Flynn could scrape against the side of annoying with his arrogant bombast, his Robin was more restrained than he probably needed to be*, when adventure in the 30s and 40s (and indeed beyond) could frequently veer into territory best thought of as "horny fantasies of sexual license." But what the movie would surely like us to consider "a stolen kiss" (though it's frankly excessive in its importunity, even by 40s standards, not least because he has known her all of thirty seconds) is truly soured later on, when he's apprised to Catherine's identity and now he apologizes, because now he knows she wasn't some filthy peasant he could inconsequentially assault, and that starts poking at the diminished myth that The Bandit wants to claim the power over, with a Robin Hood story that is concerned exclusively with the political infighting of an Anglo-Norman elite of which Robin and Robert are, indeed, integral parts.
Well, the upshot to the scheming and counter-scheming is re-infiltrating Pembroke's fortress to save Henry, which is a quick trip because London is a single castle sitting next to Sherwood Forest, eventually leading to Robert and Catherine's capture and the first time the movie feints towards any kind of sustained entertainment value. Before the last twenty minutes, and honestly at some points even during the last twenty minutes, this is a boring movie—and I am aware of the possibility that watching what amounts to the same thing, even if it's technically a different thing, over and over could be biasing me against it—but it was so boring in its abiding mode that I don't think that's what it was. One thing counting in its favor is that at least this Adventures knock-off was manufactured by a genuine movie studio, so that even if Columbia was a minor major in the scheme of things, that still means that some fraction of The Adventures' physical production is at play here, albeit not so much physical production that our son of Robin Hood, while leering at Catherine undressing in a stream in preface to their rude introductions to one another, isn't doing so in an obviously Californian park and from behind what is plainly a single prop bush that does not even extend from one side of an Academy frame to another, nor so much physical production that this is anything you would ever consider "action-packed" even if it is technically an "action movie." They do have a horse budget. Most importantly, and in this respect it does follow The Adventures, they have Technicolor, and although the degraded presentation that often inheres to watching an obscure movie from 1946 make it a little hard to be sure, this thing's team of three cinematographers seem to be using it fairly well; in fact, it's the DPs probably doing the most good work to differentiate this from The Adventures, thanks to a surprising amount of inky black nighttimes and dark castles in this one, lit by firelight and studio moonlight. Costume designer Jean Louis is likewise taking advantage, and if it's not to the "full advantage," if that term must perforce be defined by The Adventures of Robin Hood and the eternal glory of Milo Anderson's costume design—and it isn't, they're much less imaginative—they're still poppy in the noblewomen's solid, unnatural colors and he delivers at least one very neat ice-white ensemble for our Gisbourney Pembroke.
On the other hand, one or both of the film's two directors Henry Levin and George Sherman (see, even the production details are copying The Adventures) and editor Richard Fantl are forgetting entire participants they've just highlighted in the (infrequent) action scenes, and while everybody else can at least inhabit a stagey period piece, Wilde never feels like anything but a guy with a bad mustache in a Robin Hood Halloween costume standing in the woods, and, I shit you not, Will Scarlet (John Abbott) wears no red whatsoever, which actually wound up with me confusing him with Robin for a long stretch of movie, probably because I was a little disengaged though the Merry Men are an especially interchangeable bunch of cogs this time, as evidenced by how I just unintentionally lied to you, because it was Alan-a-Dale (Leslie Denison) that I confused with Robin; or was it Little John (Ray Teal)? No, definitely Alan-a-Dale; he plays a song to distract some guards. (Bizarrely, this movie's best parts barring its finale are all just interstitial bits with featured extra fucking guards; the only time it's thrilling involves a guard tricking another guard to help Isabella and Catherine's escape, and this and the rest are practically the only times it's funny.) It manages a halfway-cool thing every ten minutes or so, I suppose, notably how Catherine cleverly helps Robert undermine Pembroke's plan to make Robert's invocation of a trial by combat moot by starving Robert for three days in a prison cell (which is some pretty cool "fiendish villainy" in and of itself); and the finale is perfectly fine swashbuckling, even giving Robert his first good quip in the entire film when he suggests that Pembroke's subpar combat performance is the result of him being "overfed." But it's got no momentum, certainly nothing to overcome the tiresome and slow parts which were going to predominate anyway. It's also the better of these two movies.
For twelve years later, in what I suspect isn't a coincidence, because he produced the film for his own independent company, George Sherman directed 1958's The Son of Robin Hood; and the basic set-up is pretty exactly the same as The Bandit except screenwriters George S. Slavin and George W. George (really, and Jesus H. George) are making a slight effort to render the historical context less blatantly identifiable, including cutting bait on Robin Hood being anybody but a guy named "Robert Hode" as well as a big bad in the form of the fictional "Des Roches" (David Farrar), which everyone always pronounce as a single word, "DAROSH," like he's more interested in bringing the Athenians to heel, and this is all to the best because they have Robin Hood's kid growing up in, uh, "Spain." Incidentally, if you're asking "do either of these movies ever identify the mother of Robin Hood's child?", then the answer is "no," because I guess you gotta keep the flame of hope alive for all of those Robin x Clorinda shippers, because those people definitely exist. But premise-wise it's mostly just the same "young king" threatened with usurpation, all that. So is there any twist here? Yes, for Robin Hood's son is Robin Hood's daughter, Deering Hood (June Laverick), a name that strikes my ears as so odd that I initially wondered if it really did come from some tradition, so points there, too. (It certainly beats "Roberta.") You will guess, and you'll be right, that this was the "matinee programmer era of Robin Hood" entry that genuinely piqued my interest.
Turns out it isn't very interesting at all, and it also turns out that this movie from 1958 about Robin Hood's daughter isn't that woke***, though I guess it was sort of stupid of me to even momentarily contemplate it might be, and while it's not as bad as it could be on that front even in '58 it could be better. And so it occurs that, instead of Deering, protagonistic duties largely fall almost entirely on the charmless and uninteresting shoulders of Jamie (David Hedison), who is mistaken for the dead Robin Hood's son by medieval CBP upon his arrival in England, prompting Deering to try to save him whereupon Deering gets knocked out and he saves her, because girl. Little John (George Woodbridge), who alone knows of Deering's gender, brokers a deal between the two: Jamie shall work as a cut-out for Deering to run the Merry Men, under her given and family names, as "the son of Robin Hood" because they won't accept a girl leader (I don't know why Robin Hood's male offspring would necessarily be their leader anyway), I think this could have been fascinating, dealing with the dynamics of group leadership (and the inevitable romance) and Robin's heir chafing at the dynamics within a predominantly male group, which we get a little bit of, though not very much because Deering is (not hugely persuasively) also presenting herself to the Merry Men in male "young lad" drag, so this amounts to one fraternal butt slap and I don't really understand why she does this, because as noted above the furthest thing from the minds of Merry Men should be the sexual advantage I presume she's protecting herself from. Even though Little John would, you know, kill them; she might kill them, because she's at least an expert archer if evidently rather thin-skulled for a Locksley and/or Huntingdon.
But no, it's almost none of this: instead, it's mostly a matter of the former pretending to be the latter's wife during a film-long subterfuge in Des Roches's castle in order to nip the current crisis in the bud. And Deering could still be a major factor, having infiltrated the upper echelons of Norman society and using the invisibility of her gender to get a great deal done in the shadows. But no: Deering's role in the subterfuge itself mostly involves being jealous that Jamie is fucking some other nobleman's wife (Delphi Lawrence) as part of their subterfuge, whilst she sulks in a prom dress rather than what she was doing earlier, which was sulking in Movie Robin Hood tights. (Weirdly, some of the Norman noblewomen wear simulacra of 13th century attire, but it's very intermittent.) And I would swear on a Bible that when Deering returns to the Merry Men who have been lied to this entire time, the fact of her and Jamie's deception never comes up and the screenplay acts like they have been following Robin Hood's daughter this entire time. Meanwhile, it's hard to really evaluate The Son of Robin Hood as cinema, as its only accessibility these days is as a CinemaScope film butchered for television or VHS, but it has a sometimes-fun, mostly-uninspiring "we're playing dress-up in the park" quality to all its outdoor scenes, and doesn't look like it's a very impressive production in any respect, which I guess I wouldn't expect it to be from Sherman in 1958.
It does make up more ground than I ever expected in its finale, which has a kind of genuinely awesome brawl between Jamie and Des Roches, involving like five different weapons including a halberd, and even including our son(-in-law) of Robin Hood getting bludgeoned by a chair. There's a big courtyard dust-up intercut with this, and Deering is finally getting to, like, do stuff—I don't know if bringing the Merry Men to the fight counts as "stuff" but it's more stuff than previously—and if it's still not stuff beyond "being an expert archer, incompetent in all other respects," "being an expert archer" is a skillset that tends to bring results in a Robin Hood movie, even if Laverick is not a super-convincing action heroine in any other regard. It's the finale of a better movie, which is definitely not Son of Robin Hood, which takes a pretty terrific premise and does nothing with it that it couldn't have done with the actual XY offspring of Robin Hood (and it would've still been pretty uneventful with the actual XY offspring of Robin Hood if it did, and initially threatens to recapitulate what Sherman did already with the actual XY offspring of Robin Hood, but Jamie is at least more of a gentleman), and it's also pretty ugly and cheap, and, today, kind of hard to look at, in the bargain.
Score, The Bandit of Sherwood Forest: 5/10
Score, The Son of Robin Hood: 5/10
*'Tis significant in our hearts, at least.
**And insofar as we're talking about Errol Flynn, we may well hold that to be an irony.
***I have seen, in the wild, more than one person complain about being tricked by the title to this movie, and oh my God, can you incel weirdos turn it off long enough to watch a movie you clearly did not come across by accident?
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