The big, genial man at the star's shoulder for forty years, and Errol Flynn's in particular. Alan Hale made loyalty look like a pleasure rather than a duty, and his Little John of 1938 is still the model for the part.
Fi1m perspective
The scene everyone remembers Alan Hale for is a fight over right of way. In The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) his Little John stands on a log across a stream and declines to move for a man in green tights, and the two of them settle it with quarterstaffs. Hale plays it as if losing would be nearly as much fun as winning. We grinned through the whole of it, and he is the reason: a big man swinging a stick like someone who has been waiting all week for an argument, and taking the outcome in good humour. Our review said the scene tells you everything about both men. It also tells you everything about Hale.
He had been at this a long time by then. He started in silent films with The Cowboy and the Lady (1911), spent two years as a leading man at Biograph and then, sensibly, stopped, settling into the character parts that filled the next four decades: 235 films in forty years, with eight more directed by him in the 1920s and 1930s. He was Little John three times across twenty-eight years, in Robin Hood (1922), the 1938 film and Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950), which takes some doing. In between he became a fixture of the Warner Bros. stock company and, above all, Errol Flynn's man, in thirteen films including Dodge City (1939) and The Sea Hawk (1940).
The Flynn pictures show what the job was. Flynn was quick and light and slightly pleased with himself, and Hale stood beside him solid, gruff and delighted, so that the star had someone to bounce off who would not break. The trick was to be loyal without being dull, and Hale managed it by looking as if he enjoyed the company. Outside Sherwood he did the same work in plainer clothes: Ed Munn in Stella Dallas (1937), Ed Carlsen in They Drive by Night (1940), and Danker in It Happened One Night (1934), where our review, which had a good deal to say about Gable and Colbert, did not mention him at all. That is the supporting actor's fate, and it is not a complaint against the film.
Nor is it quite a complaint against him, though it names the limit. After Biograph he was rarely asked to carry anything, and the nearest thing to a criticism his reputation has ever attracted is that he was kept in the supporting ranks for the rest of his working life. He seems to have made his peace with it. "I want to play characters with comedy or tragedy," he said, and the studios mostly gave him the comedy. He picked up the staff for the last time in Rogues of Sherwood Forest, the year he died. The 1938 one is the one to see.
Biography
Alan Hale (1892–1950) was an American actor and film director. Born Rufus Edward MacKahan in Washington, D.C., he began his career in silent films around 1911 and appeared in more than 200 feature films over four decades, often in supporting character roles.
He is known for playing Little John in the Robin Hood films of 1922, 1938 and 1950. Hale frequently appeared alongside Errol Flynn, including in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City (1939) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Other notable credits include It Happened One Night (1934), in which he played Danker, Of Human Bondage (1934) and Stella Dallas (1937). He also directed nine films.
Hale was married to actress Gretchen Hartman from 1914 until his death; their son, Alan Hale Jr., also became an actor.
