Sherwood Week: He's not the Marian kind

ROBIN AND MARIAN

1976

Directed by Richard Lester

Written by James Goldman

Spoilers: moderate shifting pretty immediately into severe, and I guess you could feel deceived that I said it was ever "moderate"

The ending of Robin and Marian is not, in broad strokes, a surprise, or at least it would not be if you knew the title its screenwriter William Goldman, its director Richard Lester, and even its executive producer Ray Stark had intended it to have been released under, The Death of Robin Hood, before Columbia Pictures, its distributor, decided that this was one awful glum way to market a romantic action-adventure movie about Robin Hood.  I did know, however, and knew that to the extent it's based on anything that its primary source was a particular ballad, lesser-adapted for obvious reasons despite being as old as any Robin Hood tale to have survived to our present day; but I had forgotten some pretty important plot information from that ballad, yet exactly the right plot information, so that there could not have been any more optimal way for me to have watched Robin and Marian, a movie that strikes like an iron when one realizes, three minutes before its credits roll, what it's been doing out in the open all along.  So now you know Robin Hood dies in the movie, but unless you've read "Robin Hood's Death," not how.  Go forth, and experience it as I did.

If you've decided to proceed, I am going to get into how, for it's really quite extraordinary.  But, to begin, we should situate this Robin Hood in its context, as the very first live-action film adaptation of the legends to arrive after the post-Adventures of Robin Hood era had finally ended.  It had been a cycle of cheap and ignominious programmers (the last live-action Robin Hood before this one was Wolfshead: The Legend of Robin Hood, a 56-minute supporting feature for a Hammer musical—who knew such a thing existed?—originally produced as a TV pilot), and it had petered out the minute it started, only saved from being nothing besides ephemera by Disney's 1973 animated Robin Hood, a movie plainly in The Adventures' line of descent even if I persist in finding it radically interesting and distinctive, despite being intended for babies.  If Disney's Robin Hood, being for babies, must therefore be precluded from being a Robin Hood for its decade, then that's the void which Robin and Marian filled in 1976, for it is very much a Robin Hood of the New Hollywood, pretty radically interesting and distinctive in its own right, and far more obvious about that, since what makes it interesting and distinctive is being so serious and adult.  Consider how adult: unless I'm forgetting something, it's only about twelve frames' worth of gore that would demand it, but I think that today this Robin Hood could actually get an R-rating ("PG" could cover one enormous spectrum back then), and I don't even know how viscerally I could object, because even if the content here wouldn't really justify it, I'd still feel like an R-rating would correctly tell you how this Robin Hood should be approached.  And if you'd like to quibble that this British-directed, British-cast film wouldn't be of any Hollywood, new or otherwise, well, its money was American and so was its writer.  It's undeniably of the 70s, anyhow.

That writer is most famous as a playwright, or at least most famous for adapting his own play, the scabrous Plantagenet political-thriller-and-family-shock-comedy The Lion In Winter*, to Oscarworthy success in 1968.  Eight years later, and we have something we can't quite call Goldman's "spiritual sequel," because Robin and Marian isn't that much akin to what we could term that film's William Shakespeare-meets-Oscar Wilde portrayal of psychopathic Angevin infighting, but it's practically a literal sequel, still distrustful of the "great" men (sometimes women) of history and continuing, in some cases, to hate the exact same ones.  (It also has the same great man's musical accompaniment, though John Barry's heavy, medieval score for Lion In Winter has more to recommend it, while his score for Robin and Marian, though not devoid of lovelier passages, largely only aspires to be generically-appropriate, and sometimes missing that mark, because this isn't always a generically-appropriate Robin Hood.)  For his part, Lester had found a curious groove with the neo-swashbucklers of the mid-70s, in which he'd discovered a manner of shooting and cutting action, even highly-exciting action, with an increasingly spare and laconic style that was (sort of) good for his movies' dopey adventure-comedy, but even better for dourer realism.  So while it's potentially complicated by the existence of 1975's Royal Flash in between, what had started for Lester in 1973 as an excuse to goof entirely the fuck around with the Salkinds' The Three Musketeers had somehow become, during The Four Musketeers (albeit on the same infamous shoot, the first film being split to make its own sequel), a much severer, more intense kind of period piece.  Not to spoil The Four Musketeers too, but there's a very minimal gradient between the cold-blooded, frankly horrific ending of The Four Musketeers and the beginning of Robin and Marian, and to the extent a gradient does exist it's because one of the first shots of Robin and Marian is of two soldiers in those medieval pot helmets bonking their heads together, though it's in the same vein of the Musketeers movies where Lester was no longer hugely interested in stressing his comedy even if the comic impulse remained, and this time it's even more intentional-seeming, pitched more as downbeat absurdism.

The very first shots, meanwhile, are of rotting fruit on a windowsill (an image echoed at the end, because it's a metaphor for Robin and for Marian and the lives they did not have together, and while it's certainly there to be gotten, my initial impulse was it's too precious), plus one of a vulture, and then those soldiers digging in the sand for a rock to load their catapult with.  (The catapult will anticlimactically misfire, dribbling out its payload; also "a joke," in a grimly-hypothetical sense.)  We'll soon get to a wider angle and dialogue will tell us we're in France, because while surely there must be some part of a country of 210,000 square miles that looks like this, it does not read as "France," and even if it's simply what old buildings might look like when you're shooting in Spain,** Lester must have at least felt okay with our immediate associations taking us further east; but here we are with a troop under the command of Robin Hood (Sean Connery) and Little John (Nicol Williamson), still serving their erstwhile crusader king Richard (Richard Harris), though it's a decade later, during his final campaign, specifically the ugly "siege" of a defenseless Chalus-Chabrol, which is some remarkably historicized stuff for a Robin Hood.

And, as is apparently our wont with Robin's movies, let's awkwardly pause to wonder at that, because Robin and Marian is, unless something surprises me, by far the Robin Hood most engaged with actual history, which is neat, and nevertheless what wonks it up, even a little surprisingly this time, though "historicizing Robin" will pretty much always wonk it up.  At any rate, the author of Lion In Winter is as insistent as anybody on the tradition of a "Kings' Crusade and aftermath" timeframe, except the backstory here is not, for some reason, "basically The Adventures of Robin Hood, the movie you've seen on TV," but, oddly (even confusingly), it instead backdates the outlaw exploits that have made this Robin a Nottinghamshire hero, as well as a close associate of the Quor de Lion, to before Richard's crusade, by the movie's account fighting against Henry II, even Richard himself.  Yet he also ultimately joined Richard, came back to Europe but never back to England, and apparently missed out on any enmity whatsoever with Richard's brother John (Ian Holm), who doesn't seem to know who Robin is and becomes one of the movie's villains solely by default, since he's only even really in it long enough for Goldman to take a swipe at John's pedophilic marriage to Isabella Taillefer (Victoria Abril, who is indeed worrisomely young but clearly not the dialogue-supplied age of twelve, so whiffing on the immediacy of the imagery there too, in probably the only instance of the filmmakers not being on the same page, Goldman writing sex horror and Lester deciding he'd rather film sex comedy).  At least it's not another baffled, baffling pro-John reimagination of the Barons' War, the previous era's go-to for movies about an aging or dead Robin, but it still seems like an unnecessarily-addled reshuffling, and perhaps not itself the wisest course for a movie that's essentially still making the same demands as a legacy sequel.

Well, Richard orders everyone in the castle slaughtered, even though they're noncombatants (and between this and Lion In Winter, perhaps no one in film history has ever been more determined to dismantle Richard's popularity than Goldman); Robin angrily refuses, and Little John follows his leader, getting both of them thrown in gaol.  Except Richard has met his match with these civilians, catching a random arrow (thrown, by hand, back in the Englishmen's direction) in the neck.  Dying, Richard lets Robin and John go, and the pair head back to Sherwood to be homeless in their home.  (Incidentally, Spain or not, and I'm sure Spain has trees just like I'm sure France has sandy pits, this is probably the first Robin Hood ever where the woods look like woods.)  They reunite with Will Scarlet (Denholm Elliot) and Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker), who have become simple poachers, and reminisce, with Robin's reminiscences turning towards his old flame, Marian (Audrey Hepburn), whom he abandoned so many years ago for "adventures" of a less satisfactory nature than he'd expected.  He finds Marian at Kirklees Priory, where she is, in fact, its prioress, and having long ago killed her infatuation with Robin she's not happy to see him now.  Yet Robin has also arrived the day that Marian is to surrender herself, martyrlike, to the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw), as a result of her taking the pope's side against King John (the acceleration of this conflict being, arguably, the screenplay's most significant liberty).  Robin isn't having this, so while Nottingham—long of Robin's acquaintance—is unprepared, at present, to make any attempt to stop him, Robin still finds it expedient to kick the sheriff's less-experienced and highly-theoretical boss Sir Ranulf (Kenneth Haigh) in the nuts and render Marian off to "freedom" over her objections, where she shall discover that maybe she hasn't killed her love for the rogue after all.

There's obviously some echo here of The Lion In Winter's Henry and Catherine, then, though since at no point had these lovers attempted to actually kill one other, their relationship, as much a creature of wounded nostalgia as it remains, is on somewhat solider ground, and basically everyone who's ever seen the film since 1976 has it right: this movie must have a Robin and Marian you believe in, and fortunately what it has is Connery and Hepburn.  Not merely moving beyond The Adventures' shadow, I would've liked to have noted earlier that this movie's luminous cast also suggests that (notwithstanding the cartoon) it's the first Robin Hood with any real effort put into it since 1938.  Yet the film is not so indebted to star turns as opposed to, you know, acting (Harris's wasteland warlord is probably the sole figure getting more than he's giving in terms of an extrinsic screen persona, and he's shortly dead), Connery smack in the middle of his explicit "I'm not Bond, I am even the anti-Bond" era and Hepburn un-retiring after seven years spending time with her kids and, evidently, with much pent-up acting energy.  And it's not a problem per se, but for a movie where being old is everything, we may point out that Connery, 45—almost the exact same age Roger Moore was in Live and Let Die***—and Hepburn, potentially not even 47 yet, do not exactly have both feet in their graves already.  So what that emphasizes—because it really isn't a problem—is that it is vastly more a movie about middle age, about starting to get tired, and about realizing there are more days behind you, and that you have nearly as many regrets, with just enough time left to change, with Connery and Hepburn flawlessly finding Robin and Marian's rhythm of autumnal reconnection amidst the kind of humor that's bright, but dimmer than it would've been in their youths (they may reconsummate in a field, but Marian asks if their lean-to can have a floor this time; Marian asks why Robin didn't write, and Robin reminds Marian that he literally cannot), and made tenderer, painfully so, by the constant awareness that there's a twenty year hole in their lives where massacres and attempted suicides and spiteful marriages to Jesus went instead of love.

This happens in between what amounts to medievalist tactile social realism (sometimes trying too hard for it—there's a shot where I swear some peasant is literally just shoving mud around with their hands) and the highest adventure that this Robin is still up for (it's not funny-funny because Lester's comedy doesn't work that way here, but the funniest thing likely involves the jailbreak of several ancillary nuns and Robin and Little John climbing their way out of a trap like always, but very, very slowly); these other two functions combine, smartly enough, in Nottingham.  And Sir Ranulf is actually right, that one time, that Nottingham could have killed Robin and Little John if he'd had his crossbowmen ready, because he probably could have killed them by throwing buckets or rocks at them, or just yelling distractingly at them, while they sluggishly scaled that wall.  But regardless, Shaw's sheriff (he could be named "Roger") must be the soberest conception of Nottingham ever put to screen, exceedingly careful and perpetually self-amused, and approaching his archenmity strictly as his duty, while he and Robin almost seem to have come to like each other in the intervening years, or at least what each one of them has meant for the other—which is to say a purpose in life, and a legacy beyond it.  Such seems to power their compulsion to ultimately meet each other in single combat, respective champions of a renewed Sherwood insurgency and a royal task force, whereupon Lester brings us an unromantic but not unlegendary final confrontation, just plonking away at each other with swords until one of them falls down and, indeed, long after both of them have fallen down, several times, alternating between flatly-angled medium shots of two combatants in a field, getting at the unadorned grittiness, and very long shots, to remind us that what we're watching is (or will be) the culmination of a mythic cycle.  But it always leans more towards the former, telling us precisely how swashbuckler-peddling Lester and legend-doubting Goldman feel about this "heroic" violence.  Though it's also terribly exciting and cool.  Such is the movies.

And so to offer criticism that isn't just cranky nitpicking, the movie doesn't have enough action, in a very specific way.  Namely, it doesn't have enough action for its narrative, because without a third setpiece in the middle the movie can only muddle its way towards where it needs itself to be.  The story is called Robin and Marian, after all, and what it's after is whether, for Marian, Robin Hood can stop being Robin Hood, and, in fact, it's certain he could, but it doubts he'd want to, and it doesn't manage to fully support Robin's new optimism when what we have is Robin's successful-but-still-pretty-embarrassing swashbuckling on that wall, and little else that would whet an appetite for glory until he rides out to get it from Nottingham, a stratagem that is, itself, a tiny bit muddily-expressed before it happens, even though Robin's refusal to abandon his (awfully nebulous) cause has been the subject of every conversation between him and Marian, and even between him and everybody else, ever since Nottingham's army showed up; it's far clearer emotionally than it is logistically, which means it isn't any damning problem, but it's not by necessity.

What obviously helps clarify it is when this Death of Robin Hood wends its way back to "Robin Hood's Death," and we, or at least I, very suddenly remembered who the villain(ess) of "Robin Hood's Death" was, the prioress of Kirklees, who is—oh right—Marian.  This is bold stuff now, incredibly emotionally and morally thorny, and excitingly confusing even when it does more-or-less explicate itself, and the 70s must have been a real time, man, a decade when filmmakers could be absurdly vicious to their audiences and expect those audiences to lap up whatever depressing and upsetting shit they were given, for this is the romantic adventure Robin Hood where Marian inveigles Robin into murder-suicide, at least in part to punish Robin for being a bad boyfriend.  Except this astonishingly depressing and upsetting thing is perversely uplifting, too—exactly what Robin wanted, the chance to pass into legend directly, rather than to live ten thousand more days all worse than the single greatest day he'd ever had.  It's doing so much, this ending, tearing into the narcissism of heroism, wondering why legends matter but having to concede they do, deconstructing a myth with tangible disgust and simultaneously reconstructing the same myth with newfound awe, letting Robin live just long enough to shoot one last arrow in the air to find, by his own hand, what part of England would be his forever.

Score: 8/10

*You ever notice that there's never been a movie, maybe even a story, about Robin Hood in the winter?  You know, in England, in the "green" wood?  Funny when it occurs to you!

**Look at our anti-authoritarian movie, shooting in Franco's Spain.  Although it would be unfair to single this particular movie out for a startlingly common practice that had produced many ironies of this sort already.

***And, for that matter, six years younger than Sean Connery was in Never Say Never Again.