Silence & Silver XIII: Robin Hood (1922)
Douglas Fairbanks Takes Up The Bow
As a kid, I loved Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. As an adult, I’ve only come to appreciate it more. The perfect casting, the comedy blended with gravitas, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s grandiose, groundbreaking score, its surreptitious anti-racism message—it’s an absolute masterpiece. So when I learned that Douglas Fairbanks had starred in the first Hollywood blockbuster based on the Robin Hood legends, I knew I’d found the perfect movie for Silence and Silver. As an ethusiast for both Robin Hood and Douglas Fairbanks, how could I do better?
It’s easy to understand why Douglas Fairbanks took on this project, which he wrote and produced. The outlaw of Sherwood seems like a natural evolution of the comic swashbuckling persona Fairbanks first developed in The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. The role gave him the chance to perform a wider variety of stunts, from swashbuckling to marksmanship to scaling the walls of a castle to jousting on horseback. It also perfectly suited Fairbanks’s swaggering charisma, while still letting him play a conventional rom-com lead in several scenes.
The rest of the cast is equally excellent. Sam De Grasse plays Prince John as cold, scheming, cruel, and debonair. Enid Bennet—while she has more than a bit of the flapper in her performance—foreshadows Olivia de Havilland’s interpretation of Marian as a sophisticated lady of the court-turned-rebel. Robin Hood’s Merry Men—though they don’t appear until halfway through the film—seem to have sprung right from the pages of a children’s book.1
Then, of course, there are the astounding production values. Bankrolled yet again by Fairbanks himself, the movie was wildly expensive by 1920s standards, and it’s easy to see why.2 The elaborate sets—including the king’s castle, the village of Nottingham, and Robin’s hideout in Sherwood—are spectacular, and the armies of extras—all dressed in suitably medieval garb—emphasize just how huge this imaginary world is. There’s a working drawbridge—used in multiple stunts—and King Richard’s tent while on crusade, which stands several stories high, almost like a portable castle made of fabric. The scale of it all is impressive, even by modern standards (what modern film production would build an entire castle, even out of wood and plaster?)
There is something I don’t like about this film, and that’s how little it draws on the actual Robin Hood stories. With its narrow focus on Robin Hood and his fight against Prince John, the plot leaves out many an iconic episode in the traditional legend—at least as it’s been told since Howard Pyle reimagined the medieval ballads for Victorian children in 1883.3 So, we get no archery tournament, no quarterstaff battle between Robin and Little John, and no feasting the Sheriff of Nottingham in the forest. We do get some quite gruesome scenes of Prince John exploiting the peasants of England and torturing people for information about Robin Hood—including an infant actor who delivers a sigh of despair at its plight with such perfect melodrama that we couldn’t help laughing. But, for the most part, the movie is made up of two plot arcs: an extended prologue that explains how the Earl of Huntingdon went from a crusading knight to an outlaw, and the overthrow of Prince John by Robin and his Merry Men one year later.
I can’t help but feel Fairbanks would have been better served with less prologue and more quarterstaff fighting.
I have another frustration, but it’s a frustration with every Robin Hood story. The idea that Richard the Lionheart (Wallace Beery, who we met earlier as Professor Challenger in The Lost World) should abandon his people to his wicked brother while he goes off on crusade—and that we, the audience, should nonetheless consider him a “good king”—well, it doesn’t work. And if anything, Beery’s performance during the film’s interminable prologue serves to magnify the problem, by making Richard a glutton and a buffoon who’s not only taken in by his blatantly-evil brother, but also by Sir Guy (Paul Dickey), who looks a bit like a cross between Kojak and Severus Snape. Beery’s portrayal is, at least, somewhat reminiscent of the real Richard I, who—typical of many martial leaders in the High Middle Ages—seems to have been a greedy, ill-tempered thug whose only virtue was his prowess in combat.
But I suppose that’s all part of the fantasy. Good kings are hard to come by, and perhaps bluff, jovial, rather stupid kings are the best we can reasonably hope for, even in Merrie England.4 And it all turns out alright in the end. You know the story—Richard returns from the Holy Land incognito and takes part in the overthrow of his brother alongside Robin, before revealing himself and pardoning the Merry Men. It’s a good story with some powerful resonances, and Fairbank’s Earl of Huntingdon does it justice.
Postscript: In many ways, this movie feels like a test run for what Fairbanks would ultimately achieve in The Thief of Bagdad—a real swashbuckling fantasy epic that pushed cinematic boundaries and blew the audience’s collective mind. I almost wish I had seen Robin Hood first, just so I wasn’t always comparing it to another Fairbanks movie that’s undeniably superior simply by virtue of being one of the best silent films ever made. Oh, and make sure you also watch the Errol Flynn version. It owes a lot to Fairbanks, but improves on the original in almost every way—except the stunts. You can’t beat Fairbanks at stunts. Not even if you’re Errol Flynn.
Alan Hale, who plays Little John, would go on to reprise the role alongside Flynn in 1939.
Another medieval blockbuster, When Knighthood Was in Flower, outspent Robin Hood, mainly because it was funded by Citizen Kane William Randolph Hurst as a vehicle for his mistress Marion Davies. It appears to have won rave reviews from critics and flopped at the box office.
Pyle, while preserving many elements from the original tale, made Robin much more admirable and less thieving and murderous. He’s still a decidedly gray character—quick-tempered, arrogant, often foolish—who seems to enjoy humiliating the rich and feasting on their spoils more than he likes giving to the poor, but he’s not the bandit of medieval legend.
While I was a teacher at an international school, I overheard this exchange between two Korean students—Tyler and Hyung—which amuses me to this day:
Tyler (appropos of nothing): “Merrie England!”
Hyung (incredulous): “You marry England?”