It's a mistake to meddle with the Robin Hood we all know and love

WHAT is it about modern filmmakers that makes them unable to tackle a traditional story without giving it an unnecessary make-over?

I winced when I saw Clive Owen's Romanesque version of King Arthur. Tim Burton's rendering of Alice in Wonderland – a whacked-out apocalyptic acid trip rather than Lewis Carroll's surrealist fantasy – wasn't the tale I remembered from childhood.

And now Ridley Scott has tinkered with the legend of Robin Hood. Thus Robin of Loxley becomes Robin Longstride in the guise of New Zealander Russell Crowe who, macho star that he is, seemed most desperate to avoid wearing tights la fellow Antipodean Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood 72 years ago.

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Beefy Crowe was interviewed and quoted at length about the problems of sporting hosiery when navigating brambles and other thorny woodland flora. How could one realistically fight a battle when one's clothing snagged on every piece of sharp twiglet, he reasoned?

But it's the wholesale shift from myth and lore to what Crowe has called "a recalibration" of the accepted tale – itself an accumulation of half-truths, wish fulfilment and outright lies – that rankles with this writer.

Most ordinary folk want to embrace the myth: that Robin was a man of noble birth driven to outlawry by a corrupt king and who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.

Meddle with established tradition at your peril. And that's precisely what Crowe, director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland have done. Everyone, it seems, is anxious to put their own spin on a story – to lend to it an extra dynamic that lifts its head and shoulders above all prior versions.

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Crowe doesn't think much of the Kevin Costner version, partly filmed on location at Aysgarth Falls and Hardraw Force 20 years back. Neither do I, come to that. But the trick to making the story of Robin Hood is to retain the rudiments of the legend.

Crowe, Scott and Helgeland seem hell-bent on re-writing so extensively that Robin becomes merely a cipher – a rather sombre caricature of the stereotypical tree-climbing, Lincoln Green-garbed bandit that we know and love.

My choice as best-ever Robin Hood adaptation is Richard Lester's Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery as the weary, middle-aged warrior returning home to an England that he no longer recognises and which no longer has need of his brand of swaggering heroics.

Lester and writer James Goldman set their elegiac drama/romance in an age when chivalry was in rapid decline. He populated it with tremendous stars and character performers – alongside Connery were Audrey Hepburn, Robert Shaw, Richard Harris, Denholm Elliott, Ronnie Barker and Nicol Williamson. It worked perfectly.

Such a five-star ensemble is missing from Scott's self-conscious, self-aware and overblown would-be epic. And Russell Crowe ain't no Sean Connery.

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