Robin and Marian (Rastar, Columbia, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 16) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that were both oddly disappointing, though in different ways. The first was Robin and Marian, made in 1976 by Columbia Pictures in association with Ray Stark’s Rastar Pictures, directed by Richard Lester and written by James Goldman with Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn and Robert Shaw as the top-billed stars. Actually Nicol Williamson as Little John has far more screen time than either Hepburn or Shaw, and Hepburn took the part of Maid Marian for her first film in nine years (since her 1967 home-invasion thriller Wait Until Dark) because her kids were jazzed that she’d be in a film opposite the first James Bond. Lester took on this film after a checkered career that had begun brilliantly with the 1962 teen musical It’s Trad, Dad! (retitled Ring-a-Ding Rhythm in the U.S. because the term “trad” – short for “traditional,” and meaning Dixieland jazz – meant nothing to American audiences) and went into superstar orbit two years later when he was given the job of directing The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. Lester would go on to make The Beatles’ second film, Help!, and would establish a reputation for modern-day stories with nervy quick-paced editing that anticipated music videos. Lester’s career nose-dived big time when he made a nuclear-war apocalypse film called The Bed Sitting Room (1969), but he came back in 1973 with a cheerily irreverent, campy semi-remake, semi-spoof of The Three Musketeers. He followed it up with a sequel, The Four Musketeers, in 1974, and that gave him the chance to update the Robin Hood legend with Robin and Marian (1976). I haven’t seen Lester’s The Three Musketeers since it was new – and I was mightily impressed by it, finding it charming and being beguiled by its irreverence towards the conventions of costume epics – but I was definitely not impressed by Robin and Marian.

Goldman’s script takes place 20 years after the main story of Robin Hood as told by Douglas Fairbanks (as producer and co-writer as well as star) in 1922 and Errol Flynn in 1938. Shortly after helping restore Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris, reunited with Connery six years after the two played opposite each other in the 1970 film The Molly Maguires, a tale of 19th century labor unrest in the coal fields with Connery as the leader of a band of saboteurs and Harris as the Pinkerton agent who goes after him) to the throne, Robin Hood left England and his girlfriend Maid Marian behind to join Richard on his ill-fated Crusade to reconquer the Holy Land from the Muslims. In the meantime, Marian became a nun and now leads a convent near Sherwood Forest. Robin and his sidekick Little John return to England with Richard, who still wants to retake the throne from his scapegrace brother John (Ian Holm), who comes off like one of the villains from Game of Thrones (complete with a whining mistress who emerges near-naked from his tent to complain that he’s ignoring her with his business at court). It’s typical of Lester’s and Goldman’s deconstructionist approach to the Robin Hood legend that Richard, who in previous depictions (not only the Fairbanks and Flynn Robin Hood movies but Sir Walter Scott’s 19th century novel Ivanhoe and the various films made from it) was an unambiguous hero, is portrayed as a war criminal who burns a castle with children inside because he’s disappointed with the fact that the three-foot gold statue he was told would be there turns out to be just a rock. Later he and Robin reminisce about the time Richard had thousands of Muslim children similarly butchered en masse during his Crusade. The film is already well past the half-hour mark of a total 145-minute running time when Audrey Hepburn’s Marian finally appears, and it takes even longer for Robin Hood’s old nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw), to show up.

Ultimately the film builds to an action climax of sorts in which the Sheriff gets 200 men from King John to mount an assault on Sherwood Forest to end this Robin Hood business once and for all. The Sheriff camps his men outside the forest, and ignoring the sound advice of Little John that he keep his band of Merry Men inside the woods and not march them out for a direct in-the-open confrontation in which they’ll be outnumbered four times, Robin Hood goes out and challenges the Sheriff to a one-on-one duel to settle the whole conflict. The Sheriff accepts, though for some odd reason Richard Lester shoots virtually the whole fight scene between them in longshots; Lester was an excellent director in certain kinds of scenes, but no one ever accused him of being good at staging action. The Sheriff dies at Robin’s hands but not before severely wounding him, and in the end Maid Marian offers to take him back to her convent and nurse him to health -– only [major spoiler alert!] the drink she gives him turns out to be poisoned, and the scene becomes a murder-suicide in which she kills first him and then herself. The ordinarily lesser talents who made the 1933 Warner Bros. film Ever in My Heart – director Archie Mayo and writers Beulah Marie Dix and Bertram Millhauser – an extraordinary movie about an American woman and a German man who marry on the eve of World War I and then are torn apart by the conflict (it’s basically a reworking of Romeo and Juliet, only instead of two feuding families they’re doomed by two feuding countries) – were able to make a similar ending genuinely beautiful and moving. That feat totally eludes Lester and Goldman here. I remember wishing that someone would have remade and updated Ever in My Heart in the wake of 9/11 – in my putative version the leads would be an American woman and an Iraqi man and 9/11 would have served the plot function of the Lusitania sinking in the original, ramping up American hostility, prejudice and harassment towards Arabs (instead of Germans) in general. That remains one of the potentially greatest unmade movies, and a far cry from the seeming boredom of much of Robin and Marian. And one of the aspects about Robin and Marian that annoyed me the most was Audrey Hepburn’s hair. Once she doffs her nun’s headdress she looks like she’s had a permanent wave – and you’re not going to convince me that they knew how to do permanents in 13th century England, just as I wasn’t convinced that the cave people in Hal Roach’s One Million, B.C. had somehow invented the push-up bra.