Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood: an outlaw hero that even the rich can love

[Hannah Bell]

The story of Robin Hood is one of the most beloved myths in the English-speaking cultural tradition. A figure symbolizing resistance to the false authority of wealth and privilege and the communal solidarity of the exploited, he has been transmitted to us from medieval England in countless books, plays and film.

This process has naturally wrought numerous changes on the tale for better or worse, depending on the social, economic and ideological pressures of the times. Yet, the tale persists in popular consciousness to the extent that it captures some essential truths about society, law and the class nature of morality itself.

In their new version of the legend, Robin Hood, Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland happily eviscerate all of the character’s essential content, leaving a dry husk filled with their own nasty concoction. To summarize, they revise the story to add a chapter in the life of Robin Hood which precedes the great story we all know and love, or in Hollywood-speak: they have made a “prequel”.

This new chapter presents a very unheroic, brooding Robin (Russell Crowe) who is not really an outlaw at all, but ultimately a great patriot who aids a corrupt and ruthless king to unite the country — exploiters and exploited alike — against a demonic and ever-present foreign enemy, France. Another new addition: Robin Hood and his merry men initially meet and band together as mercenaries slaughtering Muslims in the Crusades!

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/hood-j09.shtml

[Tansy_Gold]

1. The 1950s TV version

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_Films

Sapphire Films was a British television production company, active in the 1950s. Amongst their best-known series are The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, produced for ITC Entertainment and screened on ITV in the UK, as well as being networked in the United States.

Sapphire Films was founded by producer Hannah Weinstein, in part with funds provided by the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party USA.<1> Weinstein hired many blacklisted Hollywood writers to write scripts for The Adventures of Robin Hood under pseudonyms, and instituted elaborate security measures to ensure that the writers' true identities remained secret.<1>




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Robin_Hood_(TV_series)


After the blacklist collapsed, Lardner said that the series' format allowed him "plenty of opportunities to comment on issues and institutions in Eisenhower-era America". In addition to the redistributive themes of a hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, many episodes in the programme's first two seasons included the threat that Robin and his band would be betrayed to the authorities by friends or loved ones, much as the blacklisted writers had been.<1>

[ProgressiveVictory]

2. I liked the movie.

[Hannah Bell]

3. yes, you think inheritance tax = double taxation.

[ProgressiveVictory]

4. I didn't know and asked a question. how does this have anything to do with Robin Hood?

does my opinion not count because I'm not good enough in your book?

[Hannah Bell]

5. But the tale of Robin wasn’t merely spun whole cloth from the popular imagination.

It had definite roots in socioeconomic conflicts in late medieval England. This period in England was closely analyzed by Karl Marx in Capital as a case study in what he dubbed the “primitive accumulation of capital,” or the prehistory of capitalism. “This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology,” according to Marx.

From an socioeconomic standpoint this was the period when the feudal order—in which the peasant was attached to an overlord, owned his own small tools and some parcel of land that had been passed on to offspring as a matter of right for several hundred years—underwent a transformation. In the old society’s womb a new social order emerged, in which feudal bonds were broken, the peasant-laborer was stripped of his individual tools, land and obligations to a lord and thrust into larger capitalist enterprises where labor became a social process, carried out with industrial-size tools owned by the private entrepreneur.

This was a brutal process experienced by masses of people in late medieval England, the period in which Robin Hood first became so popular...these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/hood-j09.shtml


now rewritten to line up with the state war on muslims, with the merry men as blackwater thugs

[ProgressiveVictory]

7. so its making fun of the U.S.?

[amborin]

6. how fitting! revisionist mythology in keeping w/ our empire-mongering plutocracy