A century’s worth of Robin Hood on screen • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Alongside the likes of King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood is one of English literature’s most larger-than-life characters, a figure synonymous with tales of heroism that have entered the wider pop-cultural lexicon and endure today.

From Errol Flynn’s gallant rendering of the outlaw against lush ’30s Technicolor in The Adventures of Robin Hood to Mel Brooks’ cheeky put-on of the character in the ’90s spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Hood long ago became a household name. Some fondly recall the charming fox from 1973’s Disney-animated version of the legend, while others still pine for Kevin Costner from 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. There’s the expert archery, iconic swordfights and that iconic phrase: “Steal from the rich and give to the poor.” The movies have made him immortal.

What makes Robin Hood even more fascinating is that stories of the outlaw came first out of a handful of spoken-word ballads, most likely written around 1450. As R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor wrote in Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw, their academic exploration of the character, “Robin Hood was a real hero to simple and unlettered people: his perennial popularity shows that, transcending its historical context, his myth had in it some element of universal appeal.”

Through the centuries, people have told each other tales of a bandit that took the law into his own hands, in opposition to corrupt power structures. This tale has survived through the ages precisely because those struggling have taken solace in creating their own versions of it. In those early ballads, there was no heroine akin to Maid Marian, and Robin was not a rebellious nobleman. He didn’t even steal from the rich to give to the poor; instead, he was a commoner in conflict with corrupt local bishops, monks, and sheriffs. (That said, the “hye sherif of Notyingham” appears in A Gest of Robyn Hode, among the earliest and longest surviving texts about the outlaw.)

Still, much of what we now associate with the legend was popularized by Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, published in the early 1800s. By the time Douglas Fairbanks played Robin Hood in the 1922 silent epic, he had been reimagined as an earl who joins his king, Richard the Lionheart, to fight in the Crusades. While away, Prince John—and the evil Sir Guy of Gisbourne—plot a coup d’état, and Lady Marian gets word to the good earl, who returns to fight Prince John on behalf of the king. To do so, he assumes the alias of Robin Hood and makes camp in Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men.

Out of such additions arose the legend we know today. As time’s gone by, new takes have emerged, some focusing on the centuries-long conflict between the Saxons and the Normans (Flynn’s Robin Hood), while others use the outlaw’s story as a backdrop to evolving rules of law like the Magna Carta (Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood). Over the last century, there have been roughly twenty theatrically released Robin Hood films.

Now, with Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood in theaters from A24, we list the most essential ones to watch.