Robin Redbreast (1970)

Well, folks: here it is. The final film I have left to talk about before diving into the centerpiece of it all: a documentary on folk horror entitled Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. While I'm sad that this set has to end at all, I do have lots of other folk horror films to plow through afterward, so it's not all bad. Oh, but what was I saying? Robin Redbreast, yet another selection from Play For Today, an old BBC program that ran for over a decade. Our protagonist, Norah, is a woman stuck in an awkward place between not quite middle-aged, and no spring chicken anymore, and she has just broken up with her partner of eight years. Finding herself struggling to cope with the sudden loneliness and boredom in her life, Norah decides a little country air might be just what the doctor ordered. Good thing her beau didn't want to keep their cottage they recently purchased out in the country. After all, she's a writer for the BBC, so she can work almost anywhere (blatant author appeal aside, write what you know I guess) and is now unattached and free to do as she pleases. And so to the rural English countryside she goes!

Her newfound sexual frustration comes to a head when she makes a trip to speak with the local exterminator about a problem with mice she's having in her new digs, only to find that the exterminator is young, buff, and educated, like her. Also, like her, the townspeople seem to keep him largely at length, and they insist on calling him 'Rob,' short for 'Robin' we're later told, even though his name is actually Edgar. Norah finds herself instantly attracted to him physically, but a later dinner conversation reveals him to be quite... well, let's say, socially stifled, as he mostly keeps to himself, and apparently has since birth. I like the realism of their relationship. Like, she just wants to get her rocks off, in a polite English kind of way sure, but Rob has like never had a friend in his life and so conversing with him is like pulling teeth, and so it's hard to even get it up around the poor guy. When they initially try to hook up after a very promising first encounter, it almost immediately feels weird, pathetic, and awkward, which I can't help but respond to, but maybe that's just an issue with me, I dunno. Oh, and to top it all off, Norah seems to have misplaced her birth control just in time for their disastrous date, not that she'd need it anyway, she tells herself. I guess it's a good thing it went so poorly then.

Well, guess what? After she sends Rob packing only for a scary goddamn bird to fly down her chimney and attack her, Rob hears her screams and gets there just in the nick of time to deal with it. Needless to say, the two sleep together after all, and very soon after, Norah discovers that she's become pregnant. It's here that the film goes headlong into the treacherous waters of abortion and rejection of motherhood, something that seems bold and extremely progressive for a film of its time, much less something that aired on national television. And despite Norah initially wanting an abortion, nothing seems to depict her as incorrect in her view, though she does eventually decide against it after being guilt-tripped by Rob. She gives a rather kickass teardown he demands that he has a say in the situation, but still, he gets into her head and she decides to have the baby. There is this whole pagan-inspired subversive take on sex politics and the roles of men and women that has a frisson of feminist edge to it, but again, I may be off-base. Its celebration of what amounts to older women and their disposable male concubines is also, and this probably says a lot about me, quite endearing. 

Robin Redbreast isn't considered a precursor to The Wicker Man for nothing. Obviously, pagan ritual connects the two, but there's also the structure of its narrative. The arrival of the third act is declared by our heroine attempting to leave the cottage after having it made clear to her that she wasn't allowed to leave until after Easter ceremonies, only to find that her car won't start, her phone line has presumably been disconnected, the postman is pocketing her desperate letters for help, and the local buses simply will not stop for her. It's a pretty nightmarish scenario, and one can hardly imagine why the people so desperately want her to stay, unless... oh, no. Norah believes herself to be in mortal danger, and when Rob comes around, she spurns him, believing him to be in on the whole thing. It's here, in the climax of the film, that everything really clicks, especially Rob's character and performance, which really is kind of heartbreaking in this scene. You realize that he is, more-or-less, a boy in a chiseled man-body, and it really does come off as quite pathetic. 

Needless to say, things don't go well, and the film ends on a very ambiguous note as far as the fate of our main character and her unborn child goes, but we do, apparently, get confirmation that the four villagers were actually four pagan deities all along, but I'll be doggered if I actually noticed that they looked any different in that last shot. Oh, well, it's a cool idea regardless, and everybody makes mistakes, so the fault likely lies with me. In any case, I enjoyed Robin Redbreast, and found it well worth my time. There isn't a ton of subtext here, but not all stories need oodles of it to be great, and this simple little tale succeeds so well probably because it is so subdued and so unlike modern popcorn horror, ditto the sprawling graveyard of horror TV shows that have popped up since the seventies. Like many teleplays on similar programs at the time, it's very talky, and their budget wasn't exactly unlimited, but that's not really an issue for me so long as the narrative is strong. I mean within reason. I don't like that they feel the need to have Norah call up her friends every other minute just as a means of summarizing whatever's just happened in the last scene over and over again as if we'd all lose track of what is happening otherwise, but again: nobody's perfect, and overall, none of this bothered me very much while watching, but I can't help but think it would have been a bit more gripping if we didn't keep having all our work done for us. There's just one thing that bothered me about the narrative overall, and that's this: how did you purchase a cottage, pay it off, yet never once pay it a visit? If she has visited it before, how has she never met any of the villagers or indeed, needed to employ the only cleaning lady in town, Mrs. Vigo, before now? And how did the pagans factor any of that into their elaborate scheme? If Norah and her beau had never broken up in the first place, what would the pagans have done? Not exactly a plot hole, but questionable on reflection in a way I thought worth mentioning.

The presentation of this particular program is not exactly its strong suit, at least here in the future-world of 2022. Compared to Penda's Fen, this looked ancient, and you immediately notice that it was shot on videotape, and thus has that instantly-recognizable too-smooth motion. Not to mention, the color copy has been lost forever, and so all we have now is a preservation film print. So yes, that's videotape converted to film, and film that seems to be lower resolution, if that's even a thing, than even 16mm film. It's often blurry, and far from ideal, but it's not quite as bad as I expected based on what I'd heard. Still though, phew. Honestly, though, the visuals aren't really held back by the quality of the surviving print; they're more likely hampered by either the budget, a backbreaking television schedule, or simply a lack of imagination, though I have trouble believing the latter. Long story short: there are criminally few shots of the natural landscape, which in a folk horror film is kind of unforgivable, although it does the best with what it does have. The setting is still felt, mostly in the sense of isolation from civilization, but one does wonder if it could have benefitted from some more of that mysterious pagan flavor that comes from contrasting violence and horror against the idyllic English countryside. One or twice, the film would get wild and creative, most bizarrely during the bird-down-the-chimney scene, but these scattered moments hardly make a feast for the eyes. And I can't remember the score one single bit. In fact, there may have not been one, I can't remember. For the third and final time, I'm not saying I'm infallible, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I can't remember a lick of music, all besides a diagetic and presumably already-existing opera recording that was effectively used in a throwaway scene with Norah alone in her pajamas. 

Performances are definitely strong, but Rob's performance did take a little while to fully appreciate, at least it did for me. Fisher is the clear standout here, and he steals every scene he is in. His actor, Bernard Hepton (I watched for his name in the credits) turned in a pitch-perfect performance, and it was a joy to listen and reflect on his many scenes of ambiguously-threatening exposition. Overall, I found Robin Redbreast to be quite cozy and easy to slip into, though I did feel somewhat spoiled by more recent attempts to do the same thing, even attempts that happened only three years later (wink, wink.) It could have been a bit richer in subtext or thematic material but I can't ask that of every single film, and I can't find much fault with my time spent with this vintage gem, almost lost to time, but not quite.