Robin and Marian
I can’t imagine this movie being made in any decade but the 70s, when Hollywood’s appetite for conventional heroism was at its lowest ebb. Richard Lester’s 1976 movie explodes the Robin Hood myth. The pitch should have been simple enough: “Robin Hood and Maid Marian get old.” In Lester’s hands, the gimmicky concept becomes an adult, melancholy study of aging and the fallacy of glory on the battlefield. It’s like a Robin Hood movie directed by Robert Altman, although Lester has a greater affinity for action sequences and casts A-list movie stars (Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn) instead of actors’ actors.
Lester begins with a jarring and unnerving montage, straight out of Eisenstein: a vulture’s head, fresh fruit, rotten fruit, a cross blocking the sun’s rays, an elderly man with an empty eye socket. We are clearly not in a fairy tale, but instead in some dusty no-man’s land somewhere between Britain and Jerusalem. Robin (Connery) and Little John (Nicol Williamson) have been fighting the First Crusade with King Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) for 10 years, and are fed up with warfare. The king, who long ago lost his moral compass, has ordered them to sack the castle occupied by the one-eyed elderly man, women and children. They refuse. Richard, played by Harris with a frightening casual insouciance, leads the attack himself and throws them in jail. But he gets an arrow in the neck for his trouble, and while the wound appears superficial (he pulls it out himself), a couple days later he’s dead.
That frees up Robin and John to return to Sherwood Forest. The more things change, the more things stay the same: The Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw) is still in charge, sapping the populace of its strength with his draconian taxes. But Marian (Hepburn), abandoned by Robin decades earlier, is no longer holding a candle, unless she’s kneeling in prayer: She’s joined a convent. And the sheriff is about to haul her off to jail, leading to a renewal of his old battle with Robin and a rekindling of the flame between Robin and Marian.
Although he takes some liberties, Lester is committed to showing a more plausible early-medieval milieu than any previous Robin Hood chronicler. The people are dusty and dirty, and they live hardscrabble, death-haunted lives. Robin and John, both past 40, know they’re on borrowed time, life expectancy-wise. No men-in-tights elegance here: Their first big caper, involving the scaling of a castle wall, is a test of endurance. Can they get up there without falling? Can they keep swinging heavy swords in suffocating armor? They fare better than men their age should, but Lester doesn’t cut them many breaks. There’s a sweet moment later when Marian takes off Robin’s shirt and sees all his scars — then reveals her own, from a suicide attempt after his departure.
While Hepburn has left her Holly Golightly days behind, she has a perpetual girlishness that radiates from beneath her nun’s habit. And Connery is wonderful: relaxed, virile and self-possessed. Both of them command the screen effortlessly. And Shaw makes a sly, languid sheriff, one who knows he can’t defeat Robin unless it’s on his own terms. Otherwise, it’s not worth trying.
“Robin and Marian,” with its lovely orchestral score by John Barry, manages to be both romantic and skeptical. Lester pulls off a similar mixture of tones in “Superman II”: He’s a director confident enough to throw everything into the stew. He balances movie-movie grandeur with psychological complexity. Only at the absurd, existential finale can he be accused of overreaching.