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Knight |A Garland of Robin Hood Films Stephen Knight University of Wales, Cardiff A Garland of Robin Hood Films Douglas Fairbanks exults outside the massive Santa Monica Boulevard set of United Artist's Robin Hood, 1922. 34 I Film & History The Medieval Period in Film | Special In-Depth Section The long dive to freedom from the castle tower into the moat; a forest ambush; a rescued beauty; a villain's quivering nostrils; the archery contest; the sword fight; a well-filled pair of green tights: from hero to hokum, the Robin Hood tradition has so much for the cinema to relish and re-create. The history of the outlaw tradition has two generic characteristics of special interest to a survey of recent visual representations. First, it was always popular, both in the sense of being well known and in the sense ofbeing known in low-level genres. Proverbs , place names, song, street theater, vigorous ballads — these were the forms that disseminated this myth of rural vigor and natural justice. The second, related, feature is that no major works appeared in the tradition. No Malory or Tennyson turned his pen to Robin Hood, and the more sonorous genres, such as novel, opera and five-act drama, were mostly silent on the topic. When they did have something to say it was not very interesting — witness the lamentable nineteenth-century Robin Hood novels, Tennyson's lackluster The Foresters and the long unperformed plays of 1598-9 by Anthony Munday, The Downfall and The Death ofRobert Erie ofHuntington, which first popularized the dispossessed-gentleman version of the outlaw saga. The cinematic Robin Hood has remained absolutely popular both at the box office — three of the films have been major money-makers (those starring Fairbanks, Flynn, and Costner) — and also in terms of genre — cartoons and pastiches abound as well as simple adventure sagas. But in the cinema at least, popularity has not meant a lack of high quality. At least two of the Robin Hood films have been cinematic masterpieces, the Fairbanks Robin Hood of 1922 and the Flynn film, The Adventures ofRobin Hood oí 1938. There is a good case for seeing Richard Lester's Robin and Marion of 1976 as a first-rate piece of work, and in their differing contexts the two British television series, that from the 1950s starring Richard Greene and its successor from the 1980s, with Michael Praed as Robin, both had clear elements of excellence. Film has not only publicized Robin Hood around the world; it has been a natural development of the outlaw tradition. It was never highly verbal: the core genre has always been theater, and the early ballads are themselves highly performance-oriented — a forest encounter, a fight, an ambush, or a rescue are almost always the central features.1 Complexity rarely goes beyond a disguise, a pretense, a revelation; analysis never exceeds a clipped exchange between opponents or allies; full meaning lies in the symbolism of the heroic figure, the forest, the assembled band. All of these can be realized with great vigor and impact in visual form, whether in film or on television. The combination of theatricality and popularity gave the Robin Hood tradition a flying start in cinema . Remarkably, there were five Robin Hood films made before 1914; the attractiveness of the theme must have been a factor, but that was mediated through the popularity of the outlaw in nineteenthcentury theater. J.R.Planché's musical version ofThomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian came out in the same year as the novella, 1822, and was reproduced in many forms through the century. Robin Hood was the theme both of major pantomimes and barnstormers ' playlets; in the 1890s, America saw Augustine Daly's extremely successful lavish production of Tennyson's The Foresters, with music by Arthur Sullivan2 and also Reginald De Koven's musical Robin Hood, which for the first time made central a love triangle between Robin, Marian, and Sir Guy. Activity in the period was just as vigorous in Britain — the Lord Chamberlain's records indicate seven new London "greenwood" dramas between 1900 and 1910, and three of the prewar films were ofU.K. origin.3 Little is recorded...

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