What makes 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood such a great movie? It’s surely something to do with the action: sword fights, swinging from vines and ropes, leaps from trees, the archery contest, all set in gorgeous color, the bright yellows and reds of the Norman costumes, and the greens and browns of the Sherwood gang, against bright blue skies and rolling hills of Chico, California, where much of it was shot. Then there’s the character of Robin himself, bold and daring, like when he barges in on Prince John’s feast and deposits the carcass of his illegally poached spoil on the table as a gift. Or righteous and kind, like when he gives Maid Marian a tour of his camp and explains how his unjustly fallen stature has led to his loyalty to his men. But there’s also no denying another key aspect of the enduring appeal of this film: the dazzling good looks of Errol Flynn.
I knew Flynn being good looking would be a tough sell to a seven and a five-year-old, but I thought I had a chance with the other aspects. We’d been rotating picks on Friday night movie nights, and I’d been doing what a lot of parents do, taking my picks as opportunities to show them movies that I loved as a kid, in this case a movie that was shown to me as a kid. I had no idea then that the film came out years before my father was born, just as my kids have no sense of the relative age of things. All I knew, all they know, is that it’s an old movie.
“We can tell it’s old because the credits are in the beginning,” the older boy once told me. True enough, but the credits are also in the beginning of Back to the Future and Grease, and although those movies would get their own day in our house, and maybe their own blog post, I wanted to go all the way back, the Golden Era, technicolor and sound, the height of the studio system, to try to build their knowledge from the ground up, I suppose the way I felt mine had been built. I wanted them to be like me, seven-year-olds walking around knowing who Basil Rathbone and Claude Raines were, because not only was that totally not weird, it was cool!
“Okay, dad, but just remember, we don’t live in the past. We live in the present,” the older one said, speaking as usual, for the both of them.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Okay, just give it a try, and if you don’t like it we’ll switch and watch something else.”
But when the older one balked at the hunting scene near the beginning of the movie, I didn’t stop it. “It’s just one scene,” I said. “It gets better.” But for him, it didn’t, and when the sheriff’s men give chase to Robin’s poachers, he went into the next room and remained there sulking for the rest of the movie. Why didn’t I turn it off? What kind of sadistic monster was I being? The answer was in the bug-eyed expression of pure wonder on the face of the younger boy. He was so enthralled by the early scenes of the film that he didn’t even notice that his brother had left the room. I weighed the cost, knowing full well that the older would never forget, and never let either of us forget, how we wouldn’t stop Robin Hood even though he hated it and it scared him. But the younger was loving it so much, and I was loving it so much, now on multiple levels, and their aunt who was with us was also loving it, that I let it roll. That and the fact that the movie is simply, objectively great.
The younger brought back the wonder of some of the scenes for me, as I watched him watching it, and as we would discuss the scenes in the coming days: the ambush from the treetops, when Robin’s men fall on the Sheriff’s gang and knock them off their horses; the escape from the castle after the gift at John’s feast, which features a wonderful gate-closing stunt where Robin flies up the wall on the gate rope; the duel over the water with Little John, terrific staff-fighting action, famously mimicked by Daffy Duck. (Looney Tunes and The Adventures of Robin Hood are both productions of Warner Brothers.)
But the scene that seemed to stand out the most was the archery contest. The appeal of this scene seems to lie not only in the closely contested sharpshooting contest, which is exciting in itself, but in the fact that Robin is in disguise, his identity known to the viewer, but not to Prince John or Maid Marian. There’s something magical in this for a kid, and I think it has something to do with being granted an entryway into what is normally a difficult and unappealing aspect of old films: the way all of the characters look alike, and talk alike, and the way it’s so hard for a kid to identify and differentiate characters in old films. This difficulty is often compounded by the plots, the way characters discuss events and other characters who aren’t on screen, and by the language itself, which is old, and hard to follow.
But when Robin removes his hat at the beginning of the sequence, and seems to almost give a knowing wink to the viewer, to follow his character through the sequence, and it’s Errol Flynn’s mischievous grin, we, the viewers, young and old, are invited in, to participate and revel in the magic of storytelling. That was the moment for the younger, Robin in disguise. Interestingly this conceit, Robin in disguise, although not for an archery contest, is present in the earliest Robin Hood ballads, first written in English in the 1400s, although clearly dating from poems and myths from the century following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The treetop ambush is also present in early versions, as are his key costume elements including his brown buckskin shoes and quiver of arrows.
But the Robin of the middle-English poems was no fallen noble, nor was he necessarily altruistic. They robbed from the rich, or anyone else wandering the woods, and didn’t necessarily give to the poor. Murder was also not a big hang up for the early version of the Merry Men. These are facts that I imagine the older boy learning at some point and throwing in my face as further evidence of the wrong I did him by showing him the film. He’ll also probably find out one day that Errol Flynn wasn’t such a terrific guy either, being tried and acquitted for statutory rape in 1943, despite openly admitting his fondness for teenage girls, along with being an severely depressed alcoholic and heroin addict, who died of a heart attack at age 50.
Yes, the older will be throwing all of that in my face someday, and I look forward to those discussions. Just as I look forward to the younger and I talking about Robin swinging from the trees and winning the archery contest, in disguise, by splitting his opponent’s arrow, in the old movie that his brother wouldn’t watch.
XulaDad 