Robin Hood ***** (1922, Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Enid Bennett, Wallace Beery, Alan Hale Sr) – Classic Movie Review 1792

Douglas Fairbanks Sr stars in one of his most famous and iconic roles as the king’s favoured knight The Earl of Huntingdon, who becomes the outlaw Robin Hood to protect the oppressed English people from the tyrannical regent Prince John, the stand-in ruler while King Richard goes on the Crusades.

Cult name Canadian-born director Allan Dwan tends to canter rather than gallop through the first half of writer-producer star Fairbanks Sr’s famed big-budget 1922 silent movie. But this is easily compensated for by the huge verve of the film’s exhilarating second half when he picks up the pace and the excitement thrills.

The movie is best remembered for the star’s incredible death-defying descent down a vast curtain. But even this is bettered by an enormous leap from the battlements to a wall, then to a moving drawbridge and so on to the window of the Lady Marian Fitzwalter (Enid Bennett).

Wallace Beery and Alan Hale Sr co-star as King Richard the Lion-Hearted and Little John, with Paul Dickey and William Lowery as Sir Guy of Gisbourne and The High Sheriff of Nottingham. Willard Louis is Friar Tuck, Lloyd Talman is Allan-a-Dale and Bud Geary is Will Scarlett. These are all rousing performances, with Dickey and Sam De Grasse as Prince John making fine villains, one after Lady Marian, the other Richard’s crown.

Alas, there are some exquisitely embarrassing performances in the smaller roles. But Fairbanks Sr’s famed acrobatics, the superlative feats of swashbuckling, the displays of pageantry, and Wilfrid Buckland and Irvin J Martin’s superb set designs more than make up for any minor downsides.

If Fairbanks Sr was world-famous royalty at the time, this film shows why. Robin Hood is an awesome, sometimes heart-stopping achievement. It was the most expensive movie of its time, with a production cost of $930,000. The big budget includes an amazing castle set for King Richard.

Memorable inter-titles include interjections of supposedly medieval English catchphrases like ‘I’ll knop your scop’.

Alan Hale makes the first of three appearances as Little John in Robin Hood films. He was also Little John with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and with John Derek in Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950).

Three versions exist, one at 117 minutes, the 1997 AMC print at 120 minutes and the 2012 Raymond Rohauer print at 143 minutes.

It is the first movie to have a gala premiere, an idea conceived by cinema owner Sid Grauman. The premiere was held at Grauman’s then brand-new Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The Los Angeles Angels were used as extras to play Robin Hood’s Merry Men in the film.

Never a ‘lost movie’ as legend has it, the film was restored by the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, with screenings at the Eastman House’s Dryden Theater with an 11-piece orchestra on October 24 2009 and at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on June 27 2011. It has also appeared on DVD in a colorised version.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1792

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