 Robin Hood and friends try to stave off Prince John's and the Sheriff of Nottingham's attempts to steal the crown while King Richard is gone. Thrill to the merry men's exploits as they "rob from the rich to give to the poor and provide rousing good entertainment!"
1952, 84 minutes, VHS
Like any real man, I can't get enough of this Robin Hood stuff. It's classic male wish fulfillment fantasy, what with getting to live in a forest, having buddies with cool nicknames, and wearing sheer hosiery. In fact, when you get down to it, the story is really just a twelfth century version of Animal House. You've got a fair amount of hazing going down with people getting dumped in the river before getting to join up. There's a big archery competition between the slobs and the snobs (I mean between the merry men and the bad guys) and instead of outwitting Dean Wormer, Robin and company spend the movie getting the drop on that rotten Sheriff of Nottingham. Admittedly, Little John isn't much of a substitute for Blutarsky, but then again, Animal House didn't have a strolling minstrel so it's pretty much a wash.
All that being said, I found this particular version of the Robin Hood story to be a rather lacking one. I'm not one to go around blaming one particular person for such a collaborative craft as filmmaking, but it's clear that this all star Richard Todd's fault. This movie finds Todd only two years removed from being an Oscar nominated Best Actor, but two years can be a lifetime in the movie biz.(Insert Guy Pearce joke here.) No one could ever claim that starring in a fifties Disney costume drama could be anything but the cinematic employment equivalent of getting on with a rural puppy mill or something.
Richard's problem as Robin Hood is mainly that he doesn't look or act like a convincing rogue. He looks like a guy playing dress up in the school play more than an outlaw who is fighting the Man and keeping the home fires burning for the real king's return. There are some scenes where he actually looks like a dwarf standing next to some of the other actors and I was starting to wonder whether this wasn't some version that had recast the Robin part as some kind of wood gnome. And maybe I was spoiled by Errol Flynn (you knew he was going to come up didn't you?), but where was the sword fighting in this movie? And for that matter, where was the bow and arrow action?
There was an contest early in the movie where Robin and his dad go to the county fair and beat the sheriff's men at some archery, but that was about the only feat of derring do with the arrow that was performed in this movie. Where was the scene of Robin shooting the toupee off Prince John at 500 paces while Johnnie mewls like a stuck hog so that he looks like the vaguely homosexual villain he always seems to be portrayed as? 
There was the rather silly Bat Signal-like system the Merry Men had of keeping everyone up to date on all the forest gossip like who had shingles and which member of the university's administration was riding through Sherwood and in need of some harassment, but was it just me or does the idea of guys randomly shooting arrows through the forest into Robin's secret camp strike you as a wee bit dangerous. These arrows go flying through air and make a whizzing noise and everyone at camp stops and looks for the arrow to land and secretly prays that it's not on top of their head or in their butt or something.
This isn't to say that Richard Todd doesn't go through motions of our favorite woodsy rogue though. He smirks frequently, flirts and bickers with Maid Marion and whines endlessly about how great King Richard is and how sucky Prince John is. If Robin would have taken five minutes to do a search on King Richard on the Internet, he would have found out that Richard was French, didn't speak English and spent about only six months in England during his reign. The movie also glosses over the details on Richard being ransomed off by Austria by failing to note that Duke Leopold of Austria actually sold Richard off to the Holy Roman Emperor of the time, Henry VI before Henry resold him (at a substantial mark up I suspect) back to England. Oh well, I suppose it wouldn't do to have a guy known as "the Lion Hearted" portrayed as being passed around like a groupie at a Led Zeppelin concert.
For a movie that doesn't even run an hour and a half, they spend a lot of time setting up Robin's secret origin. We get to see the good guys go off to the Crusades (King Richard and Maid Marion's father) and we see Robin and his dad hanging out together at the big archery competition and also get to see Robin and Marion rolling around the forest with one another. I thought this was a Disney movie! Even worse was when Friar Tuck was sitting all by his lonesome in the woods talking to himself in a woman's voice! Paging Norman Bates! Paging Norman Bates! A fat, bald guy has just stolen your gimmick! 
I don't know where all this father stuff comes from, but he's a good role model for Robin which means that he gets shot in the back by the sheriff's men. This murder sets Robin on his course as outlaw with a heart of gold and it isn't long before we see that not only is the sheriff so evil that he would have Robin's dad killed for not joining up with the bad guys, but he would also raise taxes and steal everyone's goats! First Prince John connives to usurp his brother's throne and now his cronies are kidnapping farm animals! You can dang sure bet the Robin and his crew will do everything in their power to mess up the big homecoming parade at the end of the movie.
It turns out that Robin and the rest actually mess up the big "Bring Richard's Wimpy French Ass Back Home" Telethon that the Queen is holding in Nottingham's town square. Seems the Austrians want several hundred Euros before they'll Fed Ex Dickie back home so the Queen gets everyone to ante up. The sheriff is cajoled into donating and claims that he just can't give any more than the already generous eight bucks and several pogs that he's already pledged. Robin and his compatriots though have snuck into his castle and liberated all his treasure and "donate" it for him in front of everyone. You can imagine that everybody was stunned by the Sheriff's generosity, most of all the Sheriff himself!
A plan is promptly hatched by Prince John and the Sheriff to steal it all back from the Queen and the archbishop while it's in route to the ransom location (or "the drop site" to those of you in the security biz). This plan is even made more cunning in that they are going to steal it all back while dressed up as Robin Hood and his Merry Men! What finks! How will this plan ever be thwarted? One of Robin's guys in the woods sees it all go down and sends out a message arrow to the rest of the posse and the next thing you know, Green Arrow and the rest of his super team appear and apply a Sherwood pimp slap to these thieving dolts.
A final showdown is hastily arranged back at the castle so that Robin can rescue Marion and confront the Sheriff. Instead of the monumental sword fight you had where Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone clashed like two young gods bent on rending the very Earth from its axis before yielding to one another, you had Richard Todd watch as Peter Finch (yes, the one from Network) gets crunched in a draw bridge before Todd hastily climbs over it and falls into the moat below. The Sheriff of Nottingham defeated by a defective garage door? Is Prince John going to slip in the shower?
King Richard returns and has apparently been taking English lessons while he was in captivity because he's able to tell Robin that he is now an Earl and that he is going to marry Marion. Marion has taken to wearing a green outfit that makes her look like Peter Pan, but still manages to find her color of lipstick in the forest. She's a rather unimpressive Marion, but she does go undercover as a page boy in one sequence to get aid from Robin and his men for the big telethon. I guess page boys back then frequently wore red lipstick, what with all the goats being kidnapped and all. 
The rest of the cast is passable though they aren't given a lot to do, other than to appear for their standard incidents. Little John gets his moment in the sun during the big stick fight on the bridge with Robin (the closet we get to any real action from Robin). Friar Tuck gets to do his thing when he and Robin fight over who's going to carry the other across the river. (That bit goes on so long that when the Sheriff shows up to arrest Robin, you breathe a sigh of relief). Will Scarlet even gets to do his classic bit where he stands around wearing a red outfit instead of green.
Nothing much in this seems too authentic since this is one of those costume movies where everyone is dressed in bright colors and all the clothes look like they had just been bought from the Nottingham branch of JCPenney's. Even more questionable was the amount of the budget that must have been devoted to Brylcreme for all the men in this movie. These guys had hairdos that look like they were sculpted by Rodin. Can you imagine how nasty it be to be running around the forest and sweating all that gunk in your eyes? Or how much the bugs would appreciate it? And why can't anyone grow a mustache and beard that actually connect with each other in this movie? Between grooming their facial hair and the hair on their head, these dudes must spend two hours in the morning getting ready for the day's raids and taxing.
This is innocuous enough, but it's hard to see what the point of it is when you've got the Errol Flynn version running around. I don't see what this one had to offer that the other didn't do ten times better. Even the fact that this one was in color didn't give it an advantage since Errol's was an early Technicolor one itself. This one comes across as a quickie retread that probably would be totally forgotten if it weren't for the Disney name attached to it, but it must have done well enough back in 1952 since it precipitated two more Richard Todd/Dinsey collaborations, The Sword And The Rose and Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue. At least they started wising up and didn't try to remake any more Flynn movies though I was hoping for a Richard Todd version of That Forsyte Woman.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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