Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922) – Review

1922’s Robin Hood – released as Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood – is one of those silent-era spectacles that makes you wonder if early Hollywood briefly lost its collective mind and decided to build an entire medieval city just for fun. Released at the absolute height of the silent swashbuckler craze, the film exists largely as a grand showcase for the unstoppable athletic charisma of Fairbanks. The result is a massive, lavish, occasionally goofy adventure that helped define what we now think of as the classic Robin Hood legend on screen.

The film opens with the dashing Earl of Huntingdon (Douglas Fairbanks) besting his bitter enemy, Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Paul Dickey), in a jousting match, establishing right away that this fellow is the kind of man who wins tournaments before breakfast. Huntingdon then joins King Richard the Lion-Hearted (Wallace Beery), who is heading off to the Crusades and leaves his less-than-trustworthy brother, Prince John (Sam De Grasse), in charge as regent. Naturally, this proves to be about as wise as leaving a fox in charge of the royal henhouse, as Prince John soon reveals himself to be a cruel, scheming tyrant who, encouraged by Sir Guy, decides he quite likes the throne and takes it.

A right pair of villains.

Back in the Holy Land, Huntingdon receives a message from Lady Marian Fitzwalter (Enid Bennett), his beloved, explaining that England has gone straight to the dogs under Prince John’s rule. He requests permission from King Richard to return home and help sort things out, but Richard—apparently in no mood for nuance—assumes the Earl is trying to dodge crusading duties and denies the request. When Huntingdon attempts to leave anyway, Sir Guy ambushes him, has him branded a deserter, and tosses him in prison. After escaping captivity, the Earl risks both life and reputation to return to England, only to find that he and his friends have been declared outlaws and that Marian is believed to be dead.

“I think it’s time for a career change.”

Refusing to let tyranny ruin everyone’s day, Huntingdon reinvents himself as Robin Hood, the acrobatic champion of the oppressed. From the greenwood of Sherwood Forest, he gathers a merry band: Friar Tuck (Willard Louis), Little John (Alan Hale), Will Scarlet (Bud Geary), and Allan-a-Dale (Lloyd Talman)—and proceeds to make Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s lives an absolute nightmare through daring raids and cheerful lawbreaking. Robin rescues Marian from Prince John’s clutches, defeats Sir Guy in a climactic clash, and is briefly captured before the timely return of King Richard restores order, reunites Robin with Marian, and reminds Prince John that attempted royal usurpation is generally frowned upon.

“I declare a happy ending!”

Stray Observations:

• This is a rare Robin Hood who seems oddly afraid of women. He’ll leap castle walls and fight armies without blinking, but gets strangely awkward whenever Marian appears.
• Little John is first introduced as Huntingdon’s squire, but the fact that he is left behind when Huntingdon goes off to the Crusades is a little odd.
• Huntingdon asks the King for permission to return to England, but without telling him why, for…. reasons? Is this stupidity, or simply to add dramatic tension?
• Sir Guy of Gisbourne uses his own dagger in his failed attempt at regicide. Yeah, not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
• In this version, the famous quarterstaff fight is not between Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, but between Friar Tuck and a disguised King Richard.
• The enormous castle and Nottingham sets were constructed at the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio and were so massive that they became tourist attractions during production.
• Some of the sets were designed by architect Lloyd Wright, son of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which may make this the only medieval adventure movie with a serious architectural pedigree.
• Alan Hale, who plays Little John here, would go on to reprise the role again in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn.
• The Sheriff’s guards are hilariously incompetent at catching Robin, which becomes a recurring theme of basically every Robin Hood story ever told.
• Some prints include an early Technicolor sequence during the court pageantry, which must have blown audiences’ minds in 1922.

Today, it’s still rather impressive.

One of the most jaw-dropping aspects of Robin Hood is simply how enormous it is. The filmmakers didn’t just build a few backdrops and call it Nottingham; they constructed an entire medieval city on the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio lot in Hollywood, complete with massive stone gates, towers, and streets filled with extras. The castle alone looks large enough to withstand a genuine siege. When hundreds of performers flood through the courtyard, the film briefly resembles a historical epic decades before Hollywood perfected the form. For a 1922 production, the scale borders on the absurd in the best possible way.

That scale also came with a staggering price tag. 

The film reportedly cost around $1 million, which in modern terms works out to roughly $19 million—an astronomical budget for the silent era. You can see every dollar on screen: giant sets, elaborate costumes, enormous crowd scenes, and production design that feels far more ambitious than most films of its time. It’s the sort of spectacle that only early Hollywood, drunk on its own newfound power, would attempt. Even beyond the physical scale, the film shows a surprising level of visual sophistication in its use of colour tinting, a common silent-era technique where different scenes were bathed in specific hues. Cool blues suggest night or secrecy, warm ambers evoke torchlit interiors, and other tints help guide the audience through changing locations and moods. The result is that this silent film quietly uses colour with impressive effectiveness, adding atmosphere and emotional texture long before full-colour cinema became the norm.

The colour of romance.

As an adaptation of the Robin Hood legends, the film takes a few liberties but captures the spirit of the mythology remarkably well. Instead of starting with Robin already in Sherwood Forest, it gives us a full origin story for the Earl of Huntingdon, turning him into a nobleman who deliberately becomes an outlaw in order to fight tyranny. This adds a sense of heroic sacrifice to the story while still delivering all the classic elements: Sherwood Forest, the merry men, the wicked Prince John, and a whole lot of cheerful rebellion against corrupt authority. In many ways, the movie codifies the version of Robin Hood that later films would follow. The noble outlaw, the merry brotherhood, the romantic bond with Marian, and the climactic return of King Richard all appear here in a form that later adaptations would refine but rarely replace.

“You’ve been a terrible brother.”

The influence of 1922’s Robin Hood on later adventure films is enormous. The movie helped establish the swashbuckler as a major Hollywood genre, laying the groundwork for the sword-fighting spectacles that would dominate the 1930s and 1940s. You can see its DNA in everything from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood films to later adventure heroes like Zorro, pirates, musketeers, and pretty much any cinematic rogue who prefers rooftops and rope swings to walking through doors like a normal person. Its action style—acrobatic, playful, and heavily centred around a charismatic hero—became the template for decades of adventure cinema. Modern action films may rely more on explosions and CGI, but the basic appeal of a fearless hero performing outrageous physical feats started here.

Stunt Note: Despite warnings from his brother and studio executives about the danger, as Fairbanks was both the star and producer, making an injury a huge financial risk, he insisted on performing the climb, where he shimmied up the chains of a rising 40-foot drawbridge.

And of course, none of this works without Douglas Fairbanks himself. Fairbanks wasn’t just the star of the film; he was the engine driving the entire spectacle. His performance is packed with athletic stunts, climbing walls, swinging across beams, and leaping around the giant sets like gravity is merely a suggestion. In many ways, Fairbanks was the prototype for modern action stars. Long before stunt doubles and digital trickery became standard practice, he insisted on doing many of his own stunts, giving the film a physical authenticity that still feels impressive today. If modern audiences look at Tom Cruise dangling off airplanes and skyscrapers, they’re basically watching a tradition that Fairbanks helped invent.

Fairbanks, a truly charismatic action hero.

A century later, Robin Hood remains one of the most ambitious productions of the silent era. Its gigantic sets, lavish costumes, and huge crowd scenes feel like a statement piece from a young Hollywood eager to prove it could rival any spectacle in the world. The film may move at a leisurely silent-era pace and occasionally indulge in theatrical melodrama, but its charm, humour, and sheer sense of adventure remain infectious. Most importantly, Douglas Fairbanks’ exuberant performance gives the movie an energy that still leaps off the screen…sometimes literally, usually from the top of a castle wall.