Robin and Marian Reviews

(OK) Whon can't love this? The characters are coming from everything you could see, including the crusades and its holocaust perpetrated by christians, and are resuming its own timeless legend. Each contact with the nun, each blow in a fight, each scar counts...

When the legend ends, where does that leave the figures in the central plot? Robin and Marian answers that question by picking up decades after his populist campaign against the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here is one last ride into the sunset, the coda to the end of the legendary Merry Men, Sherwood Forest, and symbolism of Robin Hood.

 

We begin with the Crusades and the vision of Robin Hood (Sean Connery) and Little John (Nicol Williamson) finally disillusioned enough to leave behind King Richard (Richard Harris). He returns to his old haunts and reunites with key figures from his glory days such as Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker), Will Scarlett (Denholm Elliott), and the Sheriff (Robert Shaw). Naturally, he goes looking for Marian (Audrey Hepburn), and finds her now living her life as a nun having happily left behind her more adventurous life. Robin’s reappearance disrupts the delicate stasis of this community as old wounds, love affairs, and resentments come rising back to the surface.

 

If the first romp through Sherwood was a merry series of adventures and prankish dares, think Errol Flynn’s proud strutting in The Adventures of Robin Hood, then Robin and Marian is the elegy to their twilight. The film is best when it lays off the slapstick and comedy and goes for a sustained tone of history repeating itself as tragedy and restraint.

 

Even as the film loses its way tonally, Connery, Hepburn, and Shaw know exactly how to play the material for maximum impact. Shaw is all grim and taunt as a version of the Sheriff that knows better than to underestimate Robin. There’s a certain note of finality to Shaw’s Sheriff as if he knows this meeting will be the final one for him, for Robin, or for the both of them. It’s an interesting note that Shaw deploys with extreme delicacy and care over the course of the film.

 

While Connery seems to the forest born for the part as he brings a certain swagger that age will not dim. There’s a depth of feeling to his Robin Hood that displaces him from Saturday matinee adventurer and into flesh-and-blood person. It’s in the ways he looks and interacts with Hepburn, the resignation and disgust with Richard the Lionheart’s actions in the opening scenes, and in his final moments as he shoots the arrow through the window to mark his grave.

 

But it’s Audrey Hepburn that leaves the biggest impact on you. She was away from the screen for nearly ten years before this role, and she seems perfectly attuned to the part and its layers. It seems a bit like reality and fiction are folding in on themselves as a screen legend of a Hollywood gone by returns to the screen during the “New Hollywood” period playing a fable finding her taste for love and adventure reawakening. Or as The Dissolve succinctly put it, “Hepburn’s subtly shifting moods give this movie its soul.”

Not a bad film. Not great either. Connery and Hepburn are fine. There is a great supporting cast of Robert Shaw, Nicol Williamson, Denholm Elliott, Ian Holm, Ronnie Barker (one half of the Two Ronnies) but the trouble is we see soooooo little of them. I don't think Barker had more than 2 words to say! And to have the great talent of Ian Holm wasted on a less than 5 minute seen was criminal. Richard Harris stands out as the villainous Richard the Lion-Heart and has some great dialogue. Its a tad slow in parts but the battle between Robin and the Sheriff is worth seeing as is the final seen, which is very touching. (aided by Connery's performance). Interesteringly it was not Connery's only apperance in a Robin Hood film. He also had a speaking cameo as King Richard in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner as Robin.(although Costner kept his American accent!) I prefer Prince of Thieves to this version but I prefer Connery to Costner in the main part.
All in all good fun but could have been a lot better.

3/5