The Errol Flynn Blog

Flynn’s Robin Hood the template for all the rest, and still the best …

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— Philip

Robin Hood famously “stole from the rich to give to the poor.” Odd, since that’s pretty much the inverse of what Hollywood’s many adaptations of the Robin Hood legend have done: take moviegoers’ hard-earned cash every few years, and in exchange give us very bad Robin Hood movies. The rich get richer; the rest of us get “Robin Hood, but hip.”

If the legendary Sherwood-Forest-dweller ever existed at all (some historians believe that the real man from whom the legends are derived was actually a petty thief, not a heroic swashbuckler), Robin would certainly disapprove of the perpetual exploitation of his story for corporate gain. The latest Hollywood adaptation—Robin Hood, out in theaters today (Nov. 21)—could be the worst of them all.

The film, starring the Welsh heartthrob Taron Egerton as the titular outlaw, is being panned by critics, who are almost unanimously deeming it a disaster: “Gird your loins for a misguided attempt to profit off the public domain that takes its one big idea—what if we marketed 15th century class warfare to millennials?—and leans into it so hard that the movie starts to feel less like Robin Hood than it does a castrated ‘Riverdale’ spin-off for Bernie bros,” wrote David Erhlich of Indiewire. ”By the way, gasoline exists in the Middle Ages now—as do midriff tops, wire-rimmed glasses, roulette, the entire Industrial Revolution, and my permanently bewildered expression,” io9’s Beth Elderkin wrote.

Those hoping that Robin Hood would be modern in ways other than the cast’s sartorial choices will probably leave the theater disappointed. “I won’t waste time talking about Marian, the movie’s only notable female character, because she fails every representation test there is,” Elderkin wrote. ”She’s worse than a ‘Sexy Lamp,’ she’s a Human Stare. All she does is look at stuff, lips partially opened, waiting to have a thought. She bought her clothes in Forever 21’s Reign section.”

It would be unfair to pick on the 2018 Robin Hood without mentioning some of Hollywood’s many previous debacles. There was, of course, Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood film starring Russell Crowe, a film whose critical panning was usurped only by its dismal box office returns. Though it later achieved a cult following, the 1993 spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights was one of Mel Brooks’ least successful films both critically and commercially. Even Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood movie was a bust, and remains one of the Mouse House’s rare misfires. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner, performed relatively well in 1991, but that’s setting the bar quite low. You’d have to go back to 1938 for the Technicolor sensation The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring a dashing Errol Flynn, to find an indisputably successful Hollywood adaptation of the Robin Hood legend.

So why is such a universally resonant tale about fighting injustice and oppression so difficult to make interesting? Perhaps it’s precisely that it’s too universal, too generic—an innocuous blank slate that inspires either bland filmmaking or, in the case of this 2018 film, desperate, revisionist attempts to make the centuries-old legend socially or politically relevant to the era of its adaptation.

In a piece for Smithsonian Magazine, James Deutsch, a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, noted that Robin Hood adaptations tend to pop up every generation, often during times of US economic turmoil. “Folklore comes from the folk, which is why ‘robbing the rich to give to the poor’ is a motif that has endured for centuries in the imagination of the people,” he wrote.

The first feature-length Robin Hood, a silent film in 1922, followed a recession in the aftermath of World War I, Deutsch observed. Errol Flynn’s turn as the hooded bandit came in the midst of the Great Depression. And Ridley Scott’s 2010 film was released during the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s unsurprising that Hollywood tries to exploit working class fears for profit, with the Robin Hood character recurring in troubled times as an avatar of resistance to the fat-cat elites. Except, these movies are almost always bad investments.

The US economy is relatively stable today, though income inequality is still an enormous problem in the US and globally. As long as that remains the case, the Robin Hood story will resonate, and Hollywood will keep trying to cash in on it. There are already several more Robin Hood films development.

— tassie devil

Fifteen years ago I hired Deirdre Flynn to appear at a Q&A before a showing of Warner Bros’ 1938 version of Robin Hood at Carmel’s Outdoor Forest Theater. I owned a national consumer products business and was forever looking for fun ways to promote the products. When someone approached us to sponsor a film at the Forest Theater, I agreed, providing, I cautioned, it was Robin Hood and providing they let Flynn’s daughter Deidre introduce the film after a Q&A on stage. They readily agreed, and after some doing, I managed to contact Deirdre through a Flynn website in Los Angeles. Nice guy ran it, forgotten his name.

About a month later she arrived in Carmel and it was a delight to meet her. She was soft spoken and friendly with no ego. It was apparent she’d had a hard life. We’d advertised the movie and the Q&A locally, and out of the woodwork appeared Deirdre’s former step sister, the daughter of Joanne Dru, whose father was Dick Haymes. I think we all got together for drinks first in town, and after a shy minute or two the women began to laugh and reminisce.

That night we got to the theater early and I spent some time with Deirdre talking about her dad. I asked whether he’d been a good dad, in her opinion. She said that he had, and that although she had nothing to compare it to, he seemed solicitous and concerned about her. According to Deirdre, from location Errol used to send her letters asking about her homework load, what she was reading, boyfriends. She said he’d sometimes add vocabulary words to the letters he sent, for her to look up and commit to memory. Well that’s something, I thought.

The whole affair of meeting Deirdre was bittersweet, because clearly Errol hand’t been the best father and it seemed sad that his beautiful daughter was drifting thru life as a consequence. The Q & A and movie were a huge hit, however. I remember two things. One, when the audience was told over the loudspeaker that before the film, there would be a Q&A with Errol Flynn’s daughter Deirdre Flynn, the audience actually gasped; they were that enthralled. Second, I was seated beside Deirdre and at the iconic moment in the film when Errol makes his appearance, leaping over the felled tree on his white stallion to the rousing Wolfgang Korngold score, the audience screamed and cheered, and I saw tears of pride and joy appear in Deidre’s eyes as she watched her father up there. I’ll never forget it.

One footnote. There was a raffle before the Q&A, and one lucky audience member received an autographed copy of Errol’s My Wicked Wicked Ways. For a lot of reasons not the least of which was that Flynn died when his book was still in galleys, they didn’t get an actual autographed first edition, but a 1984 paperback edition with an ersatz autograph. In my writing.

— TJR McDowell