Tickle Me: Robin Hood e i pirati (1960)

Italian Locandina

Robin Hood e i pirati (aka Robin Hood and the Pirates), directed by Giorgio Simonelli in color, is an Italian Robin Hood tale that plays out kind of like the many sword and sandal epics from Italy in that era. Robin Hood (Lex Barker) has been captured by pirates after a shipwreck on his way to join the crusades. The pirates intend to bring him back to Nottingham and collect a ransom from his father, the Lord of Nottingham. Meanwhile Robin's father has been killed by Jonathan Brooks (Mario Scaccia), one of his superintendents, who has seized power.

The pirates are disappointed to learn that there will be no ransom, but Robin convinces them to help overthrow Brooks by promising them gold from Brooks stash in return for their efforts. In the process, Robin meets an old sweetheart, Karin Blain (Jocelyn Lane), and their romance is rekindled. Problems lurk, however, because Brooks' daughter, Lizbeth (Rossana Rory), also has eyes for Robin, and Brooks wants to marry Karin, so Lizbeth conspires to separate Karen from Robin and get rid of him. The remainder of the plot revolves around the efforts to save Karin and take control of Nottingham back from Brooks, which is all wrapped up with a happy ending in just over 78 minutes.

Barker may be best remembered for some early 1950's Tarzan films. He probably did not wow many folks with his performance as Robin Hood, but even at 40 years old, he reasonably looked the part. Jocelyn, with plenty of screen time, looks lovely in her leading role and performs respectably in a role that could have been handled by dozens of actresses working in European cinema at the time. I presume that this type of exposure could have only helped her as she was still struggling to land leading roles in the industry, but for crying out loud, her name was again misspelled in the credits as "Jakie Lane." Her hair is not black, but it is long and dark, with a reddish-brown sheen to it. It's a bit hard to judge her performance in total, because I can't verify that she even did her own dubbing for the English-language version. At times Karin's voice sounds to me like it is Jocelyn, and at other times, it sounds to me like it is not her. In that era of Italian films, the general practice was to shoot the films without direct sound, and then add sound with dubbing in the studio.

The plot is fairly ridiculous, but the action and fight scenes, though nothing out of the ordinary, are reasonably done for this type of film. I would have probably enjoyed watching this movie on TV as a boy in the 1970's, but other than my interest in reviewing Jocelyn's work, it is not very entertaining to me at this stage in life. There are a few reasonably humorous scenes involving the pirates and their women, particularly a hefty black woman that likes to boss around the lead pirate. It's worth a viewing to see Jocelyn in a lead role, but if you don't get around to tracking this one down, I can't say that you've missed much.

Shot in the late summer/early fall of 1960, the film premiered in Italy on December 24, 1960. I have seen no indication of a U.S. theatrical release, but as indicated by the stills below, it appears that Embassy Pictures sold the film for TV exhibition in the U.S. in the 1960's as part of a syndicated package of adventure films.

The film was released on DVD in Germany in 2006: