"The Adventures of Robin Hood" -- Classic 1950s TV, served Blacklisted Writers

With a new Robin Hood in theaters, the Archive has created a show page for the classic 1950s TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood. Produced in England, the series ran on CBS from 1955 to 1958 and starred Richard Greene in the title role. Harry and Wally's Favorite TV Shows describes the series as "a well-done staging of the familiar swashbuckling tale, with excellent performances from the central cast, an authentic setting, good guest stars, and reasonably clever plots [with] Richard Greene... an able champion of the people." Reviewing the series opener, Daily Variety raved: "the series... stacks up as one of the superior foreign TV pix imports.... producer Hannah Weinstein has given the vehicle fancy trappings production-wise [and] her choice of Greene for the lead was a good one."

What was not known at the time to American audiences was that producer Weinstein actively employed writers who had been blacklisted in the US. Among those writers was Archive interviewee and one of the famed "Hollywood Ten"— Ring Lardner Jr., who along with Ian McLellan Hunter, wrote under the pseudonym "Paul Symonds" for the series. When Lardner emerged from the blacklist, he was awarded the Academy Award for his screenplay of M*A*S*H (1970). Click here to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood (embedded from the Internet Archive) and watch Ring Lardner Jr. discussing how he and other blacklisted writers worked on the series.