Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this week's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at the 1976 movie "Robin and Marian."

ROBIN AND MARIAN (1976)

I went on The Ride for the Arts on Sunday. Did the whole fifteen miles trying to catch up with my son, who just took off and rode as if the devil was chasing him.

I guess that puts me in my place. He finished a full hour ahead of me and that really made me feel old and tired. So I watched one of my favorite movies about getting old but not giving up, "Robin and Marian."

It was made in 1976, when baby boomers were still booming around, changing the world and not looking for condos with a view. This film stars Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as Robin Hood and Lady Marian. Robin went off to the Crusades and then followed King Richard around France for 20 years looking for castles to plunder. Basically, he was being a boy.

Marian waited for him to return for a while and then joined a convent and devoted herself to God. The kind of thing girls did in the 13th Century. The movie also stars some of my favorite English actors, Nicol Williamson as Little John, Robert Shaw as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Richard Harris as King Richard the Lionheart, Denholm Elliot as Will Scarlet, even Ian Holm in a very funny scene as the usurper of Richard's throne, King John.

Richard Lester directed and he has a very unglamorous eye for period detail. Almost Monty Python-esque in a way. The Middle Ages were a muddy, bloody, difficult time to live. Nevertheless, love will find a way.

Ordinarily, I'd be somewhat cynical about a line like that last one. But, feeling a little creaky with age, it's nice to see that you can run off around the world being a boy, fighting wars, following a foolish king, growing slowly into a kind of manhood, and come back, and the girl you went to the prom with, to whom you promised your heart and never lost sight of, is still there, older but just as beautiful and with the same light in her eye that she had for you when you said goodbye.

It's nice to know you can live a life half-filled with mistakes and, if you stay open to it, still love and be loved.

The easy chemistry between Hepburn and Connery is wonderful. They bicker, they banter, they laugh and fall, exhausted, into each other's arms and because Lester's camera is interested in character and emotion and not in beautiful pictures there is uplifting nobility in the intricacy of this aging relationship, warts and all.

For me, the best scene, because I played guns and play-fought with my brothers throughout my childhood and still love the chance to have a sword fight on stage or in a film, the best part is the fight between Robin and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Broadsword and ax, two aging men, fighting for honor and to save Sherwood Forest, and the people who live there, and it takes forever.

I have lifted the actual broadsword that people fought with back then. They weighed eight to 10 pounds. If you had to swing it more than eight times, you were pretty much done. These two go at it for what feels like an hour. Chipping away at each other. Bashing away is more like it. Until they can hardly stand, and only because of sheer determination, and with help from natural forces like gravity, does either of them win the battle.

The film is a wonderful finish to a great legend, the legend of Robin Hood. Robin Hood really did steal from the rich and give to the poor, unlike our good friend, Jesse James. It is also a great love story, unsentimental, possible and hopeful.