From Adventure to Austerity and Back Again: On ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’

I have lately been reminded of something.

A film, and its importance.

I was feeling down earlier this evening, caught up in one of my far-too-frequent recent melancholy moods. Musing on fiscal matters, as it happens. Which, when one is a writer, is never the smartest of plays.  

Anyhow, I got it into my head that what was needed to rectify this joy-rot was a good, solid, movie-going experience. I felt certain that, should I be able to find the right film, I’d be lifted clear of the doldrums.

Only, an actual movie-going experience was, by the time I hit on this idea, not going to be feasible. Not only was it too late, too cold, and too wet to be travelling anywhere to see one; but going out to see one would only have compounded my aforementioned monetary woes.

So, instead, I plumped for watching something on demand. I wheeled through the action/adventure selection, considering everything from Blood Simple to Snatch to The Hurt Locker to The Outlaw Josey Wales. I spent a good few minutes mulling each option over, but, in the end, I didn’t quite fancy any of them.

In fact, I was beginning to go off the idea altogether. It seemed as though bedtime was approaching, a good couple of hours faster than usual.

Until, that is, I noticed – shunted in and amongst a bunch of wholly dissimilar titles – the 1938 classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood. The kind of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’ – which seemed as fitting a recipe as any other for a late evening’s reality-break. Indeed, though I hadn’t seen it for a long while, I recalled how I always used to enjoy it when I was younger, and decided to give it a go. At the very least, I was sure it couldn’t make me feel any worse.

After only a handful of minutes, I noted down the following thought: There are few films so excellently and effortlessly entertaining as this early Technicolor marvel.

And then added: There are few films as effortlessly rebellious either.

Already, it was beginning to do what I wanted it to. Furthermore, it was also helping me recall the way I felt when watching such films as a kid.

At the age of six or seven, I felt a kinship with The Adventures of Robin Hood because it seemed to mirror the medieval mischief I got up to with my elder brother and our friends out in our garden or in the neighbouring field. Running around with plastic bows and arrows, or with ones that we’d fashion from sycamore branches and tightly-tied string.

As an adult, I found I was revelling not only in the memories of such times, but also in the newly-noticed anarchic angle, the rebel tone, which I didn’t have to think to understand when I was young. The outlaw aspects of the story and of Flynn’s performance were much clearer. The socio-political underpinnings of that standpoint, I mean.

Indeed, as a child, there is a sense in which outlawry is one’s natural state. Only you don’t notice it so much, because few people bother to clamp down on you so hard with the rules. They do not really apply, as the assumption has long since been made by grown-ups that you’re too young to understand most of the mistakes you might be making. There was a healthy degree of discipline in my upbringing, I should admit, but I was still are free, by and large, to indulge my playfulness, my imagination; I was free to give full heed to my (then) innate sense of adventure.

Such actions do not represent a side, a political/philosophical ethos you have chosen. They are simply actions, tied to goals at once far smaller and far larger than any you’ll encounter in your adult life. You give yourself quests to fulfil in your makebelieve, and then forget them, and so are free and able to repeat them at your leisure. The questing itself is the joy, and it hardly matters, at that age, against whom or what, or for whom or what, you are doing it.

At the age of about six or seven, I understood, I think, The Adventures of Robin Hood on those terms. That is to say, as an extension of my own early adventuring. I knew some of the episodes contained within it from picture books, and probably from the Disney version also, but at the same time they felt fresh; I couldn’t help but take them on their own terms. There was none of this lengthy, rambling analysis. I knew Robin Hood was an outlaw simply because people called him an outlaw. Because he called himself an outlaw. I knew he was a good guy because he was the focus of the film and played by Errol Flynn. I knew he was the good guy because he wins at the end.

Watching it as an adult, such simplicity is, largely, stripped. And yet it remains tremendously escapist and entertaining, despite, or possibly even because, I can now detect layers of discourse I previously was unaware of having overlooked.

Perhaps I have even retained a kinship with it because I, and my social situation, has changed so much. I am no longer free to do exactly as I wish. I am expected, as a full-grown man, to be obedient to the rules and dictums of the society within which I find myself surrounded. To be upstanding, as best I can. To be sensible. And, when the government says something, passes some new law, rolls out some new policy, even though this is a democracy, I am not really expected to say anything in response, to answer back.

Furthermore, I am, difficult and shameful as it can be at times to admit, not in the finest position financially. Which is to say I’m on the dole. And have been for some time. Not for want of trying to find work, nor for want of trying to make money off my writing; but that is, regardless, the way things have gone. There’s a line in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which a character propounds: ‘Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.’ And, being in the position I felt locked in last night, I could fully see where that sentiment came from. It seemed, as I thought on it, to have grown out, spread across the Atlantic, taken hold here. And elsewhere, judging by the global nature of the Occupy protests against that quasi-mythological entity, the ‘One Percent’.

However, as I watched the opening scenes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I began to reflect instead on the tendency of each generation to assume they’ve experienced the first instance of everything.

It having been so long since I last watched the film, coupled with my fuzziness over what exactly the Hays censorship code prohibited, meant I was unprepared for the way in which it actually begins. Within those first couple of minutes, we see the harsh actions of Prince John’s knights towards the ‘Saxon’ villagers and peasants in Nottingham. They are denied extra food, leniency, comfort. As I watched this, I understood these scenes as austerity measures. Austerity Britain: The Middle Ages Edition.

Rather than Robin Hood, who I always was (even if my brother was Robin Hood as well), I found myself feeling closer, identifying more, at this stage, with them. In particular with a figure in pale blue robes who, after being denied a fairly basic demand by a soldier, waits for the soldier to leave the frame before looking him daggers and spitting into the mud. I watched that and clicked with the sense of curiously impotent anger that figure projected, the vague notion of their being a wrongness he could do nothing to right.

But then, moments later, Robin Hood himself bounds into view, jumping a low-hanging tree branch on his horse, looking every inch the ultimate badass. A feat made all the more impressive given that at least a third of his inches are taken up by bright green tights. And it is the introduction of Robin, in such a way, which ensures that the film stays entertaining. Which lets you know that things will be alright. That the preceding injustices will be addressed, rectified.

As soon as I see him, I can’t help but grin. I grin wildly and my breath is taken a little, because not only does this image return me to the aforementioned simpler, less rule-stricken times. But, having associated myself with the downtrodden, I understand and feel his presence as more heroic also. I understand that heroes are not only heroes because they tend, in films like this, to win, but because they represent a moral/ideological position that people suddenly, desperately need to witness being upheld.

There’s a long line of similar folk-heroic figures peppered like buckshot through the arse cheeks of history. Rebels, poachers, bank robbers, ne’er-do-wells who nevertheless are felt to have done well by a great many people, all in the name of sticking it to The Man. Most of these, however, do seem fairly stuck in their own historical context. Their heroism is defined by the era they were in. As Sam Elliott intones in his introductory monologue in The Big Lebowski, ‘Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place.’ This seems to be a fit description of such folk-heroes as Bonnie and Clyde, the kind of bank robbers most often linked to ideas of Robin Hood-like aspirations.

Indeed, though films have been made about them, and figures like them, decades after their era, these, especially Arthur Penn’s masterful Bonnie and Clyde, come laden with an elegiac tone. The audience is aware of most of the actual facts (not ‘stories’, mind you) about such figures, and so these facts undercut the escapist mythologizing such films might otherwise aim for. The audience knows the era of these characters has passed, and so they will be able to embrace them only fleetingly before their inevitable end. And, when it comes, that end will come with the implicit moral that crime doesn’t pay, and it’ll be back to reality for everyone.

This is not so much the case with The Adventures of Robin Hood. For a few reasons. First off, though, within the film, he is clearly presented as ‘the man for his time and place’, the historical sketchiness, of both film-makers, audience, and, let’s face it, historians themselves, as regards that time and place means that Errol Flynn’s characterisation much more readily transcends such boundaries. Indeed, rather than being an elegiac evocation of a bygone age, and focusing its attentions on mourning the demise of such values as chivalry, etc., the film concentrates on creating a platform through which modern-day grievances can be simultaneously considered, and, through Robin’s eventual triumph, escaped from.

I’ve talked about how I found myself drawing parallels with the ‘Saxon’ situation as laid out in the film and my own, and associating myself with the downtrodden, as it were. But mention should also be made of the actual release date of the film, 1938, which is right at/just after the tail-end of the Great Depression. It is possible that, aside from it being a darn good entertainment and starring Flynn, this timing played a part in its initial success.

Because there is so much more distance between now and the era in which the (hi)story of Robin Hood is set, than there is between now and the 1930’s, say, the former era (at least as it has become enshrined in Western myth and folklore) has become timeless. And, as a result, can return to being timely, well, whenever it pleases.  

Which may go some way towards explaining why it affected me the way it did on latest watching.

The fact that I’d not previously considered the film verdant grounds for criticism may go some way towards explaining why that impact surprised me.

I chose to watch it on a whim, because I fancied a complete diversion from my current personal climate. I had not considered that, in Flynn’s performance, I would find evoked on screen my poorness-pressured person’s patron saint.

And yet, the more I watched, the more I came to think of him as exactly that. He is defiant, courageous in all the ways I want to be but currently aren’t. He carries on as though the rules that are so stringently and virulently enforced are not really there, and, in so doing, overcomes them. He is a slave only to his ideals.

Indeed, he feel like the right man for this moment – for the moment I was having last night, anyhow – precisely because he has been able to not only hang onto those ideals, but act on them, flying in the face of austerity and the tyranny of being told what to do. At one point, he speaks to Maid Marian of being able to offer his men ‘silks for rags, kindness instead of riches, limitless food instead of hunger’, and, whilst in the real world I may be willing to dismiss such promises as empty rhetoric, in the world of this film, it is clear that they are not lies. So I succumb to the sentiment, allow it to lift me.

I was buoyed as well, watching the film, by the fact that Robin has retained an important aspect of one’s childhood makeup. He has hung onto outlawry as a natural state.

As the character progresses on his eponymous adventures, he therefore graduates from peer to inspiration. The trade-off is that I accept my own downgrading, the prohibition of my own adventuring; that I acknowledge the areas in which I lack. But I would still be lacking, even without Flynn’s Robin Hood there to make that jump. Which is why the fact that he is at least there to entertain me makes my position more tolerable.

Performances such as that, and films such as this, facilitate, for ninety-odd minutes, a return to the freedom one used to take for granted. As you grow older, they cease (unless you yourself have taken to wearing bright green tights) to act as a mirror, but become instead a looking glass, a window into the possibility of a better world.

Of course, there is a level on which such films are purely frivolous – the historical content is, as afore-alluded-to, damn-near utterly bunk – designed and intended as nothing more than eye-catching entertainment. But there is another level, both beneath and above that, in which that entertainment serves a deep and gratifying purpose. A purpose made clear when, at the end, you watch the court and the merry men cheer in unison, and feel something inside of you cheer along too.

It is a shame, therefore, that The Adventures of Robin Hood is, indeed, the type of film about which it is often said: ‘They don’t make them like this anymore.’

Because films like this feel important. Not least because they make the watcher, whatever their age, feel important as well.   

This Is A Happy Ending

(Caution: contains spoilers for Toy Story 3, and The Shawshank Redemption.)

What can you say?

You know, right at this moment, that if you open your mouth it’ll break out into a sob. You can feel your lip going, trembling. You reach up to each eye, maybe a minute apart, to discreetly wipe ‘something’ from the corner.

You’d heard that there was a sad ending to this film, a very sad ending, from other people, from the Internet, but you didn’t think it would be quite like this. Not in a kids’ film. Not even in this kids’ film. And yet, you find yourself strangely-accepting, understanding that all things come to an end, even things as good as this. It is easier to accept this because the characters accept this. Still, if you weren’t in a packed cinema, you know you wouldn’t have held your mouth closed for so long, wouldn’t have wiped at your eyes. You have every reason to cry.

Because this film has been about a prison break, has been about that thing that most people dream about at some point or another – escape. A getaway from one bad situation back into a good one, or even just into one they hope will be better than the hole they’re in. About making it to some place that those in control assure them it is impossible to reach.

Furthermore, this film has been an escape in itself, from the very start and up to this current point right here – it is not set in reality as we inhabit it, and, so we think, its main protagonists are not human but toys, moulded plastic and machine-shaped wood, these materials themselves rendered in CGI. This has been the most fun you’ve had at the cinema in ages – in fact, you can barely remember when you laughed so hard in front of a big screen. Sure, there’ve been bits of danger, threats to that fun, but nothing quite like this.

Reality is intruding now and, just because you’re accepting it, understanding it, doesn’t quite mean you’re liking it. At all.

And so you think of another prison film, The Shawshank Redemption, more recognisably set in reality than that, even if that reality begins about 70 years in the past, and you think of a scene in that film, a scene holding an old man in a dim-lit room, about to step up onto a chair. That man is called Brooks, and he has, after around 50 years in jail, finally been released on parole. He has, however, been released into a world in which he no longer fits, in which he no longer seems to have a purpose or a place. Motor cars that were, before he went inside, rarities on the roads, are now everywhere, and the only job he can get is in a small supermarket, packing bags, something he finds increasingly difficult with his arthritic hands. In prison, he was in charge of the library, he was respected, had friends, and he also had a bird that he took care of, which he released shortly before he was let out. Not so out here. Back in the room, he steps up onto the chair, scratches his name into the wooden beam running across the centre of the ceiling. Watching, you know what is coming, and, as hard to accept as it may be, you nevertheless find yourself accepting, knowing that this is not how things should be, but seeing, like Brooks himself, no other way out.

Likewise, in Toy Story 3, what has led the toys to such a point is the feeling that they were no longer needed by their owner, Andy – that, even if he did still care, with his leaving for college, they will be obsolete regardless, at least in terms of what they hoped to remain and hoped to be beyond that in the future. And yet, in Toy Story 3, something else is at play too. Brooks’ tragic end almost feels inevitable because he seems to have lost all hope, whereas the toys’ inevitable end feels tragic because they still had hope, they still have, even at that point, each other.

Indeed, it is, outside of the prison connection, the struggle to maintain hope, that eternal intangible, which most directly links these two films, and, moreover, the way in which both films take the notion of hope seriously, without ironically undercutting it, without belittling or downplaying its importance to the way a great many people try to live. For most of its first half, Toy Story 3 plays the conflict between those who keep and those who lose hope for gentle comedy, making references to mistakes made in the past by certain characters. Shawshank, in expected contrast, deals with this in a far more visceral fashion, through the steady disintegration of the prisoners at the titular jailhouse as they pass their years there – in particular, the disintegration of Andy Dufresne. Ostensibly the film’s main character, we see him most through the eyes of Red, largely from a distance, physical and emotional, at first, and then as a close friend by the time Andy is planning his own escape. Through Red’s eyes we see remarkable changes within Andy, in the way he acts, the way he talks, the way the lines look on his face.

But there is a strange and unexpected mischief in that face too, at times, and you get the feeling that those times are what makes Red accept this ‘new fish’, what makes him become his friend. After all, most of these moments come when Andy reaches out to Red and asks for something (Red being the prison’s fixer, and all). And it is those things that hold the key to understanding the way that hope works, and how it can motivate people to extraordinary things, at least in these two films.

Particularly, it is the pin-up posters he wants for his wall that are of primary importance. Indeed, one of the film’s most playful scenes comes when Andy walks into a screening of Gilda, notes all the prisoners enjoying the film even though they’ve seen it several times this month, and then taps Red on the shoulder and asks if he can get him the film’s star, Rita Hayworth. He is smiling as he asks this, and Red knows what he means, even as he feigns incredulity at being expected to bring this real-life movie star to Shawshank prison. Shortly afterwards, a large poster arrives, and Andy places it on his cell wall, across from his bed. He sits and stares at Gilda, Rita Hayworth in her prime, and, we get the feeling, he has already begun to dream.

This is not necessarily a salacious dream, however, more just another form of escape. You see, Rita represents not just the prime of A-list womanhood at the time, but also the good life in general. And, in more ways than one, she comes to represent his aspirations to travel once again beyond these prison walls. Of course, the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a key factor of many prison narratives, but it's rare to find it explored with such nuance and tenderness as it is at times within both of these films, particularly Shawshank.

In Toy Story 3, in a neatly quirky spot of invention, Mrs Potato Head discovers that she can still see Andy’s room from within the confines the daycare centre where they find themselves trapped, because her lost eye is still there – through that, they can monitor the progression of his packing as he gets closer and closer to leaving to college, and they can also discover that their ending up in this daycare centre was a mistake. On a more usual level, the toys can see the streets, or at least the roofs of other houses, from within the walls of the centre, and that view gives them further hope and incentive to escape. Likewise, in Shawshank, some of the prisoners, Andy and Red included, are allowed out to do (supervised) work on community projects, allowing them to (re-)experience important glimmers of life beyond bars, and, in one of the film’s most indelible moments, to sit on a rooftop which they have been tarring and drink beer as the sun is on its way to setting, each and every one of them feeling like free men.

However, there is one piece of information from the outside that reaches Red and Andy Dufresne that changes both men’s views and hopes for life when they leave Shawshank penitentiary, and that is the last letter from Brooks, his suicide note. From that point onwards, Red notices Andy growing both more reckless in his sly disregard for prison authority, and more distant again, more withdrawn, and, upon hearing from a competitor that Andy asked for a length of rope, he fears the worst. When Andy doesn’t step outside his cell the following morning, those fears seem to have been confirmed. Because, you recall, just about the last time they spoke properly, Andy told Red that what it seemed to come down to on the ‘inside’ was that one either had to ‘get busy living, or get busy dying’, and Red, given Andy’s recent behaviour, has assumed that he has opted for the latter option. As the guards move in to check Andy’s cell, he thinks, much as you were thinking at that moment in Toy Story 3, that his good friend’s fate is sealed.

But, once inside the cell, the guards find it empty. Andy has, despite the odds, escaped. In doing so he becomes the ultimate pin-up for the inmates, the perfect image to keep them hoping through all their long days and longer nights. Indeed, when Red is finally released on parole, and ends up working at the same store as Brooks did before ending his life, and living in the same apartment, it is only the thought of Andy that keeps him going, that keeps him from stepping up onto the same old chair. And it is only the thought of Andy that makes him remember something else his friend once said to him, which leads to him breaking parole and setting out for a town in Mexico, where Andy should be waiting to take him on as a partner in his charter fishing business. That makes him take a chance on his finding happiness again, and believe in his personal right to do so. All in all, it is entirely wonderful, and fitting, that the last two words of Red's voiceover should be ‘I’ and ‘hope’.

The only way, then, that it would seem a more definite sense of escape than Andy’s and, perhaps more crucially, Red’s can be achieved is with characters who don’t seem to inhabit or be subject to the harsh laws that sometimes intrude unbidden upon human life, with characters like toys. Because toys, well, they’re what you put all your hopes in when you’re younger, achieving anything you make believe they possibly can, always helping good win through, giving you comfort and maybe letting you dream, even for the slightest of moments, that real life will one day be this exciting, this important, this fantastic and this fun. Of course, within the grand scheme of things, that is why they have to reach that terrifying point, why those harsh laws have to intrude in here as well.

It could be suggested that this peril they come to face resembles a final loss of innocence in the life of the owner, Andy, before he steps up into the ‘adult’ world, but, more than that, it seems to signal an impending loss of imagination as well, of fealty to one’s dreams. An abandonment of one’s hitherto deepest convictions and desires for self-improvement, in the face of external pressures, such as the encroaching ‘prison’ of social expectation and forced responsibility.

Watching that scene, it becomes clear that you are crying, or almost crying, because you once reached a similar point in life, whether you took the time to notice then or not, and you, quite possibly, ceded something to those pressures. You’re on the verge of weeping because you didn’t see any way around that loss at the time and you felt forced into accepting it, whether you wanted to or not. Perhaps you couldn’t sleep some nights in the past because you couldn’t find the escape you wanted, so desperately, to find, even given all your hope. Perhaps you still can’t sleep some nights now for that same reason, whether you’d ever admit that to anyone or not. And you want to cry now because that same thing is happening to someone else – real or fictional, it doesn’t matter here, because the travesty being represented is the same.

And that’s why, when it comes down it, these toys were here in the first place, the reason Pixar brought them to life. To act, firstly, as avatars for our best-planned adventures, and then to remind us that we really do care about our deepest hopes and aspirations, however childlike the society around us may conspire to tell us that they are. That we have to do so, in order to fully care about and do right by ourselves.

When their inevitable doom is, brilliantly, avoided, therefore, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out, like Pixar have pulled their punches right at the moment they most needed to hold their nerve. It feels good. It feels bloody amazing. You can feel your lips stop trembling and break out into a grin. You still don’t know what to say, but it doesn’t matter, because, somehow, a kids’ film about toys being trapped in a daycare centre has restored a little bit of your hope, has let you know that maybe it’s alright for you to just go right ahead and restore more on your own.

But what really makes this experience exceptional is that is doesn’t stop there, that it can't, because there is the acceptance that, now ‘reality’ has intruded once, it can’t magically go away, not fully. Something is still coming to an end. Andy is still going to college, and he still can’t take his toys with him. So, following a slyly beautiful communication from Woody to his precious owner, the toys end up being taken over to the house of a family friend, and given over to her young daughter, Bonnie. And, thusly, does the film, and the series, achieve its peak, emotionally and ideologically. We see, as we watch that closing scene of Andy introducing all his toys to Bonnie, those toys (especially Woody) having their Pinocchio-moment, finally becoming a real boy. We see, as Andy plays with them one last time, that it has always been about him and his dreams, really. In the way that maybe your own toys were always more about your dreams than they ever were about whatever TV series they came from, whatever factory they were made in, whatever they looked like to anybody else when you were playing with them. And, whilst he does give the toys away in order to help someone else dream a little more truly, the finest moment comes as he waves goodbye before driving off towards college, and he lets out a short breath, one of those that might just make it out when you’re trying not to cry. He realises, as do we, that, just because the physical embodiments of those dreams are moving on, it doesn’t mean that the things he’s learnt from them have to go away, doesn’t mean that he has to give up on the way he really wants to be within himself. And, if he gets stuck, he’s always got the photograph of his younger self with them all, just as a sign of something well-worth hoping for.

If, then, there’s one thing that all characters learn by the end of Toy Story 3, it’s that (slightly contrary to conventional wisdom) most of the time you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s nearly gone - at which point, of course, you can still try and do something about it. Correspondingly, there is the suggestion that if you still don’t know by that time then you probably didn’t deserve whatever it was to start with. The beauty of Toy Story 3, just as with The Shawshank Redemption, is that the heroes know. They know the value of their friends, they know the value of themselves, and of their dreams and of the things that move them; and they also know that, even if you have to let go of something, you should always try and let go well. Indeed, that’s precisely why they’re heroes.