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Films & Filming review
ROBIN AND MARIAN
Cordon Cow sees Richard Lester merging legend and history in a
denial of dreams . . .
- Directed by Richard Lester.
- Produced by Denis O'Dell.
- Screenplay by James Goldman.
- Director of photography, David Watkin.
- Editor, John Victor Smith.
- Music, John Barry.
- Production designer, Michael Stringer
- A Ray Stark/Richard Shepherd production.
- Distributed by Columbia-Warner.
- Colour. Cert A. 107 mins.
- Robin Hood, SEAN CONNERY;
- Marian, AUDREY HEPBURN;
- Sheriff of Nottingham, ROBERT SHAW;
- King Richard, RICHARD HARRIS;
- Little John, NICOL WILL1AMSON;
- Will Scarlett, DENHOLM ELLIOTT;
- Sir Ranulf, KENNETH HAIG;
- Friar Tuck, RONNIE BARKER;
- King John, IAN HOLM;
- Mercadier, BILL MAYNARD;
- Old defender, ESMOND KNIGHT;
- Sister Mary, VERONICA QUILLIGAN;
- Surgeon, PETER BUTTERWORTH;
- Jack, JOHN BARRETT;
- Jack's apprentice, KENNETH CRANHAM;
- Queen Isabella, VICTORIA MERIDA ROJA;
- Sisters, MONSERRAT JULIO, VICTORIA HERNANDEZ SANGUINO, MARGARITA
MINGULLION.
A benign sun hovers around the greenery of Sherwood Forest, but the mood
is decidedly autumnal. Robin and the once-merry men are greying in their
middle age; and Marian has become a nursing abbess, practical and prickly.
Like everybody else she has grown disenchanted. She thought Robin foolish
to absent himself for the best part of two decades in the false glory
of the Crusades. Now that he is back, greeting her with casual vigour,
she is certainly persuaded to doff her cowl and copulate, surrendering
the passion-balm of her calling and taking to the woods; but it is only
a matter of time before she realises that Robin will never lose that childlike
urge to be mannish, to prove himself in mortal combat, reducing heroic
causes to opportunities for a show of righteous violence. So Marian's
sorrow returns. Her manner of dealing with it is imbued with a whisper
of tragedy, an echo of romance, not too sweet, not really sentimental:
the final moments between Robin and Marian and Little John are the most
tricky, and to my mind the most successful, in a film that challenges
legend with truth.
Gone is the clean-limbed daydream Robin, affectionately remembered from
the portrayals of Fairbanks and Flynn and the rest. Instead we see him
plain, a man unwilling to accept the weight of his years, prepared to
deny with considerable force the slackness of his muscles—and in
Sean Connery's thoughtful interpretation, this Robin obliterates for himself
the tokens of time that are everywhere apparent except in his eyes, which
repeatedly shine with the excited wistfulness of a small boy; yet in his
eagerness to keep on pursuing the myth of adventure, he is (as the Sheriff
of Nottingham so knowingly puts it) 'a little bit in love with death'.
The evidence of this can be clearly seen, for dark scars from distant
battles mark his flesh, and Marian traces their ugly course with a finger
and says, 'So many! You had the sweetest body when you left'.
She too has scars. When Robin went away she slashed her wrists. And,
after an initial bout of boisterous fun (during which I wondered momentarily
if the idea were to give us a cross between Ingrid Bergman in The Bells
of St Mary's and Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara), Audrey Hepburn enriches Marian and the entire film with a wealth of inner
beauty (and still more outward beauty, too) as well as a dramatic assurance
that can carry off the most difficult passages (libidinous yielding where
the sunlit crops are thickest in the fields; a collapse with a slither
down the wall that bears testimony to her long-ago dancing days): this
is a come-back performance of great quality, and it is also the film's
very core.
While Richard Lester has not entirely relinquished his familiar sense
of humour for the occasion, he does keep his straightest face yet. Palpably
he has found it interesting to set against hygienic myth-movies the stench
of historical fact. Here are twelfth-century men who sweat and do not
wash much. The sheriff, however, does shave fastidiously with his dagger's
edge, his face reflected in the larger blade of his sword. And if old
conventions are acknowledged, the homage is wry: sunbeams through the
trees, and white jets of dust from the hooves of fast horses, linger momentarily
on the screen as if to remind us how illusive was the cinema of the past.
Truer to the purpose is the slow death of Richard the Lionheart: he gets
an arrow in the neck during his siege of Chalus Castle, and he snaps most
of the shaft away while the horses whinny hysterically as if to express
the pain of it on the king's behalf, and Lester cuts to a ruddy sunset
of ironic lyricism before Richard pulls out the arrowhead personally,
disdaining the fussy surgeon, and later with grey-green cheek and blood-stained
bandage this persistent monarch tries his hardest to make merry in a banqueting
hall of inhospitable stone.
Historians might aver that it wasn't actually like that. But it looks
more probable than anything we've been offered in the way of kingly deaths
in the average commercial-historical movie. To be sure, Richard Harris
vocalises a touch too extravagantly as Coeur-de-Lion, rather as
if he felt the need to resuscitate his Sprechgesang of Camelot. But visually the strength is undeniable, as is the case with all the action,
whether Robin and John be scaling a high wall as a tremulous camera transmits
to us the panic of their bid to escape from Nottingham Castle, or men
be joined in battle with a clumsiness occasioned by the weight and structure
of their trappings. Instead of the elegant swordplay of Hollywood's golden
abysm (which. God knows, we still want to savour in revivals—for verismo in massive doses could emaciate our spirits), Lester gives
us the sickening wound, the unsporting kick; and his incidental details
(a pig grovelling for food; a pair of hands efficiently skinning a rabbit;
a white hood for a black horse, with a hole through which the animal's
eye stares out in alarm) banish the storybook connotations, merging legend
and history in a denial of dreams. There are those who would prefer all
films to do this, and I am not of their number; neither, I imagine, is
Lester. But having chosen to play it straight and tough (although
not without the odd nudge of comic relief), he has done extremely
well.
The intelligent screenplay is by James Goldman, author of The Lion
in Winter: providing in the process two of the characters of that
former work as they developed in later life, the luckless Lionheart, and
the wilful John, who this time is merely glimpsed in quaintly spiteful
mood, of which scant material Ian Holm makes much. It is a fine cast altogether,
especially notable for the humanity and banked passion of Nicol Williamson's
John, the surly substance of Robert Shaw as an uncommonly credible Sheriff
of Nottingham, and the haunting sadness of Denholm Elliott's Will, who
knows that the legends of which he sings are hollow.
A constant boon is David Watkin's cinematography in soft clear colour,
everywhere apt to Lester's design, and never more so than in the still-life
shown at the film's opening and close: firm ripe apples, tempting the
taste buds—an image followed immediately by another wherein the fruit
has decayed to such an extent that there is no point in trying to save
even a part of it. And decay—of hopes, of adventures, of life itself—is
this strange and touching film's pervasive theme. |
