Cinema of Swords

#5, Robin Hood: Prince of Tights

Cinema of Swords

A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)

By Lawrence Ellsworth

Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to my Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.

This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.

If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, look for it from wherever you do your book shopping!)

Robin Hood: Prince of Tights

By the late ‘80s, Hollywood had largely perfected its formula for showy-but-shallow action movies that didn’t have a lot of ideas but made up for it by being fast and loud, applying this formula to nearly every genre of story with popular if not critical success. These films relied in part on familiar themes and characters, concepts sufficiently well-known that they almost sold themselves in advance, so it was only a matter of time before the hit factories found their way back to the legend of Robin Hood. The movies about the emerald archer in the resulting spate of films were a decidedly mixed bag, but one of them, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was such a gigantic worldwide success that it promoted swashbucklers back into the action film mix, a position they’ve held onto for over thirty years since.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Rating: ***

Origin: USA, 1991

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Source: Arrow Films DVD

Which of these things is not like the other? Douglas Fairbanks Sr.; Errol Flynn; Richard Greene; Sean Connery; Kevin Costner. Easy one: the last-named actor, alas, doesn’t have the screen presence to carry off the Outlaw of Sherwood. This bloated Hollywood blockbuster is burdened with the usual flaws of bloated Hollywood blockbusters, but is buoyed up by spirited direction from Kevin Reynolds, a (largely) superior cast, an exuberant career-best soundtrack by Michael Kamen, and most of all by the sheer cumulative power of the Robin Hood legend, which the story gleefully plunders and builds upon.

Plus, of course, Alan Rickman, whose delicious performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham is the best and even essential thing about this film. While the rest of the cast is delivering solemn, self-important statements about freedom from oppression, female empowerment, and racial tolerance, the Sheriff and Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), his wicked-witchy advisor, are cackling away, fully aware that they’re villains in a ridiculous melodrama and playing every scene to the hilt, eye-rolling, lip-curling, and wallowing in diabolic excess. They quite simply steal the picture.

There’s little to gain by summarizing the plot of this long movie because its purpose is simply to serve up the standard Robin Hood recipe with extra Hollywood action-movie sauce; in a general sense, nothing happens that you don’t expect (that’s the point of it), and any surprises along the way are new bits that are just variations on the familiar theme. Some of these bits fall flat—Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) gazing in vacant rapture as Costner emerges naked from a swim in a forest lake, or that notorious convenient two-seater catapult—but mostly they work. Added to the usual greenwood robbery antics, Nottingham castle escapes, dungeon tortures, and gallows rescues, we get black powder explosions (because of course) and the Sheriff calling in barbarian Celt mercenaries—strange racial caricatures in a movie ostensibly, in part, about racial tolerance. The fencing master is Terry Walsh, as he was for the Robin of Sherwood TV show, but the swordplay is weak and the climactic duel between Robin and the Sheriff, in which they flail around unconvincingly with broadswords, is unsatisfying. But the merrie men are well drawn, including Christian Slater as Will Scarlet and particularly Morgan “gravitas” Freeman as Azeem the Moor, which partially offsets Costner’s shallow performance. At least the settings are scenic, with the lovely Burnham Beeches in England standing in for Sherwood Forest, and the walled city of Carcassonne in the south of France for Nottingham. This was the second largest grossing film of 1991 after Terminator 2, and introduced a whole new generation to the Robin Hood legend. If you haven’t seen it, you probably should.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

Rating: ***

Origin: USA, 1993

Director: Mel Brooks

Source: 20^th Century Fox Blu-ray

Ha ha, brawny men wearing tights look effeminate! Hilarious, right?

This Mel Brooks comedy follows the unexpectedly massive success of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and is mainly a parody of that film, though it also draws quite a bit upon the Errol Flynn classic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). It stars the charming Cary Elwes as Robin of Loxley, who as we saw in The Princess Bride (1987) has a comedic talent for sly parody, though much of the humor here is too broad for him. This is one of Mel Brooks’ lesser efforts, and he relies heavily on obvious gags and slapstick, with a quick succession of blind guy jokes, Black guy jokes, fat lady jokes, and we’re-not-really-gay jokes. There are occasional snorters, but in general few of these gags land; Brooks has nothing funny to say about the genre that wasn’t said funnier in Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester (1955). Roger Rees as the Sheriff of “Rottingham” (a typical example of the script’s weak wordplay) tries to lampoon Alan Rickman’s Sheriff in Prince of Thieves, but it’s a parody of a parody, and Rickman was funnier. Dave Chappelle as Robin’s incongruously modern African-American sidekick gets in a few good zingers, but Amy Yasbeck as Maid Marian seems to have been told to channel Madeline Kahn, and she flops at it. Even worse is Richard Lewis as a tediously neurotic Prince John, but to be fair his lines are as stale as month-old bagels.

There’s no plot, just a series of labored sketches sending up the source material. Many of these scenes go on too long, and overall, the pacing just plods. Summary: pleasant, mostly, but unmemorable.

Robin Hood

Rating: ****

Origin: UK, 1991

Director: John Irvin

Source: 20^th Century Fox DVD

Though this came out in 1991 just ahead of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it was so overshadowed by the Costner vehicle that it wasn’t even released to theaters in the States, being relegated to TV-movie status there. And yet, this smaller and sharper British production is better in almost every way than its American counterpart.

This film tells a traditional Robin Hood story—or at least, it starts that way, framing it on the supposed late-12^th-century conflict in England between the Saxons and their new conquerors the Normans, the central struggle of the classic Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, starring Errol Flynn). This Robin Hood returns the Saxons vs. Normans thing to center stage, so much so that it even dispenses with the Sheriff of Nottingham as the main villain, replacing him with a pair of haughty Norman nobles, Baron Daguerre (Jeroen Krabbé) and Sir Miles Folcanet (Jürgen Prochnow of Das Boot). Daguerre has a wealthy ward, Maid Marian (Uma Thurman), whom he plans to marry against her will to Folcanet. Opposing them is a lesser Saxon noble, Robert Hode, the Earl of Huntingdon (Patrick Bergin), who protects a poacher from the cruel Folcanet and his hunters, is outlawed and flees into Sherwood Forest.

For a Robin Hood film, this is pretty standard fare plotwise, but what’s new is the presentation, making the characters and setting as authentic to medieval England as possible. This continues a trend that began with Robin and Marian (1976), continued through Robin of Sherwood (1984), and which reaches its apogee here. There’s a reason for it beyond the convincingly muddy streets and rough-hewn period costumes: depicting the hardscrabble life of the peasantry puts Robin Hood back into the milieu of the medieval ballads he came from, earthy tales of a culture hero of the downtrodden, a trickster, sometimes sly, sometimes ruthless, who stood up to the nobility and made fools of them. Patrick Bergin, who plays Robert-Hode-become-Robin-Hood, is presented at first as a staid young nobleman, a bit dull, really—but then his face lights up with a wicked grin and his eyes gleam with a feral glint, and suddenly you see the darkly charismatic outlaw the Normans fear and the peasants will follow.

Robin Hood succeeds as an adventure film by presenting the familiar events of the legend, such as the quarterstaff fight with Little John on the river log, the robbery/recruitment of Friar Tuck, the escape from the castle ramparts, and so on, but all time-warped back to a desperate era before Hollywood gloss and Technicolor, when laughing in the face of death really meant something. The fights, brutal and bone-crunching, are entirely persuasive. This is no surprise, as they’re choreographed by William Hobbs, the greatest European-style historical fight director of his generation, and could be improved only by less reliance on closeup shaky-cams.

Marian adopts male guise to pass as an outlaw, a common trope in Robin Hood shows and movies, where it’s nearly always unconvincing—but here Uma Thurman just about pulls it off, requiring little suspension of disbelief to buy it. She’s very good as both feisty Norman demoiselle and would-be outlaw, nearly a match for both Krabbé and Prochnow, the worthy villains. The Saxon outlaws are so grubby you can almost smell them, most of them bearing the marks of cruel Norman discipline, and in an interesting twist it’s these wretched “merrie men” who persuade former-noble Robin that their stolen tax wealth should be redistributed to the poor it was extorted from rather than kept. To save Marian from the aristocratic villains, Robin must lead a revolt of these resilient commoners and “turn the world upside down.” His success as a rabble-rouser leads to the movie’s weakest point, an unconvincing third-act change of heart by Baron Daguerre that results in a rapprochement between Normans and Saxons. In a giddy and emotional ending, the filmmakers reveal their real agenda, nothing less than an origin myth of modern England forged from this medieval alliance of former invaders. You almost buy it.

Next Week: Thrice Upon a Time in China, the Jet Li martial arts trilogy that finally established wuxia films with a global audience. Don’t miss it!

About Lawrence Ellsworth

Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.

My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Volume 7, Devil’s Dance, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform. Volumes 8 and 9 are forthcoming. Check the series out at musketeerscycle.substack.com.

As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late Seventies working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the Eighties and then online role-playing games in the Nineties. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and I’ve now returned to the worlds of D&D as a narrative design lead for Larian Studios’ massive Baldur’s Gate 3.