Cinema: Champions

ROBIN AND MARIAN

Directed by RICHARD LESTER Screenplay by JAMES GOLDMAN

Robin Hood is having some trouble keeping pace with his legend. A bright, boisterous man with an occasional taste for reflection, he reasons that a man who reaches 40 has had a good and generous life. Since he and Little John both are some years past the mark, Robin supposes that they have been particularly blessed.

Such insights help tide them over some of life’s disappointments. Certainly the Crusades, which have consumed nearly 20 years of the pair’s life when the film opens, were not all they should have been, and when the mad, majestic Richard Lionheart finally dies, Robin and Little John leave France with no regrets, riding north for England and Sherwood Forest. There, everything seems familiar. Robin and Little John come upon Friar Tuck and Will Scarlett, who are hunting deer in the forest. Now Richard’s brother John is King, and their old adversary, the sheriff, still rules in Nottingham. Will brings Robin and Little John up to date by singing a popular ballad about the putative exploits of the merry men in their pre-Crusades youth. “But, Will,” Robin protests, pleased, “we never did any of those things.” Then he asks about Marian.

This sentimental, flawed but quite wonderful movie is about romance and reunion, about people trying to measure up to the myths created about them.

Robin and Marian flirts with serious trouble a couple of times but is saved from lasting damage by a particularly bracing conspiracy of talents. Toward the end of the film, when adversary armies led by Robin and the sheriff face each other across a plain, Robin proposes that instead of both forces clashing, the battle be “settled with champions.” The movie is resolved and enhanced in much the same way.

Almost everyone involved with Robin and Marian could be a champion. One thinks immediately of the model supporting cast: Richard Harris as Richard Lionheart, Denholm Elliott as Will Scarlett, Ian Holm as King John, Kenneth Haigh as the duplicitous Sir Ranulf. There is also the ravishing cinematography of David Watkin, who makes Sherwood into a forest well suited to legend. Particularly there is Sean Connery’s Robin Hood, Nicol Williamson’s Little John, Robert Shaw’s winter-eyed Sheriff, Audrey Hepburn’s Maid Marian—and Richard Lester, a film maker of deft wit and frequent brilliance.

Zest for Buffoonery. James Goldman’s sweet-spirited script owes much to his previous The Lion in Winter, although Robin and Marian lacks the lofty airs that marred its predecessor. Marian has taken the veil, but presides over a tiny abbey with worldly animation. She swears with precision and puts up a heated battle when Robin insists on saving her from the sheriffs clutches. She would as soon go to prison, but she has little choice in the matter. Robin slings her over the back of a horse as if she were a saddlebag.

Their romance continues in this fashion, moving from barbed banter to admissions of continued affection. Marian tells Robin her confessions were “the envy of the convent,” then reminds him with a pretty sulk, “You never wrote.” Says Robin, “I don’t know how.” Seeing Marian, being back in Sherwood, rekindles Robin’s spirits. Age and old scars are forgotten, save in times of extreme stress—as in a sword fight on the castle walls of Nottingham. It is just the sort of escapade that Marian was hoping Robin would abandon.

Robin and Marian is a film that must stand or fall on the strength of its stars. Fortunately, it has two of the best. Connery is a genuine masculine presence, not afraid to be tender. He also has a real zest for buffoonery that flourishes under Lester’s considerable encouragement. Audrey Hepburn has not made a movie in seven years. The moment she appears on screen is startling, not for her thorough, gentle command, not even for her beauty, which seems heightened, renewed. It is rather that we are reminded of how long it has been since an actress has so beguiled us and captured our imagination. Hepburn is unique and, now, almost alone.

She and Connery are imperfectly matched—silk and chain mail—which means, of course, that they are superb together. It is tempting but unfair to go into details of their last scene. Let it just be said that it is one of the most unconscionable assaults on the tear ducts since . . . well, since long before Hepburn’s temporary retirement.

Jay Cocks

At $1 million a picture and all the Givenchy clothes she could wear, Audrey Hepburn seemed immovably fixed as Hollywood’s romantic princess. Then in 1969, she quietly married Dr. Andrea Dotti, a handsome Italian psychiatrist nine years her junior. She moved to Rome and dropped out of the movies. The scripts continued to arrive—and be rejected—until, attracted by the challenge of playing the part of a woman who, like herself, is 46, she agreed to star in Robin and Marian. Last summer she arrived on location in Spain with a retinue consisting of her personal hairdresser, makeup woman, and chaperone, and with a bad case of “stomachaches and clammy hands, because after all those years I didn’t know what to expect.”

Whatever she expected was not nearly as unnerving as what she got. Accustomed to the deference and more leisurely tempo of old-style Hollywood film makers, she was unprepared for the whirlwind 36-day shooting schedule. Lester’s frenetic pace permitted few concessions to star status. Even the canvas chair, that basic symbol of stardom, was not provided; Hepburn had to use an aluminum chair from her trailer.

The director refused to slacken speed for retakes that she wanted; once he insisted on shooting a key scene between Marian and Little John even though Hepburn was suffering from a sore throat and had lost her voice.

Another of Hepburn’s mishaps became a scene in the picture. She was driving a cart beside a stream. The horse refused to stop and toppled into 6 ft. of muddy water. Lester kept the cameras rolling. Then he wrote a scene in which Robin fishes Marian out and carries her lovingly to the bank.

Aiming for greater realism, Lester kept cutting down on the love story between Robin and Marian, and Hepburn fought to retain some of her best romantic lines with Connery. Says she: “With all those men, I was the one who had to defend the romance in the picture. Somebody had to take care of Marian.”

Long Absence. Marian could not have been in safer hands. “I’ve never made a film so fast and I would like to have had more time,” Hepburn says now. “But he is very different—extraordinary, spontaneous. Everything has to be new, practically impromptu.” Adds a studio executive, with his own brand of diplomacy: “Audrey could get along with Hitler, but Lester is not in her scrapbook of unforgettable characters.”

In the end Hepburn’s greatest anxiety was not knowing how she looked on the screen after her long absence, because she did not see daily rushes on location. This week she finally saw Robin and Marian at its New York premiere at Radio City. When asked what she thought of herself, she replied in the manner of her unforgettable princess in Roman Holiday: “I shall have to see it again before I decide.”