Sinful Sunday: The Queer Absurdity of "Robin Hood's” Prince John
Peter Ustinov gives enough deliciously camp (and menacing!) performance as the scene and throne stealing baddie in an underrated Disney gem.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
If there’s one animation studio that’s always excelled at creating queer villains, it would have to be Disney. As I’ve written in this newsletter on a number of occasions, there’s something uniquely pleasurable about queer Disney villains, who just seem to leap off of the screen. You know that you shouldn’t root for them or want them to succeed, but they’re just so much more interesting and fun to watch than the supposed heroes (let alone the princesses) that it’s hard not to do so.
Of course, some of the most notable of these queer baddies emerged during the Disney Renaissance, when the studio really leaned into queerness as a signifier of villainy, but it’s important to recognize that there are many precedents in the features canon. Which brings us to Prince John, the primary villain of 1973’s Robin Hood. When the film begins, he has usurped his brother Richard’s throne, thanks to the hypnotic abilities of his serpentine henchman, Sir Hiss (a deliciously queer villain in his own right, thanks to the vocal performance from Terry-Thomas). However, all is not well for this illegitimate ruler, and he faces particular challenges from both Robin Hood and his various brigands, as well as his own kinswoman Maid Marian.
When it was released, Robin Hood wasn’t a tremendous success either with critics or audiences. Emerging during the so-called Bronze Age, when the studio was still trying to figure out its direction in the aftermath of Walt’s death, it does seem to labor in the shadow of some of the studio’s other, better-known animated features (sometimes quite literally so, as it reuses animation from The Jungle Book and The Aristocats). Fortunately, however, the film has experienced something of a critical reappraisal, thanks to those who have fond memories of both the quasi-sex appeal of Robin Hood himself (there’s a whole book to be written about sexy foxes in the media) and its nefarious monarch.
There’s no denying that Prince John makes for a compelling villain, and much of his appeal stems from the fact that he is voiced by the great Sir Peter Ustinov. If you’re a fan of this newsletter, you’ll no doubt remember that I wrote glowingly about Ustinov’s divinely and deliciously queer performance as Nero in the 1951 film Quo Vadis, and it’s clear that he’s channeling a lot of that earlier role into this one. Like Nero, he has a vexed relationship with his absent mother (though so far as we know he hasn’t had her killed) and, like Nero, he’s self-obsessed to the point of parody. Perhaps most germanely, he also loves to inflict pain on others simply because he can, even as he’s mostly helpless to stop those who have already started to turn against his rule.
In other words, Prince John is just a hell of a lot of time to spend time with while he’s on the screen. It’s fun to watch him preen, gazing at his own beauty in the mirror, and it’s fun to watch him banter with Sir Hiss, who tends to give as good as he gets. It’s even fun to watch him bemoan the fact that his mother loved Richard more than he ever did her (after all, what queer villain, or queer man in general, doesn’t have a complicated relationship with his mother). This latter bit is particularly fun because it is both at least somewhat historically true–Eleanor of Aquitaine did seem to favor her eldest son and largely ignored her younger one–and also because it’s clearly a throwback to The Lion in Winter. Ustinov is clearly once again having the time of his life chewing the scenery, making Prince John into the type of queer villain who is as absurd as he is dangerous. The icing on this queer cake is the fact that he sucks on his thumb. If that isn’t as queer as it comes, I don’t know what is.
Like Nero, Prince John yearns for power for its own sake, but he’s not particularly good at utilizing it. When the film begins it’s already clear that, like the real Prince John (and like so many iterations of the character that have appeared in film over the years), this one loves nothing more than exploiting his subjects for their wealth and hoarding the gold for himself. Unlike Robin Hood, Little John, and the other residents of Sherwood Forest, who all follow the rules when it comes to gender and, not coincidentally, care deeply about the people of Nottingham, John is not only a gender deviant but also a tyrant as well, if an inept one.
This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have his own moments of brilliance (or at least quasi-brilliance). He does set a trap for Robin Hood that very nearly succeeds, after all, and there’s a savage pleasure in the moment where he comes close to finally having Robin Hood executed. And, when it comes right down to it, there’s no denying the sinister malice lurking beneath all of the camp and silliness. No one who has seen the film can forget the moment when, goaded into fury by the Sheriff of Nottingham’s singing of the mocking ditty “The Phony King of England,” he orders his henchmen to squeeze the people dry. Those who can’t pay–even the aged and women and children–are sent to jail. Prince John might be silly and campily queer, but he’s not afraid to use the power of the state for his own ends, no matter how cruel and short-sighted they might be.
Fortunately, Prince John doesn’t meet the gruesome fate that’s so often accorded to other queer villains. He is defeated, of course, precisely because King Richard does indeed return and sentences him to hard labor as punishment for his crimes. This is, I think, a rather fitting sentence for someone who not only usurped the throne but also ran the kingdom into the ground before being overthrown. What’s more, he’s also shown himself willing to throw his own accomplices under the bus and to set his own castle’s (or his mother’s, as Sir Hiss reminds him) on fire.
Even though Prince John has been largely overlooked in the history of queer villains–he’s even forgotten by many Disney fans–it’s high time that we return him to his rightful place in the canon of gay baddies.