Robin and Marian

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this John Barry-scored movie the whole way through, even though it used to play on HBO all the time when I was a kid. It’s a quintessentially Seventies updating of the Robin Hood legend, with Sean Connery as an old-fart Robin and Audrey Hepburn as an aging Marian, together again with the gang for one last stab at glory in Sherwood Forest.

It’s also a pretty awful movie of a pretty good concept — cheesy and underdone (how could England look so ugly?), with logic holes big enough to drive a truck through. However, the semi-famous last scene is pretty cool (spoiler alert): sensing time and fate closing in on them, Maid Marian slips wounded Robin a poison mickey and quaffs some herself, and they have a long and fairly romantic death scene. I loved this when I was a kid, because it all seemed so serious and grownup, and the music was so pretty, so that meant it had to be moving and meaningful, even if I didn’t really get it. And then, as he’s dying, Robin shoots an arrow out the window! Oh, how beautiful.

Well, I’m all grown up now and unfortunately the rest of the movie is just bad filmmaking. Aside from John Barry’s very unique gift for absolutely gorgeous slow melodies, I actually found the underscore kind of disconcertingly undramatic, even self-absorbed. There’s a scene near the end where Robin and his men are in Sherwood Forest, preparing for their final confrontation, and everyone is doing all sorts of different things (women sewing, men training) and clearly feeling different emotions, but the score doesn’t seem to acknowledge this in any vivid way, and the dynamic range of the music seems very narrow.

Whatever the criticism though, even as I sat through this movie I waited to see if the last scene was as I remembered it, and it was. Really, this is what film music is ultimately about - the great moments, and making ordinary moments seem great.