Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

They make a Robin Hood movie every few years, because the name recognition of the folk legend and its prior Hollywood iterations is free and in the public domain, and so any studio can poach the Robin Hood "franchise." Recently we had Robin Hood, the disguised remake of "Gladiator," directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe Last year there was a version with Jamie Foxx. No one cared, but studio executives must have had in mind the immense box office of the Kevin Costner hit (and perhaps the ubiquitous theme song by Bryan Adams).

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks irredeemably silly and dated now, and basically indistinguishable from the Mel Brooks parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But the reviewers at the time saw something else entirely. Roger Ebert thought Costner's portrayal was "tortured [and] thoughtful," and saw the depiction of Robin Hood as something like the guerilla leader Che Guevara, or at least a "civilized, socially responsible Robin Hood." (Ebert correctly notes that Alan Rickman's performance is high camp: it "has nothing to do with anything else in the movie, and indeed seems to proceed from a uniquely personal set of assumptions about what century, universe, etc., the story is set in.") But having just watched it for the first time in 25 years, I can tell you it is only an "adult" and "modern" update if your point of comparison is the Disney cartoon.

I have just been reading Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, where Robin Hood hangs out at the edge of the narrative, displaying his feats of archery at the great jousting tournament, but then retreating back into the woods, only later to bring his band of merry men to aid in besieging the Norman castle in which Ivanhoe lies captive. Scott, as Georg Lukács notices in his critical study on the historical novel, situates Robin Hood (and all of the characters), his loyalties, his principles, his sense of immediate advantage, his relation to the ideology of chivalry, his alliances and friendships, and his personal history and background, within and against the historical class situation which it also illuminates. The good guys in Ivanhoe are the dispossessed and backward Saxon lords and their followers, and the bad guys are the foreign French conquerors who have the backing of the Church (especially its military wing, the Knights Templar). Somewhere in the middle of this is King Richard the Lion-Heart, who is himself a Norman ruler, but has been usurped and so is warring against Prince John (his brother) and his corrupt and irreligious followers.

In Scott's book, Robin Hood is "political" not because of the social vision he espouses, but because he is directly involved in a legible historical struggle. (Remember that the ultimate fate of Prince John was to have wrested from him the legal rights of the Magna Carta, when he ascended the throne after Richard's death.) "Politics" just means immediate historical necessity: how every aspect of ideology, material production, the state, and class struggle "light up" during moments of revolution and unrest. For instance, the Jewish characters Isaac and Rebecca in Scott's novel are always specified as Medieval Jews at the time of the Crusades, whose alliances are complexly mediated by the push-and-pull of that political and cultural situation. Their plot across the novel is a series of pressures that runs through each node of their historical insertion.

In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, nothing the characters do makes any sense because they are governed by attitudes and desires arbitrarily stuck onto a picturesque English landscape. Although the legend of Robin Hood--if we know one thing about it--is about class struggle, the historical class situation (between Normans conquerors and a backwards, residual form of production and rule)  in England at the time disappears entirely. Robin Hood's own class position is reassigned; he is no longer a dispossessed yeoman but rather a spoiled "fortunate son" of aristocracy who returns home from the Crusades to find that his castle has been burned and his father disgraced. When he comes across a band of outlaws who are stealing from the rich (i.e. from him), he decides that he can wield them into a fighting force for his personal vendetta against the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Instead of a political explanation for the central conflict in the film, we are made to understand that the Sheriff dabbles in black magic and witchcraft, ravishes young women, starves the populace with unfair game laws, and conducts Ku Klux Klan-type raids, by torchlight, masked and cloaked in white. By contrast, we know that Robin himself has "good politics" because he liberates and embraces the humanity of his black friend, a Moor played by Morgan Freeman. And because Robin's gang "gives to the poor," which here is an obvious allusion to the failure of American troops in the imperialist war in Vietnam to "win the hearts and minds" of the colonized. But "the poor" here are just a rabble of peasants in a village somewhere; is it possible that they were formerly Robin's own feudal serfs, either directly owned or indirectly exploited?

No, it is not possible, because the movie is directly importing the class relations of 20th century America onto 12th century England: "rich" and "poor" are just different income brackets, not production relations. (In Scott's novel, the first two characters introduced have metal chains around their necks to show they are the property of their Saxon lord. When Kevin Costner shouts some nonsense about "freedom," however, it lacks the context in which it could be understood as meaningful.) Likewise, we have no sense of the relation between the feudal nobility and the King, other than that there is a power vacuum into which bad actors can step in and have their own way.  And yet this was the main political issue for more than 500 years! The return of Richard as rightful king would not settle this question, as the movie implies; it would open this question (as the story of Ivanhoe demonstrates). Furthermore, why are the Celts aligned with the Sheriff of Nottingham? No explanation is given, which means there is no dramatic interest in what happens to them. Without reasons, they are just stunt people demolishing Robin Hood's Ewok village.

This is not just griping about the film's inattentiveness to history, unsurprising anyways for Hollywood (although Braveheart and Rob Roy, from a little later on, are much more interesting and important as historical films). The basic drama of the film is undermined by hollowing out the reality of the situation and of the different characters. Why does Maid Marion side with Robin Hood (against her own class)? Why has the Church aligned itself with the Sheriff (since he is mixed up with witchcraft)? What is the difference between "the poor" and the outlaws--which brings us to the traditional class character of Robin Hood as a yeoman, a complex social position, but certainly neither indigent nor aristocratic (the two options in this film). But those are the major motivations in the film, and they are all nonsense, because "good" and "bad" are simply indicated by musical cues and costume (the bad guys wear black, the good guys are diverse). One of the symptoms of this incoherence is Costner's famously uncertain accent, which is so distracting that it never fails to take the viewer out of the scene. But then the viewer is never really "in" the scene in the first place, because the action is the mere propulsion and rebound of billiard balls, not the involvement and intensity of real persons with real reasons and purposes.