Robin Hood (1922)

(archive.org streaming, December 2022) I won’t even try to convince you that the 1922 version of Robin Hood is worth seeing by itself. There have been several better and more accessible takes on the familiar character, and even the 1938 Erroll Flynn version is a lot more fun than this one. But if you dig into the film’s production history, you quickly come to appreciate why it’s a 1920s Hollywood landmark. For one thing, it clearly marked the early days of Hollywood as we know it—throwing an immense budget at a project designed to draw in crowds of viewers, but also mythologizing itself as this magical dream factory. Hence the construction of a castle and village set; hence a near-million dollar budget (in 1922!); hence the focus on making Douglas Fairbanks a movie idol; hence the first-even Hollywood premiere meant to highlight the glitz of the business. You can, if you want, compare and contrast how the plot is handled in a two-hour silent fashion when measured against later versions of the story. But the main appeal of Robin Hood is seeing how, even a hundred years ago, Hollywood was still behaving in the same way it does (or attempts to do) today.