Yesterday's Hits: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a hit?: As with other oft-filmed tales like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, every era seems to get the Robin Hood it deserves. The silent era got Douglas Fairbanks, in a role that highlighted his formidable athleticism. In the 1930s came The Adventures of Robin Hood (still the version to beat), in which Errol Flynn turned the classic hero into a dashing rogue. The elegiac seventies brought Robin and Marian, which starred Sean Connery as an older and somewhat sadder version of the character. And by the early 1990s, Robin had morphed into the sensitive-hunk archetype that was in vogue at the time, played by one of its biggest stars, Kevin Costner.

In addition to making adjustments to the title character to suit the era, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also added some politically correct touches, including making Marian more fierce and less of a damsel, as well as keeping with the recent tendency to include a Moorish character in Robin’s Merry Men. Likewise, director Kevin Reynolds was able to juice up the action scenes using then-advanced special effects, including the famous shot in which the camera mimics the point of view of an arrow shot from Robin’s bow. And a full-out marketing blitz ensured that the film appealed to a wide audience, from kids who might be experiencing the story onscreen for the first time to adults who grew up on the older versions but were curious to see a new take on the tale. The strategy worked, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves became the second-highest-grossing blockbuster of 1991, bringing in $160 million in the United States alone and another $225 million internationally.

What happened?: Audiences flocked to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but even on its original release, the movie was plagued by a good amount of negative buzz. For one thing, there was the issue of Kevin Costner’s accent- he begins the film attempting a British accent, but within the first reel it disappears altogether, and neither of these solutions proved especially pleasing to audiences. But a bigger problem was that the film was more violent than its advertising had led audiences to believe. Warner Bros. had pre-sold the film to the family audience with such promotions as children’s toys and a breakfast cereal that was heavily advertised during Saturday morning cartoons. But when parents took their kids to the film, they were faced by such scenes as a man’s hand being severed, a number of people getting burned alive, the possible hanging of a young boy, and the attempted rape of Marian by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Both of these factors, combined with the film’s middling critical reception, helped the keep the film from enduring in the public’s esteem.

Does Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves still work?: Not very well. There’s a popular adage that a blockbuster is only as good as its villain, but Prince of Thieves put that wisdom to the test. This isn’t to say that Alan Rickman isn’t a blast as the Sheriff of Nottingham. But while Rickman- who was given more or less full creative control of the character as a condition of taking the part- makes a sneering, perfectly odious bad guy, he’s so committed to making Nottingham evil that he ends up overwhelming the story. A little of Rickman’s Nottingham goes a long way, but Reynolds structures the story like a cross-cutting tennis match, volleying scenes back and forth between Robin Hood’s antics and Nottingham’s over-the-top reactions to them.

Not helping matters is Costner’s performance, in which his accent issues were the least of his troubles. More damaging is Costner’s laid-back persona, which makes Robin Hood feel something less than heroic despite his good lucks and gift with a bow. In his salad days, Costner’s appeal was that he felt like a working-class everyguy, like a character from a Bruce Springsteen song personified. But when called upon to play a leader of men, Costner doesn’t have what it takes. This quality also makes it difficult to buy Robin’s past as a spoiled rich kid, which is mentioned at several occasions in the film. Perhaps Mel Gibson, who turned down the role before Costner signed on, could have pulled off the character as written, while making him more charismatic and entertaining besides.

But then, entertainment value is in relatively short supply in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The high spirits one normally associates with Robin Hood is largely absent from this telling of the story, replaced by- well, not much of anything. The Merry Men aren’t merry enough, Will Scarlet (Christian Slater) is too bogged down with a secret resentment for Robin Hood to function as a full-fledged character, and Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) has no chemistry whatsoever with Robin, thereby making their romantic subplot less inevitable than obligatory. Practically the only good guy who makes much of an impression is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), the Moor who bound himself to Robin after Robin saved his life. And the battle sequences, ambitious and violent as they are, are neither exciting nor especially clever. In short, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves isn’t much fun. And really, shouldn’t a Robin Hood movie at least be fun?

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.

The Screengrab : douglas fairbanks

Yesterday's Hits: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds)

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum