Robin and Marion, 37 years later

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass … Wordsworth, Immortality Ode

A little over mid-way in Robin and Marion (dir. Robert Lester, script James Goldman, producer Denis O’Dell, original music John Barry, photographed by David Watkin)

Dear friends and readers,

Last night I re-watched Robin and Marion whose date at imdb, 1976, tells me it was 37 years ago Jim and I first saw it. It was a personal journey for me. I probably meant to have a nostalgia melancholy memory journey with Jim but he was not up to watching, and the film was also not as fine as I remembered it. The work’s fable (story, plot-design) matter is both sexist and pro-violence in a mindless way. Robin (Sean Connery) shows up and before you know it Marion (Audrey Hepburn) has given up her veil and is back to cooking and sewing for him while he forages out man-like to put together a band of aging and too young men …

The central ending is engineered by the Sheriff (Robert Shaw) who again wants to root out Robin and his egalitarian band — this time a one-on-one combat. They manage to destroy one another — so this is presented as something gained? The still shows the scene is done with the basic theme of aging in mind (what saves it is this):

However the usual clichéd presentations of Richard and John are unqualified.

At the time what was remarked upon was how the actors and scenery no longer looked like Errol Flynn & Olivia de Havilland in fancy stage gear. This is so, the clothes were much less pretty, more cloth, and the surroundings and village and weapons (genuinely primitive) far more persuasive. Alas, we have gone beyond this to a grittier realism. The film is a sort of idyll — the cinematographer loved his work and sought to depict a land relatively empty of people, pastoral and the music carried laden emotions along lightly

Robin and Little John (Nicol Williamson) arriving

But for the watcher of 2013 it’s also not as un-costumy in today’s terms — the costumes are so clean, so whole, the furniture like some card Arthurian board-game. Audry Hepburn does not have a single wrinkle and is so youthful in body and face this jars as camera work is more realistic nowadays and Sean Connery plays himself — something he’s done for a long time, he’s too easy in the part. The lines outside those given Robin and Marion in their exchanges lose the theme, are wooden, at their best spare, though the cast was excellent: Denholm Elliot as Will Scarlett:

Robert Shaw, the Sheriff; Richard Harris, king Richard; Ian Holm, king John.

So what does it have 37 years later? Well as we look back to it from yet older age, it’s theme of middle age springs out at you with a single complex of living emotion done singularly evocatively, a conception of aging people who can’t return to their youth even in this glorious landscape, and especially the conception of an aging couple trying to re-capture the past, or re-live it for a moment here or there.

Thus the quiet loveliness of beautiful spots in the country with the muted music (not many trumpets in this film, no crashing surging chords at all) become a form of aching like that found in Wordsworth’s famous “Immortality Ode.” When the two ex-lovers have re-spent time, moved to one spot, joined as a pair a company, they find they are still breathless with passion and when they get together we see them dive into the grass and love-making is understood to resume, thus the Wordsworth lines (see above): but with this addition (I’m quoting a friend). Remember, nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass. The emphasis is all are older (some comically clumsy) and there has been much hurt and loss.

It’s not quite Before Midnight of course as the reasons for the failures are kept fairy tale and boyish: Robin of course had to go to the Crusades, couldn’t resist. If the film-makers could have gotten some other reason for the final scenes of the movie than the ending that would have improved the film a lot. What we get is wrestling–with–swords to the death (I doubt many action-adventure movie types would get this far).

I doubt its other themes could be carried off today: egalitarianism, rebellion against obvious evil, a really felt melancholy over a set of idealized pastoral characters inside a past not retrieved — this reflects something pre-1980, pre-Thatcher, pre-Reagan. It’s presented too naively too, with the assumption we are offended by careerism, ruthless ambition, selfishness (with the bad male characters standing in for these).

I was still touched by the close. After the battle, won by Robin’s having killed the Sheriff, Robin returns to Marion’s cell like room (which I thought Marion had abandoned) perhaps himself to die, or to survive maimed:

I think she does have some line about how she doesn’t want this sort of thing anymore, no more of this forced or volunteer fighting. So they cannot escape but one way. After the scene of their hands stretched out recalls Michelangelo’s God and Adam — they reach out like Adam and God, without explaining why — Marion pours poison into a cup which she drinks from too.

The characters are presented simply: so Sean-Robin remains puzzled at the use of a poisoned chalice, he seems to soon accept their coming fate, and if you abandon your mind to this finale, it can work a kind of realization of something precious now destroyed. They are a kind of Tristan and Isolde without an appropriate story to move through to reach this point.

They will both die, one will not be left without the other. Little John comes in

in the end then I had another kind of experience than I had thought: Jim is now too ill for us go wandering in the grass and know what we once did, but we can hold fast to something else. Another quotation came to mind for this scene and the whole of the film: and I became an English major because of Wordsworth’s Michael, the lines

There is a comfort in the strength of love
Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would break the heart ..

Ellen