The Adventures of Robin Hood

The first really weird line in this movie is right in the beginning, in which a guy is being bound up in chains- someone yells 'but he's a freeman, and a landowner, you can't enslave him!' It's sort of appropriate for medieval morality, but you would hope that by 1938 people would find that strange: how heroic is it to fight for a society in which, by implication, you can go ahead and enslave anyone who doesn't own land?

The strange sense that there's been no reconsideration of 13th century (as seen through probably the 18th or 19th century) ethics throughout the movie, too- Robin is a noble in this one, and he claims someone being harassed by the villain knight as his serf to defend him, then threatens the knight to defend himself. Aside from a brief upbraiding of the king for placing any priority over defending England, there's no sense that going off on a Crusade isn't a pretty solid idea. The Merry Men fall all over themselves to show how Royalist they are. Robin gets an Earldom for a reward in the end. It's sort of repulsive, really.

It's still a fairly fun movie, mostly because Errol Flynn is such an entertaining, dashing actor, and there is some specific sense that Robin and co. do actually intend to defend the weak generally and not just the weak freemen specifically, and moreover that their primary motivation isn't so much social justice but a sort of IRA style nationalism in favor of the oppressed Saxons. It's also campy as hell- when Robin and Little John are fighting, Little John wearing bright yellow, red, and blue, Robin's pal whips out a lute. Claude Rains plays Prince John as a simperingly effete guy with no real sense of menace, although there's probably some gay bashing mixed up with the portrayal, and all the swashbuckling stunts still work. It's nonetheless a situation where I yearn for a bit of postmodern gray goo, because Robin is such a character so admirably suited for reinterpretation- his campaign of guerrilla warfare against the wealthy hangs on so well for a reason- and it's disappointing to see what specificity there is in this version remaining so reactionary.

In Macbeth, he knocks off the good king, gets deposed and the rightful, honest monarch takes his place. It's not monarchy that's the problem, it's Macbeth. When Kurosawa redid it, the previous king was a bastard, and the man who takes Macbeth's place is a bastard, and it feels like a much more honest view of the world. I didn't really hope that a 1938 historical adventure movie would be as bold as that, but it would be nice if it were recognized that, to an American, a king is and should be a ridiculous figure at best- the Bugs Bunny cartoon managed it.