Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot - Week 127

Welcome!
As you can see, I joined the hostess crew for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot.
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

Has fall reached you yet (if you are in the Northern hemisphere)?
My household has decided that we should really start our hibernation training because temperatures are supposed to go down. Unfortunately, one in this household still has to work for a few weeks before being on vacation. Little hint - it's not der Dekan who's already on the best way to a hibernation world cup win.

Luckily, it's weekend, so I can join him and Gundel!

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week, our spotlight is on ... oh my ... it's Ponder - the Cat.
Being a bit of an insider in this particular case, I can tell you that Ponder started this blog, but now it's in Gundel's capable (and sometimes a bit lazy, after all she's a cat) paws.

You can find Gundel and her stories here.


Now let me introduce your hostess crew for the Weekend Traffic Jam.

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Have you ever thought about visiting Finland? Soma's post may just be what you need to convince you.

Ann had a great idea for a spooky Halloween decoration.

I hadn't heard of the picture book creator Pamela Allen before I read Lydia's post about the exhibition she visited.

Mireille is keeping it real with fashion photo bloopers!


Let's link up!

You can add links to specific blog posts of yours, but not just to your blog itself. The posts can be new or older and cover any topic you can think of - books, movies, fashion, crafting, thrifting, travel, art ... but only family friendly, please!
Have a look around, visit some of the other blogs and leave a few comments. You might discover something new and exciting!
Thank you for linking up with us!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Silent movies - Destiny

It's high time for a Fritz Lang movie and no, it's not "Metropolis" which has patiently been waiting in my DVD collection for many years.
Instead I have "Der müde Tod" (literally "The Weary Death") from 1921 for you, in English called "Destiny".

Let's start with the plot (with spoilers) as usual.

A young couple is riding in a carriage whose driver also picks up a stranger.
Having arrived in a small town, that stranger buys a plot next to the cemetery and builds a huge wall without a visible door around it.
Later, the young couple meets him again at the tavern. While the woman goes to the kitchen, her lover and the stranger disappear and she goes searching for them. When she comes to the wall, a group of ghosts walks through her and the wall into the realm of Death, one of them her lover.
She confronts the stranger who is of course Death himself, begging him to give back her lover because love is stronger than death.
He tells her that he is weary of seeing the struggle and earning hate for obeyeing God's orders, so he would be glad for her to conquer him. He shows her three flickering candles and says that he will revive her lover if she can save one of these lives.

Each of the stories of the three lights are told with the young couple as the lovers in different roles.
The first one is about Zobeide, the Caliph's sister, who's in love with a Frank. He is caught by the guards and sentenced to death by the Caliph. Zobeide is not able to save him and Death claims his life.
The second one is about Monna Fiametta in Venice. She's engaged with one of the Council of Fourteen, Girolamo, but she hates him. Her lover is Gianfrancesco whom Girolamo wants to have executed. Monna's plan to invite and then kill Girolama goes awry when he sees through her ploy and Gianfrancesco dies instead. The second light burns out.
The third one tells the story of a magician's assistants, Tiao Tsien, who catches the Emperor's attention, and her lover Liang. They try to escape, but the Emperor's archer catches up with them and kills Liang.

Although she hasn't been able to save any of the three lives, Death has pity with the young woman and offers her the life of her lover if she manages to find a soul to replace his within the next hour.
Several of the old people in town refuse to give her their lives.

When a building catches fire, everyone can escape, but a small baby is still in the house. The young woman sees her chance and runs inside, but when Death comes to claim the baby's soul and she sees the desperate mother through the window, she can't give it to him. She lowers the baby out of the window and offers Death her own soul instead, happy to be reunited with her lover in death.

Let's get to the elephant in the room first (not the actual one in the movie) to have that out of the way.
As you can imagine for a movie of that time, the stories of the first and third light felt awkward, not for the plot, but the stereotypes of the cultures depicted, the third one more than the first one.

It's a pity because I really liked the movie itself.
It's said to have been inspired by the Indian tale of Savitri and Fritz Lang's experience when he was sick with a fever as a child, but I can easily see this in a fairy tale from another country as well.
Actually Lang called it "ein deutsches Volkslied in sechs Versen" (a German folk song in six verses).

If you know fairy tales, especially original versions instead of the cleaned up ones, the ending may not even be that surprising. I know I read more than one that didn't have a happy ending for everyone. That might be something very German, more so at the time if you keep in mind that World War I had not been over for that long and still influenced everyday life.
However, the movie wasn't well received by German critics at first for not being "German" enough because of all the foreign settings. In the USA where it was released three years later, the intertitles had been changed in a way that suggested the young woman was to blame for her lover's death in all verses which was not the intention of the creators, so it wasn't successful there as well. It was better received in France which then also brought it more acclaim in Germany.

To me, this expressionist movie had a great mood, but it wasn't dark throughout. There was the scene in the carriage or the depiction of the town's elders which definitely showed humor.
I was really impressed by Death, beautifully played by Bernhard Goetzke, a reaper who was not just grim, but also kind and weary of the heavy burden he had to carry eternally.
He was also the reason why I loved the main story itself more than those of the three lights.

A surprising turn for me was the young woman searching for a soul she could give to Death for that of her lover. To be honest, I had expected her to sacrifice herself earlier which is something you know from many other stories. She, however, rather boldly begs several old people in town to give up their lives, but they refuse "Not a single day, not a single hour, not a single breath".
She's tempted until the last second when she storms into the burning house and has almost handed the baby to Death already. Now that would have been very selfish.

There were some nice special effects too which worked well, for example the double exposures, the flying carpet or the dancing scroll.

Will this movie end up on my rewatch list? A clear yes from me.


Sources:

1. Daniel Lammin: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921). On: Senses of Cinema, June 2018
2. David Vining: Destiny. On: David Vining, Author. August 5, 2022
3. Jay Weissberg: Destiny. Essay. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2016

Cats, cats, cats, and more cats, part 3

Did you think we were done yet with the random cats around my house? Well, we aren't.
If you are interested, you can find part 1 and 2 here and here in which I said "I have quite a few around the place, some because I fell in love with them myself, others because for some weird reason people think I like cats and have given me a lot of items over the years. Really strange, I know. Why would they think something like that? 😂"

If you seen some of my posts about the beaded doll outfits, you may also have noticed the wooden cats in the background.
There was a time when these cats were really popular meaning they were everywhere, mostly the small ones. Most of mine (there are more, including a doorstopper) were gifts, but I bought the biggest one myself. I had to get picked up from the shop called "Katze und Kunst" ("Cat and Art") because it is so heavy that it was impossible for me to get it home on the train.
The shop was fun to browse, they had cat related items from figures, pictures, cards, and books to scratching posts and cat food. Unfortunately it doesn't exist anymore.
If you think they are in the way on those stairs, they really aren't because these are the "Stairs to Nowhere", another one of those things that are weird about me, but that's a longer story. The big ones have also done a great job at guarding the Christmas tree when I still put it in that spot. The big ones are so heavy that they held it in place perfectly when Ponder creeped into the "cave" under the tree. They were even enough for des Dekan's first Christmas.

You always wondered how der Dekan got here? He's a veritable Pinocchio turning from a wooden cat into a real one!
Yeah, not really, but I still think this picture is funny (usually you see the cat under the vintage hat).

Let's go from wooden figures to stone.
A long time ago, the ex had got a small malachite Bastet cat for me. When our personnel admin retired, I asked him if it was okay for me to pass it on to her. I had trained under her when she had still been leader of one of the acquisition teams and I really liked her and also knew how much she loved cats. 
The ex then got me this one as a replacement, much bigger and definitely no natural stone, but still pretty. It has found its perfect spot in the cat book cabinet between two books. Actually, most of the little figures I got over the years are in there.

Talking about Bastet reminded me of this bead loomed pendant I designed. I made one for my sister and a slightly different one for myself.
The body was inspired by a typical Bastet silhouette and I added the golden collar with the jewel and the golden earring after seeing something similar on an ancient Egyptian figure. Lapislazuli being such a popular stone in ancient Egypt, I added two beads to the chain ends.

The cat mat was a Christmas gift from my friend.

The cat sat on the mat, a stereotype or a classic? Whatever the answer, Ponder didn't take long to claim this one.
It has never managed to work its charm on Gundel or dem Dekan, though.

Ruscha was a ceramic factory founded in 1905. In 1996, they were taken over by the Scheurich company which used the name Ruscha until 2006.
Beside vases, flower pots and so on, Ruscha was known for their decorative wall plates, especially in the 50s, which came in many different designs, sometimes scratched into the clay, sometimes partially glazed. A lot of them showed animals, among them cats.
Cats were for example part of the "Paris" design which never looked exactly the same, also because the plates were handcrafted. Often there was a young lady at the lamp pole, sometimes with a young man wearing a beret, there was a trash can around the corner or houses in the background.
With its four inch, my little plate was probably too small for more than the cat.

I don't remember who gave those bookends to me, but they do a fine job of holding - cat books, what else?
Bonus cats in the picture are a wooden ring holder cat (with a long tail) and a little amber cat.

As I wrote in this post a few months ago, "I was one of "those" kids ... the kids who never found her name on a mug, on a keychain or on a sticker." So it always had to be custom pieces, like this "Frühstücksbrettchen" (literally "little breakfast board" ("Frühstück" literally means "early piece", by the way)) which people often use for bread instead of a plate, not just for breakfast, but also "Abendbrot" (literally "evening bread"). This one was a gift.
I think those are enough parentheses and quotation marks for one paragraph.

That's it for today.
See you next time - yes, I think there will be more ...

Random Saturday - To brick or not to brick

Lego was the topic of another random Saturday seven years ago, but back then I only spoke about and showed my London bus.

You've also seen a picture of my Lego Snowglobe as part of my hallway Christmas decoration.

There's more. Not much. Lego is and always has been very much a matter of money and space both of which I prefer to spend on other things, no matter how tempting some of the projects may look like (I'm just saying cat).
There are stories, however. Of course there are, after all this is random Saturday. Old ones, new ones.

I couldn't tell you the exact age at which I got my first Legos. Back then, all of us siblings got one basic set which consisted of one baseplate - still the thicker ones then - and a bunch of bricks. We threw everything together in order to have more options for bigger projects. Basic set also meant basic bricks which we named after the number of bumps on each one (no idea if that was some official naming, but we added the Swabian diminutive -le to the numbers, so maybe not).
What I remember best was building tiny house models with limited wall height and no roof, tiny because the baseplates were small and because we didn't have that many bricks. Also no roof meant we could play in them by using the smallest bricks for the people living in the house.

Years later, my little brother had five boxes (four of them had been a lottery prize, size A to D) of Märklin's (the company is known among model train collectors and is located in my town) own brick version - the so-called Minex bricks (Märklin used the name Minex for several products, also metal construction sets or trains). You could do a lot with five boxes and the bricks were much easier to take apart which could be both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I remember having a lot of fun with those.

Afterwards, bricking (as I've heard it being called in Germany) wasn't really a topic for me anymore for many years - until one year my pal gave me the Yellow Submarine from the Beatles movie to cheer me up in a weltschmerz phase.
We spent a few evenings both working on our projects, having something to eat and drink, laughing a lot, always under the strict supervision of Ponder.
It was a lot of fun although it's amazing how many mistakes you can make on a piece that doesn't even look that difficult on the outside.

For my next birthday, he gave me the London Bus.
That really brought back memories of my first London visit (unfortunately there were only two) together with a friend and her five year old daughter. On the first day, we did bus hopping, randomly changing buses seeing where they would take us.

Again we started to work on our projects together, but then life happened and we finished them on our own. That's when I found that I wasn't made to be a lonely bricker. I gave up eventually and had to motivate myself hard to finally pick it up again. That's why it took me five months to get it finished! It's so cool.

Two more projects we did together again was the living room from The Big Bang Theory and the Santa Snowglobe (the weirdest snowglobe ever) which had been an extra gift with an order.

There's one more piece that has been waiting for me to work on it. It has been around for several years and I think it's really time to get started on it - the Lego Art set "The Beatles". With the box content you can make one of the four portraits and my first problem was to decide which one to make because, let's get this clear, if I make one I'm not going to rip it out again to make a different one.
To be honest, I wish the portraits were old black and white ones, but that can't be helped, can it?

Once I decide, I might turn this project into small WIP posts to motivate myself, so I won't give it up.
Which portrait would you choose IF you like The Beatles at all?

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.

Silent movies - The Last Command

My choice of silent movies sometimes is quite random, but this one may have been the most random so far. I got here when I looked up something else on my favorite silent movie blog and got distracted by the link to a post about the myth that silent movie performers lost their job because of their voices when the talkies became big. In the post, William Powell was mentioned, so I looked up a silent film with him and ended up here, without a clue if that was a good idea or not. Let's see, shall we?

Public domain

The movie is "The Last Command" from 1928 by Josef von Sternberg. You probably won't remember, but I sure had my problems with the only other Sternberg movie I know so far, "The Scarlet Empress" about Catherine the Great.
This one is set in a time a little closer to ours, though. We jump between the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and in 1928 Hollywood.

The plot, as usual with spoilers.

Lev Andreyev, a Russian director in Hollywood, is going through a stack of photos of actors for his next movie. When he comes to the photo of Sergius Alexander, who claims to be the Czar's cousin and a former commanding general, he tells his assistant to cast the man and fit him into a general's uniform. You get the idea that these two men have a common history.
Alexander arrives for work. In makeup, the actor next to him complains about his shaking head and Alexander says it's the result of a great shock. His mind goes back to Imperial Russia in 1917.

Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, a general of the Russian Army, arrives for an inspection of the troops. He's told that the revolutionists have intercepted most of the supplies.
Two of those revolutionists watch Alexander from a window above, Lev Andreyev and Natalie Dobrova. "Let him strut a little longer! His days are numbered!" Lev tells Natalie.

Then they are called in for a passport examination the next day. Alexander questions them personally because he's taken with Natalie's looks. When he doubts Lev's courage, Lev talks back. Alexander hits him in the face with his whip and has him locked up. Natalie, however, gets invited to Headquarters because the general has clearly fallen for her.
Before a dinner, he even presents her with a pearl necklace while his officers eavesdrop at the door.

During dinner, Alexander gets a call. The Czar wants to visit the front and see an offensive, but the general declines sacrificing soldiers for the Czar's entertainment, much to the surprise of everyone at the table.
Meanwhile, we see a soldier in prison turn on the other soldiers and enabling Lev and the other prisoners to escape.

After dinner, Natalie invites the general to her room for coffee. She intends to shoot him, but she can't go through with it. When he asks why she didn't shoot him, she replies that she couldn't kill anyone who loves Russia as much as he does. Alexander declares her his prisoner of war ... and prisoner of love (I'll admit that I cringed reading that).

Next the general, his men, and Natalie board a train. They don't know that the engineers are Bolsheviks. They stop in the next town and the train is taken over.
Natalie turns against the general and demands that he should stoke the train to Petrograd where he will be hanged.

When there's a chance, though, she slips him the pearl necklace, so he will be able to leave the country, and when a revolutionary wakes up - there has been a lot of vodka -, she embraces him, so he won't see Alexander escaping. The man thinks she's telling him that she loves him, but her looks go to the general.
He smacks the fireman with the coal shovel and jumps off the train.
Before his eyes, the train derails on the bridge and falls into the icy river, taking his love with it. This was the great shock that caused his head shaking.

Back to Hollywood.
Lev is determined to have his revenge and humiliate Alexander. He gives him a whip and a coat that looks much like the one he wore years earlier and puts him in a trench setting.  Then he orders the crew to play the Russian National Anthem.
Beforehand, he has instructed an extra to yell at the general that the soldiers are sick of fighting.
"You have given your last command! A new day is here! Down with your Russia!"
In this moment, madness takes over. Alexander whips the extra and grabs the flag. His mind is showing him the memories of the revolutionaries.
"The command is forward - - to victory - Long live Russia!"
Then he grabs his chest and falls over.
Held by Lev, he asks "Have we won?" which Lev affirms before Alexander dies in his arms.

When Lev's assistant says he was a great actor, the director replies "He was more than a great actor - he was a great man."

Soooo. Was it a good idea to watch then film?
If I wanted to see mainly William Powell, not that much probably because he didn't have that many scenes.
Also I'm not a fan of movies with war and military content, but somehow I had expected a bit less 1917 and a bit more 1928. I was definitely wrong about that.

The plot was inspired by a real life story that director Ernst Lubitsch told a newspaper columnist. It was about a Russian general he knew who fled the revolution and opened a restaurant, but was forced then to work as an extra in Hollywood to survive.

The movie was very dramatic, not just because of the plot, but also because of Jannings. I had expected that from reading about him, but had only seen him in a comedy before.
At the time, he was said to be the best actor in the world and he got an Oscar for this movie (and another movie that is lost).
Although he was a bit much for me, it was still impressive how he portrayed the general before and after, and the ending was amazing.

Nevertheless, I had a problem with the love story. I don't want to sound superficial saying that I can't imagine a young woman like Natalie falling in love with an older man. What I can't really imagine, though, is just how quickly she fell for the enemy because he did one thing right by declining the Czar's request. In that moment everything else he had done was forgotten? Sorry, but I didn't really buy that. Also the general was fine with her contemplating assassination just a moment ago? He had seen the badly hidden pistol, how could he be so sure she wouldn't shoot him?
And not only did she love him, but she loved him so much that she risked her own life by helping him to escape? Cos, you know, I don't think her comrades would have taken it so lightly if they had found out. Luckily, though, they never got a chance to because they all drowned. Oh wait, that isn't any better. Maybe someone should have taken the engineer's vodka, so he wouldn't have fallen asleep.

Not saying the middle part was all bad, but it was still too much and too long for my liking. Everyone was very passionate, there was loud laughing, dramatic crying, a lot of yelling, and a lot of either broody or glaring looks.
I could have done with a little less of that and a little more background instead. How did Lev make it to the USA and land a job as a director (maybe connections as he had been a theater director in Russia?)? Had he left the country immediately after breaking free from prison? Why didn't it try to get back to the revolution? How did Alexander make it to the USA and how did he get to be a low-paid actor?

Oh, and why exactly did Lev call the general a great man at the end? What had he done that Lev suddenly forgave it all? Sorry, it didn't make sense to me. I'm fine with him not gloating over his death, I would understand a certain amount of pity over his downfall and end from someone who was luckier, but from "I need some kind of revenge" to "he was a great man"?

Part of the movie is a satire of Hollywood at the time, the crowds of actors waiting outside the gate for their chance, the way the outfits are handed out from piles of clothes, boots, rifles, but as mentioned it's a rather small part of it.
I'm not quite sure what the other part is. Are we supposed to be on the Czarist side? Times were not very nice under his rule either, if you didn't belong to the Russian aristocracy.
Or is it simply about Alexander as a man? A man we don't really know that much about, definitely not enough to call him a great one.

Again, was it a good idea to watch the movie?
Yes. I might not love it, but I also didn't hate it, and it was undoubtedly a experience worth making.


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Last Command (1928) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, July 28, 2015
2. Scott Nye: Scott Reviews Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command [Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray]. On: CriterionCast, August 12, 2016
3. Alistair Nunn: The Last Command (1928). On: Movie Musings, November 9, 2023

The big hug - Part 1

Over ten years ago, I got several boro lampwork pendants from a very talented artisan, manatees (you can see one of them here), a dolphin (you have seen him before as well), and a shark. The pendants are absolutely gorgeous, but it took months for them to ship which put me off ordering more. That's a real pity because I have not seen any since that come even close to them.
Also the shark broke in transport. I got a replacement, but I was determined to find a way of using the broken one as well (I've done that more than once with components, but of course never sold those).

If you haven't noticed it yet, I don't just love sharks, but also octopuses.
This is a picture of just some of those I made over the years. A tiny one, bigger ones, a really big one. Ah, have you already seen it? Sharks!

I experimented with the broken pendant first. The idea had been to hide the glue marks behind tentacles, but show as much of the shark as possible.
It needed a lot of fiddling, but I managed. The pendant got the official name "The hug" because to me those two were friends rather than enemies.
If you think the second octopus-shark hug was easier to make with the experience gained, you would be wrong. Lampwork is really slippery and the tentacles had to sit just the right way to hold the shark safely. The loop on the back of the tail is the only spot where the octopus is actually wired to the shark itself.

The second pendant sold and the first one went to a friend (of course she knew about the glued spots).
I'll be honest, I quickly regretted not keeping one for myself, simply because it proved impossible to find another shark like these.

After searching for a long time, I finally found one and was so happy! It was much smaller than the other ones, but so beautiful.
Somehow I never got around to making something with it, though. There was always something else to try out and wirework was already becoming more difficult for me.
When it started getting really hard on my thumb, however, I knew it was now or never before I wouldn't be able to do it anymore at all. It had been a while since I had played with copper and it felt so good, but it took a lot of breaks to get my octopus finished over the next few weeks.

Talking of breaks ... when I was finally done and wanted to take the octopus to the kitchen to oxidize it, I missed that the shark, which had been in the same box, got tangled in some still loose wire ends. Yes, you have be quite stupid not to notice you are holding two things, but sometimes I am.

It could have fallen in the hallway on the one vinyl floor I have, but no, it fell in the kitchen, on the hardest of all my floors.
You know how some things seem to be happening in slow motion and yet it's impossible for you to do anything about them? Like the time I cut my finger and fingernail with the bread knife and my brain only woke up and told me not to cut there when I had already started bleeding like crazy.
There wasn't a chance for me to catch the shark before it hit the tiles and pieces started jumping. The nose and the tail had broken off (seems to be a thing, the same happened to my friend with her dolphin). I could only find the nose and part of the tail, though.

It may sound ridiculous to you, but I was devastated.
I couldn't replace this shark, no matter how much I looked around. There were a few lampwork sharks, both pendants and figurines and they were pretty, no doubt about that, but none of them had this elegance, none of them spoke to me.
I didn't even want to look at the octopus anymore which says a lot.
Then something unexpected happened and yes, I'm totally saying this as a cliffhanger.

See you for part 2, I hope!

Silent movies - Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood

I have been a fan of Robin Hood since, well, pretty much forever. My first clear memory is Richard Greene as Robin (did you start singing the tune, too?) followed for example by Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, Cary Elwes, and Michael Praed/Jason Connery. Of course, there are many more and it looks as if Robin will be living on forever.
There was still one gap I definitely had to fill. Today I have  "Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood" from 1922 for you. Yes, it's time for Doug once again and the title was really copyrighted like this to avoid older Robin Hood movies trying to cash in on this movie's success.

Public domain via
Wikimedia Commons

I assume I can keep the plot description short this time and you also won't mind the usual spoilers?
Actually, it won't be that short. Not at all in fact, sorry. Because you see, it takes more than half of the movie - 73 minutes! - until we even get to meet "Robin Hood". The first half is the backstory when Robin is still known as the Earl of Huntingdon.
I'm sure his audience back then was just as surprised as me.

We start at the court of Richard the Lion-Hearted. The King has a bet with his brother John that his favorite, Huntingdon, will win the joust against John's favorite, Sir Guy of Gisbourne and of course he does. Richard announces that the Earl will be second in command on the Holy Crusade. Then he tells him to go and receive the winner's crown from the hands of the fair Marian.
And what's the Earl's reply?
"Exempt me, sire. I am afeared of women." 
That's where it gets a bit weird already.
Of course Richard doesn't care, no matter how often the Earl turns around with a pleading look.

Indeed he encourages all the women to gather round Huntingdon who sees no other way to escape than to jump into the water (the moat, I guess?). The scene is actually quite funny, but it seems a bit out of place, and there's more weirdness to come.

There's a big feast before the Richard and his men go off for the Crusade. You see couples making out in all corners of the castle - only Huntingdon is having fun "trying his strength for the goblet" with the boys, and to be honest, I don't think that comes across as, hm, let's call it manly, as intended.
Richard decides he "should try his love for a maid" instead, has him tied to a post that handily stands around in the hall and summons all the ladies saying "A castle and land to the maid who wins him". They all try their luck except Marian.
The drunk Prince John tells Gisbourne he shall also have his pick of maidens.
Gisbourne forcing himself on Marian catches the Earl's attention, and when Marian runs away and John goes after her, he follows as well and confronts the Prince. Huntingdon and Marian have found their love.

It's time to leave for the Crusade.
Huntingdon orders Little John (then still called the Squire) to guard Marian with his life.
Once the knights are gone - Gisbourne with the task to get rid of Huntingdon and Richard - John goes for it, taxes, torture (the scenes were censored in some areas), all around tyranny.
Marian tries to stand to up to the prince, then she sends Little John as a messenger to the Earl who asks Richard for permission to go home. Richard declines and Huntingdon decides to go anyway, but gets shot by Gisbourne who also lets a falcon loose on the pigeon carrying the message for Marian (how far was that poor bird supposed to fly, I wonder). Richard has Huntingdon and Little John imprisoned.

Meanwhile, John questions Marian's serving woman. Under torture, she tells him about the message, but is set free then and can thus tell her lady that the Prince intends to kill her. Marian and her servant escape by horse and feign her death.
John's tyranny continues while his brother is victorious in the Holy Land.
Huntingdon and Little John have managed to escape, however, and have come back to England where they learn about Marian's death.

"To God - to Richard - and to Her."

"Here began a new life .... - bitter - but joyous." (Huh?)
Yes, Robin Hood is born and it's about time as you will probably agree.

From there on you have all the jumping and skipping and dancing and prancing and merrymenning (I know that's not a word) you can hope for. No, seriously. I guess you just couldn't stop Doug.
And if you thought Errol Flynn invented Robin Hood's iconic stance with the hands on his hips, sorry, he didn't. (Probably Robin even did it in older films.)

We are getting into familiar Robin Hood terrain here now. Taking from the rich, giving to the poor.
He's still missing Marian, though.

Where's Richard, though?
Well, on the way home he escapes being assassinated by Gisbourne, but only because his jester, who has always liked to sit on Richard's throne, slept in his bed at the time.
Then a message reaches him about John's treachery and about Robin Hood. Richard immediately guesses it's Huntingdon and leaves for England.

Now a lot happens rather quickly.
In England, John's men have taken the gold from a nunnery. Robin and his men come to the nunnery where a nun informs Friar Tuck about Robin's real identity and points out Marian to him, and so the lovers are re-united.
Unfortunately, one of John's men witnesses that and tells the Prince. Marian is taken back to the castle and locked up.
John's men are going to Sherwood Forest to capture Robin Hood, expected by the Merry Men, while Robin goes to Nottingham to take over the town together with Will Scarlett and Allan-a-Dale. Yes, just those three.

Three men are quite enough if they know how
to motivate the people to help them, but the next
minute he'll have to go save Marian.

In the forest, an unknown (not to us, right?) knight turns up seeking Robin, "mayhap to join him - mayhap to slay him". He defeats Tuck in a stick fight and is immediately welcome (what?).
Oh, I forgot to mention that Gisbourne is back, too. He secretly takes the key to Marian's room from the Prince, but Marian threatens to jump out of the window if he touches her and she does - but Robin, who has fought his way through, sees her, climbs up the vines on the castle wall and catches her!

Then he kills Gisbourne.
They can't escape easily, though, so Robin, counting on his men, surrenders and gives Marian a dagger to kill herself if needed.
Of course, the Merry Men (and Richard) arrive in time. Huzzah! Richard throws John out of the castle.
The film ends with Robin and Marian being married and retreating to their room - and King Richard banging on the door like crazy.

Okay.
The movie is kind of weird. I have no idea why Fairbanks chose to turn the first half into a bit of a snoozefest because that's what it is honestly. I'm not saying it's a complete waste of time, but it was maybe worth 15 minutes. 20 minutes tops. I'm not the only one thinking that.
The second half, however, is classic Robin Hood, so classic in fact that it inspired later films a lot. Of course it was a great role for Fairbanks to show his acrobatic prowess although he actually hadn't even been sure at all that the story was worth making a film about.
He couldn't do all stunts himself, but it's said that it really was him climbing up the chain of the drawbridge although his brother Robert seemed to have convinced him that it was too dangerous. After rehearsal, however, the double went back to his dressing room and Fairbanks took over without anyone knowing it, thus doubling for his own double.

Even if the second half was a bit over the top with the skipping through Sherwood Forest, I really enjoyed that a lot which was good because I don't think I could have made it through more in the style of the first half.
Fairbanks's Robin was how I imagined Robin Hood, full of energy, and Alan Hale made a great and loyal Little John (a role he played three times, by the way). None of the other Merry Men got their usual stories, they were just there.

Sam de Grasse was a very believable villain as Prince John and Gisbourne was really creepy.
Have you missed the Sheriff of Nottingham, by the way? His role was so small that I wonder why they didn't leave him out completely.

King Richard. He was weird throughout the movie. Wallace Beery (whom I liked a lot better as Challenger in "The Lost World") was big. Everything about him was big, his gestures, his movements, even the way he kept eating all the time, but most of all his laugh. Richard laughed at everything and he kept tilting his head or even his whole upper body back to make the laugh so big, you could almost hear him (again I'm not the only one who thought that).
I found him so annoying, also his obsession with Huntingdon until the end. What kind of ending was that, having Richard banging on the door like an idiot? Did Richard want Robin to be with Marian or was he jealous of her in some weird way? After all, he had been the one insisting on him finding a maid to love.

Leave them alone, Richard, they got better things to do!

Let's talk about Marian (who wore the most interesting costumes, just like some of the other ladies, all those patterns!).
At the beginning, Marian isn't the typical damsel in distress. She speaks her mind very clearly when she refuses Gisbourne's advances, she speaks out against the Prince about the way he treats the people, and when threatened by death, she's smart enough to fake her own death before retreating to a safe space. Even later, she's not afraid to rather jump out of the window than to give in to Gisbourne.
Then Robin turns up and suddenly Marian is the damsel in distress, gasping and shielding her eyes. I thought that was very unfair.

The production design was, well, wow.
That huge castle made me feel immediately old because I kept wondering how you would even try to heat something like this, especially with all those open windows, and that long staircase reminded me of my youth and a similarly long staircase which I hardly managed to climb even then.
Seriously, though, it looked amazing and of course gave Fairbanks ample possibilities for stunts. I love his stunts and I love how joyful he manages to look when doing them. Doug Sr. was not as good-looking as his son, but when he laughs, I forget about that.

So did I enjoy the movie? Overall yes, I did. Could it have been better? Yes, I think it could have. A lot less backstory, a lot less of Richard exaggerating, a bit less skipping, and a bit more of the Merry Men.
Still, I can imagine watching this one again. With a bit of fast forwarding here and there 😉


Sources:

1. Allen W. Wright: Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood. 1922 Silent Film. On: Robin Hood - Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood. October 2022
2. Erik Lundegaard: Movie Review: Robin Hood (1922). On: Erik Lundegaard. February 12, 2010