When I think of King Arthur, my mind immediately bolts to Excalibur (1980) as being the film-ic gold standard. But Robin Hood…? I might have caught half a dozen adaptations over the years, either in whole or part, and they all seemed pretty underwhelming. I just go to the Howard Pyle collected book if I want Robin Hood!
The Flame and The Arrow is actually not a Robin Hood movie even though it has most of Robin Hood inventory at place. And Burt Lancaster sure does his share of swashbuckling. He should’ve played Green Arrow - he could pull it off.
As for Robin Hood movies - I don’t know - Fairbanks and Flynn ones go hard. I even like the Disney one and the Sean Connery one will always have a place in my heart. My personal favorite is actually a video game in which is basically Commandos (another all-time favorite) but with Merry Men and it had great fencing mechanic and you could play pacifist.
Excalibur is such an awesome movie that manages to pack so much into relatively short runtime. If you know the stories - it is insane just how much Boorman managed to cram without overloading the movie into incoherence.
Fairbanks and Flynn ones go hard.
I’ve enjoyed them (and a couple others), but they also contain so much film convention from the time that it’s hard not to be constantly reminded of that. One of the things about Excalibur is that it almost seems like it was filmed just as the mythical stories occurred, of course with stuff like the much-later developed armor being shoe-horned in.
Good point about the video games. Robin has some presence in the Defender of the Crown series, but no doubt there’s more directly-relevant games out there, such as you mention. Actually, my complaint also holds true for comic books. The American attempts I’ve read are just laughable, and even on the BD side, there’s not much I’ve found very good.
it is insane just how much Boorman managed to cram without overloading the movie into incoherence.
Only for a bunch of critics at the time to call the film ‘borderline incoherent.’ Thank Josh that tended to fade, given time.
while of its time - i don’t really see it as something detrimental - Fairbanks was force of nature on screen and Flynn’s charisma could electrify countries - Charlie Chaplin shorts also look “of its time” but it doesn’t make them worse.
With that said, GIMME MUMBLECORE ROBIN HOOD MOVIE WITH FAIRBANKS STYLE STUNTS STARRING LOUIS GARREL DOING A CHRISTOPHER LAMBERT IN HIGHLANDER PERFORMANCE
lol
while of its time - i don’t really see it as something detrimental
Well, no. “Detrimental” isn’t the right word. More like-- this is plainly a movie shot in the 20’s / 30’s etc, will a landslide of little reminders upon such. Hence mentioning Excalibur yet again for context.
Charlie Chaplin shorts also look “of its time” but it doesn’t make them worse.
Of course not. They’re generally depicting the exact same era the film was shot in, so its perfectly appropriate IMO. It’s the rarer films like Young Frankenstein and Ed Wood that do a great job persuading the viewer it’s also somewhat true, even when it’s complete fiction.
I don’t know. I kinda stopped caring about immersion a long time ago. If the storytelling works - it works. If it doesn’t - which happens a lot in Hollywood - well, tough shit.
Young Frankenstein was stylized after 1930s films but with modern tech that smoothed out many rough edges. It did a very good job at mimicking Karl Freund lighting setups and camera movements and much of scene blocking is modeled after James Whale’s sink-in approach. It is a very post-modern but somehow manages to avoid being a gimmick. Probably because Wilder insisted on playing it straight. And then Brooks did Silent Movie and it was all gimmick and it totally failed compared to Young Frankenstein.
Now Ed Wood is a weird one because stylistically it has more to do with Orson Welles and his baroque style than anything of Wood’s. The only difference is that Burton applies single narrative perspective instead of multiple perspective narrative but somehow manages to pull off same unreliable narrator effect out it. It is actually very impressive from storytelling standpoint.
On a side note - what if Blair Witch Project was made in 1930s Hollywood? Now that’s the case for AI SLOP! Gimme Carol Lombard, Cary Grant and Clark Gable wandering in the… sets that look like woods busting machine gun back and forth dialogue that is all punchlines.
I kinda stopped caring about immersion a long time ago. If the storytelling works - it works. If it doesn’t - which happens a lot in Hollywood - well, tough shit.
I’d say I’m with you on that. I feel sort of similarly when reading BD fiction-- the author can go for whatever outlandishly oddball world-building they want to, but the storytelling has to be there, as well as a level of internal consistency. Cheats and shortcuts tend to erode the ‘truth’ of such worlds.
Again, interesting comments on the movie-making technique that sadly go over my head for the most part. I hope you find some early-era film scholars to talk to on the Fediverse, as I’d kinda like to be a fly on that wall.
regarding BD storytelling - from my perspective - it’s the Caza Bilal conundrum - both have it in opposite ways.
Caza is like sun exploding with his narrative style in Arkhe and Lailah and it takes time just to figure out how it works but then it just clicks but you also understand how this thing won’t work any other way. Then there is Bilal who seemingly always plays it comparably straight but if you read closely he goes full Derrida on story elements like he’s rendering every story into a chess problem that requires some extreme out of the box thinking and the whole thing completely transforms in meaning. This method peaks in Nikopol (sometimes literally with chess boxing storyline).
on a sidenote going back to America - the Liefeld paradox. That dude is both not very good artist in technical terms but also incredibly inventive if absolutely ridiculous storyteller. His stuff just works. I happened to read Youngblood (don’t look at me like that) and was amazed how braindead the stories are but how efficient the storytelling is.
