Rob Roy

24/05/2026

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Rob Roy

Rob Roy (directed by Michael Caton-Jones) is what happens when a fine Scottish novelist goes to Hollywood and comes back again. This could produce the clumsiest of collisions, with Alan Sharp returning to Scotland full of conventional ideas about filmmaking. But Sharp went to America at a time when US cinema was open to different voices and different cultures, as if looking for unexpected input over expected output. While during the classic period it was common for writers in Hollywood to feel stifled and hampered, including William Faulkner, and especially F. Scott Fitzgerald, by the 1970s, screenwriters took on an individualising respect. Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, William Goldman, Paddy Chayefsky and Sharp were central to the films they were writing, and few would speak of Chinatown, Taxi Driver or Network without invoking Towne, Schrader or Chayefsky. During the first half of the decade, Sharp wrote the westerns Ulzana’s Raid, The Hired Hand, and Billy Two Hats, and noirish thrillers, The Last Run and Night Moves. While he continued writing scripts and even directed a feature in the mid-80s, called Little Treasures, he perhaps never wrote another major script until Roy Roy in the mid-90s. It seemed to combine his interest in American expansionist action, central to the West, with an interest in Scottish history. If he could say in a TV interview (‘Man of Iron’) that, when he was younger, he would see similarities between the western and the samurai film, then had Scotland been making many movies and generating its own genres, the equivalent would surely have been the clan movie.
This historical period, covering centuries, has perhaps never been fully explored dramatically on screen, in contrast to American 19th-century history that became mythologised through genre, with cowboys and Indians, outlaw gangs and tribes, offering rich pickings for generically inclined directors. Scotland, with its highland and lowland contrasts, clans that included the Macdonalds, MacLeods, Campbells and Stuarts, and the tensions between them, and, too, the tensions that would later come about after William of Orange ascended to the throne near the end of the 17th century, promoting protestant interests over Catholic ones, was potentially very rich indeed. Rob Roy MacGregor was involved in the Jacobite revolution that wished to oust the protestant William and put a Catholic Stuart back on the throne.
We offer a simplified account of a complicated history, but what it makes clear is that Scotland had the historical complexity to produce a cinema potentially as vivid as the western, but lacked the production potential and budgetary opportunities for the equivalent development of the Hollywood horse opera. When Sharp says that filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah saw that the genre was capable of expansion, he would surely have realised that Scottish history was capable of genrefication. While directors like Peckinpah, Arthur Penn (who directed Night Moves) and Robert Altman were interested in expanding the genre by incorporating more historical realism into it, Sharp’s Rob Roy script, in some ways, has done the reverse. It proposes that Scottish history is ripe for generic containment. Out of the sprawling, messy events of the early 18th century, how was a writer to convey to the viewer salient details without creating confusion?
Sharp does so by working with the mythological, without undermining the historical, and arrives at a complex account of a man’s sense of duty towards his family and his community. Sharp draws on various traditions to be found in the Western movie, like the homesteader, the land grab, civilisational shifts, the earthy versus the urbane, the outlaw and the stay-at-home wife. But he both fits them into a new situation because this is Scotland and not the US, and also uses aspects of noir to complicate the plot. For example, Rob Roy’s wife, Mary (Jessica Lange), isn’t just the woman waiting for her man at home; she is important to how the story develops because of the information she refuses to divulge, no matter the horrific incident that takes place. Rob Roy (Liam Neeson) leaves home after the Marquess Montrose (John Hurt) threatens to put him in prison. Rob has borrowed money from him, the money has been stolen, and the Marquess will waive the debt if Rob Roy traduces what the Marquess sees as a Jacobite duke. Rob Roy won’t dishonour himself and another man, and the Marquess threatens to imprison him, and Rob Roy escapes. When Montrose’s nephew Cunningham (Tim Roth) burns down Rob and Mary’s home and rapes Mary, he reckons this will lead Rob Roy to seek revenge, and he will be able to kill him. But she tells his brother that he must keep it to himself. The homestead story shows the stay-at-home wife violated, but Sharp doesn’t turn this chiefly into a revenge western (a sub-genre in itself), but instead offers an intricate account of community, loyalty, sectarian division, and political affiliation, with the emphasis on community. Rob Roy originally borrows the money to feed and house his clan, hoping with the cash to become a cattle raiser who would trade his stock.
Janet Maslin believed the film possessed ‘‘long, dry stretches,’’ (New York Times), which is close to a criticism Sharp himself made about his Hired Hand script, directed by Peter Fonda. ‘‘It was a perfectly straightforward little story about a guy who f***ed off and came back... I never found the style really matched the tale... It proved to be very languorous.’’ (Eye for Film) Yet while Sharp may have been too hard on Fonda’s film, in Caton-Jones’ it makes sense that the action is limited because the circumstances are complicated. This isn’t about a man who goes and comes back, but someone embedded in his community who is also a victim of historical circumstances, as serious outside wealth undermines the immediate fabric of clan life. The film’s plot, set in 1713, hinges on how this clan can retain its living standard without constantly being exploited or resorting to cattle- rustling that many would do to survive. Once the borrowed money is stolen (in a plot engineered by Cunningham), any hope of a dignified existence is destroyed.
Rob Roy has to find a way to retain his dignity by killing Cunningham in a duel. As he says, when his wife tells him after she acknowledges she was raped, that she is also pregnant, doesn’t know if the child is Rob Roy’s or Cunningham’s, and that she didn’t have the heart to abort it, that it isn’t the child who needs killing, but his foe. In turn, this will also involve his debt annulled, as Argyll does a deal with Montrose that, if MacGregor wins, the £1000 needn’t be paid back. And if he loses, Argyll says he will pay the debt. The film offers in many ways the best of all possible worlds by the conclusion: MacGregor comes to know that his best friend didn’t escape with his money to the US, and that Cunningham and Montrose’s factor stole it. Cunningham will lose the fight, and Rob Roy will be debt-free. He has remained himself without ruining the community.
The film accepts that though Rob Roy could have honoured the community and dishonoured himself by lying about Argyll, it is by honouring Argyll that he gets to save the community and retain his own honour. Rita Kempley might say that ‘‘as the dour chief of a declining clan, Robert Roy MacGregor has little left but his honor and his noble lineage, which he stubbornly guards, nae matter the cost to his kith and kin.’’ (Washington Post) And it is true that if he’d known about Mary’s rape sooner, he probably would have sought immediate revenge – why else would Mary insist his brother refrain from telling him? But, at the same time, when Mary and Rob Roy discuss the deed later, he doesn’t immediately swear revenge on Cunningham, but insists that he was a fool to allow the situation to develop that led to her being exposed, as he also accepts immediately that even if the child she is carrying is not his own, this is of no relevance. ‘‘Frankly, Rob Roy is about as bright as one of his cows,’’ Kempley reckons, as she compares the film to Death Wish and First Blood. But the point of these latter films is revenge, nothing more. Rob Roy is about community, history and honour, and shows them working in conjunction, all the better to accept that while the historical needs to meet the demands of genre, genre ought to accept the complexity of history. While Sharp was happy to see Rob Roy as a western transposed to his homeland, and Allan Massie noted that it was ‘’a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland,’’ Sharp was making it out of a complex culture and not a new one.
Obviously, the Old West had complexities of its own, but this would have been to interrogate the different Indigenous tribes that had been on the land for many more years than the whites who arrived in the 17th century. This wasn’t the concern of most Westerns, which as a genre developed in line with the development of white civilisation, and often how it moved from the outlaw to the state, from the long gunslinger to the burgeoning presence of communal living, with John Ford westerns like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were revisionist partly because they showed how much violence was involved in this shift. If Rob Roy is more narratively complex than most westerns, it rests on negotiating worlds that aren’t binary, but strategic. Rob Roy doesn’t want to be a cattle thief, but doesn’t want simply to protect the property of the wealthy either. This is why he borrows money – to become independent. Yet its theft by Cunningham, all the better so that the foppish Englishman can pay off his debts, leads Rob Roy to become even more dependent on the marquess. Once indebted to the Marquess, he is expected to befoul the name of the duke. It is partly because he refuses to do so that, later, the duke is willing to allow for a duel between Rob Roy and Cunningham that will annul Rob Roy’s debt if he wins, no matter that Mary says when she meets the duke, asking for his help, that MacGregor didn’t do it because he sees the duke as a friend, but that he wouldn’t besmirch anybody’s name. In killing Cunningham, Rob Roy will also be avenging his wife’s rape, but that seems a secondary concern (the sort of primary concern in a typical revenge film like Death Wish), to the important one of community and honour, the sort of honour he describes at the beginning of the film to his children. As he says, ‘’honour is a man’s gift to himself’’, but in taking responsibility for it, he is also responsible to others as others will be responsible to him. “We must never mistreat a woman nor malign a man.”
Honour may often seem synonymous with revenge, but there is no reason why vengeance can’t be enacted without honour. To shoot someone in the back after they have killed a member of your family is vengeful, but it doesn’t make it honourable. However, Rob Roy needs to honour his word, and honour his community, and by killing Cunningham, he manages both to be true to his word as he doesn’t dishonour the duke, the duke honours him by allowing him an opportunity to nullify the debt, and the community becomes possible again as Rob Roy will be a free man. When Cunningham agrees to the duel, it is the first words he speaks after an earlier attempt to catch MacGregor failed, and Cunningham was almost strangled. ‘One must never underestimate the healing power of hatred,’ the marquess says to him. But the film proposes, for Rob Roy, that wouldn’t be much of a healing power. Though Cunningham is the better swordsman, he has no purpose beyond his need for fine clothing and satisfying his ego, and for paying off debts that have been accumulated to accommodate that fragile sense of self. If he were to have won the fight against MacGregor, it would have been vengeful but hollow; MacGregor beating him is righteous before it is vengeful, and an injustice has been undone. While everyone in the film has stratagems of their own, from Cunningham stealing the money, Mary keeping the rape to herself, the duke reckoning if he bets on MacGregor, he will likely lose money because Cunningham is the better swordsman, though he would prefer Rob Roy to win, then Sharp would say strategy is only as good as the honour it respects and the community it serves.
Speaking of Scottish Independence, Sharp reckoned, ‘‘ My belief is that before you can move towards anything like direct democracy you have to work with smaller constituencies. You cannae do it with 250 million people. You cannae do it with 50 million people but you can wi five million people.’’ (Herald) He doesn’t speak about England as an enemy, only as a country with a population that is too vast to incorporate into it a functioning political community. One way of looking at Rob Roy, set so soon after the Act of Union in 1707, is what happens when you complicate that governance with an English class system imposing itself on a clan culture that hasn’t quite disappeared, and where Protestantism and Catholicism remain pertinent questions when the Jacobites wanted Stuart on the throne and not William of Orange. We might say Sharp’s purpose is both generic and sociological, and we could say the same of many a great western, even if the Scottish environment creates a messier historical reality from which to draw upon. Yet the purpose of cinema, when it offers more than a generic predictability, is to find in genre the questions that might be too dispersed and difficult to address otherwise. All history is inevitably messy and complex, with causes and consequences that are too myriad to be shaped into ready narratives, and risk losing shape as the historian must try to be true to the time’s many facets. A film can be a work of strong causality without undermining complexity, and still manage to comment on the sort of world one might wish to live in. Rob Roy proposes it is one where revenge is a dish best served neither hot nor cold. It is, at best, an appetiser, and ought never to be a just dessert. The just lies elsewhere, in honour meeting community, and that the stratagems one deploys should be aimed at this end.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Rob Roy

Rob Roy

Rob Roy (directed by Michael Caton-Jones) is what happens when a fine Scottish novelist goes to Hollywood and comes back again. This could produce the clumsiest of collisions, with Alan Sharp returning to Scotland full of conventional ideas about filmmaking. But Sharp went to America at a time when US cinema was open to different voices and different cultures, as if looking for unexpected input over expected output. While during the classic period it was common for writers in Hollywood to feel stifled and hampered, including William Faulkner, and especially F. Scott Fitzgerald, by the 1970s, screenwriters took on an individualising respect. Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, William Goldman, Paddy Chayefsky and Sharp were central to the films they were writing, and few would speak of Chinatown, Taxi Driver or Network without invoking Towne, Schrader or Chayefsky. During the first half of the decade, Sharp wrote the westerns Ulzana’s Raid, The Hired Hand, and Billy Two Hats, and noirish thrillers, The Last Run and Night Moves. While he continued writing scripts and even directed a feature in the mid-80s, called Little Treasures, he perhaps never wrote another major script until Roy Roy in the mid-90s. It seemed to combine his interest in American expansionist action, central to the West, with an interest in Scottish history. If he could say in a TV interview (‘Man of Iron’) that, when he was younger, he would see similarities between the western and the samurai film, then had Scotland been making many movies and generating its own genres, the equivalent would surely have been the clan movie.
This historical period, covering centuries, has perhaps never been fully explored dramatically on screen, in contrast to American 19th-century history that became mythologised through genre, with cowboys and Indians, outlaw gangs and tribes, offering rich pickings for generically inclined directors. Scotland, with its highland and lowland contrasts, clans that included the Macdonalds, MacLeods, Campbells and Stuarts, and the tensions between them, and, too, the tensions that would later come about after William of Orange ascended to the throne near the end of the 17th century, promoting protestant interests over Catholic ones, was potentially very rich indeed. Rob Roy MacGregor was involved in the Jacobite revolution that wished to oust the protestant William and put a Catholic Stuart back on the throne.
We offer a simplified account of a complicated history, but what it makes clear is that Scotland had the historical complexity to produce a cinema potentially as vivid as the western, but lacked the production potential and budgetary opportunities for the equivalent development of the Hollywood horse opera. When Sharp says that filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah saw that the genre was capable of expansion, he would surely have realised that Scottish history was capable of genrefication. While directors like Peckinpah, Arthur Penn (who directed Night Moves) and Robert Altman were interested in expanding the genre by incorporating more historical realism into it, Sharp’s Rob Roy script, in some ways, has done the reverse. It proposes that Scottish history is ripe for generic containment. Out of the sprawling, messy events of the early 18th century, how was a writer to convey to the viewer salient details without creating confusion?
Sharp does so by working with the mythological, without undermining the historical, and arrives at a complex account of a man’s sense of duty towards his family and his community. Sharp draws on various traditions to be found in the Western movie, like the homesteader, the land grab, civilisational shifts, the earthy versus the urbane, the outlaw and the stay-at-home wife. But he both fits them into a new situation because this is Scotland and not the US, and also uses aspects of noir to complicate the plot. For example, Rob Roy’s wife, Mary (Jessica Lange), isn’t just the woman waiting for her man at home; she is important to how the story develops because of the information she refuses to divulge, no matter the horrific incident that takes place. Rob Roy (Liam Neeson) leaves home after the Marquess Montrose (John Hurt) threatens to put him in prison. Rob has borrowed money from him, the money has been stolen, and the Marquess will waive the debt if Rob Roy traduces what the Marquess sees as a Jacobite duke. Rob Roy won’t dishonour himself and another man, and the Marquess threatens to imprison him, and Rob Roy escapes. When Montrose’s nephew Cunningham (Tim Roth) burns down Rob and Mary’s home and rapes Mary, he reckons this will lead Rob Roy to seek revenge, and he will be able to kill him. But she tells his brother that he must keep it to himself. The homestead story shows the stay-at-home wife violated, but Sharp doesn’t turn this chiefly into a revenge western (a sub-genre in itself), but instead offers an intricate account of community, loyalty, sectarian division, and political affiliation, with the emphasis on community. Rob Roy originally borrows the money to feed and house his clan, hoping with the cash to become a cattle raiser who would trade his stock.
Janet Maslin believed the film possessed ‘‘long, dry stretches,’’ (New York Times), which is close to a criticism Sharp himself made about his Hired Hand script, directed by Peter Fonda. ‘‘It was a perfectly straightforward little story about a guy who f***ed off and came back... I never found the style really matched the tale... It proved to be very languorous.’’ (Eye for Film) Yet while Sharp may have been too hard on Fonda’s film, in Caton-Jones’ it makes sense that the action is limited because the circumstances are complicated. This isn’t about a man who goes and comes back, but someone embedded in his community who is also a victim of historical circumstances, as serious outside wealth undermines the immediate fabric of clan life. The film’s plot, set in 1713, hinges on how this clan can retain its living standard without constantly being exploited or resorting to cattle- rustling that many would do to survive. Once the borrowed money is stolen (in a plot engineered by Cunningham), any hope of a dignified existence is destroyed.
Rob Roy has to find a way to retain his dignity by killing Cunningham in a duel. As he says, when his wife tells him after she acknowledges she was raped, that she is also pregnant, doesn’t know if the child is Rob Roy’s or Cunningham’s, and that she didn’t have the heart to abort it, that it isn’t the child who needs killing, but his foe. In turn, this will also involve his debt annulled, as Argyll does a deal with Montrose that, if MacGregor wins, the £1000 needn’t be paid back. And if he loses, Argyll says he will pay the debt. The film offers in many ways the best of all possible worlds by the conclusion: MacGregor comes to know that his best friend didn’t escape with his money to the US, and that Cunningham and Montrose’s factor stole it. Cunningham will lose the fight, and Rob Roy will be debt-free. He has remained himself without ruining the community.
The film accepts that though Rob Roy could have honoured the community and dishonoured himself by lying about Argyll, it is by honouring Argyll that he gets to save the community and retain his own honour. Rita Kempley might say that ‘‘as the dour chief of a declining clan, Robert Roy MacGregor has little left but his honor and his noble lineage, which he stubbornly guards, nae matter the cost to his kith and kin.’’ (Washington Post) And it is true that if he’d known about Mary’s rape sooner, he probably would have sought immediate revenge – why else would Mary insist his brother refrain from telling him? But, at the same time, when Mary and Rob Roy discuss the deed later, he doesn’t immediately swear revenge on Cunningham, but insists that he was a fool to allow the situation to develop that led to her being exposed, as he also accepts immediately that even if the child she is carrying is not his own, this is of no relevance. ‘‘Frankly, Rob Roy is about as bright as one of his cows,’’ Kempley reckons, as she compares the film to Death Wish and First Blood. But the point of these latter films is revenge, nothing more. Rob Roy is about community, history and honour, and shows them working in conjunction, all the better to accept that while the historical needs to meet the demands of genre, genre ought to accept the complexity of history. While Sharp was happy to see Rob Roy as a western transposed to his homeland, and Allan Massie noted that it was ‘’a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland,’’ Sharp was making it out of a complex culture and not a new one.
Obviously, the Old West had complexities of its own, but this would have been to interrogate the different Indigenous tribes that had been on the land for many more years than the whites who arrived in the 17th century. This wasn’t the concern of most Westerns, which as a genre developed in line with the development of white civilisation, and often how it moved from the outlaw to the state, from the long gunslinger to the burgeoning presence of communal living, with John Ford westerns like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were revisionist partly because they showed how much violence was involved in this shift. If Rob Roy is more narratively complex than most westerns, it rests on negotiating worlds that aren’t binary, but strategic. Rob Roy doesn’t want to be a cattle thief, but doesn’t want simply to protect the property of the wealthy either. This is why he borrows money – to become independent. Yet its theft by Cunningham, all the better so that the foppish Englishman can pay off his debts, leads Rob Roy to become even more dependent on the marquess. Once indebted to the Marquess, he is expected to befoul the name of the duke. It is partly because he refuses to do so that, later, the duke is willing to allow for a duel between Rob Roy and Cunningham that will annul Rob Roy’s debt if he wins, no matter that Mary says when she meets the duke, asking for his help, that MacGregor didn’t do it because he sees the duke as a friend, but that he wouldn’t besmirch anybody’s name. In killing Cunningham, Rob Roy will also be avenging his wife’s rape, but that seems a secondary concern (the sort of primary concern in a typical revenge film like Death Wish), to the important one of community and honour, the sort of honour he describes at the beginning of the film to his children. As he says, ‘’honour is a man’s gift to himself’’, but in taking responsibility for it, he is also responsible to others as others will be responsible to him. “We must never mistreat a woman nor malign a man.”
Honour may often seem synonymous with revenge, but there is no reason why vengeance can’t be enacted without honour. To shoot someone in the back after they have killed a member of your family is vengeful, but it doesn’t make it honourable. However, Rob Roy needs to honour his word, and honour his community, and by killing Cunningham, he manages both to be true to his word as he doesn’t dishonour the duke, the duke honours him by allowing him an opportunity to nullify the debt, and the community becomes possible again as Rob Roy will be a free man. When Cunningham agrees to the duel, it is the first words he speaks after an earlier attempt to catch MacGregor failed, and Cunningham was almost strangled. ‘One must never underestimate the healing power of hatred,’ the marquess says to him. But the film proposes, for Rob Roy, that wouldn’t be much of a healing power. Though Cunningham is the better swordsman, he has no purpose beyond his need for fine clothing and satisfying his ego, and for paying off debts that have been accumulated to accommodate that fragile sense of self. If he were to have won the fight against MacGregor, it would have been vengeful but hollow; MacGregor beating him is righteous before it is vengeful, and an injustice has been undone. While everyone in the film has stratagems of their own, from Cunningham stealing the money, Mary keeping the rape to herself, the duke reckoning if he bets on MacGregor, he will likely lose money because Cunningham is the better swordsman, though he would prefer Rob Roy to win, then Sharp would say strategy is only as good as the honour it respects and the community it serves.
Speaking of Scottish Independence, Sharp reckoned, ‘‘ My belief is that before you can move towards anything like direct democracy you have to work with smaller constituencies. You cannae do it with 250 million people. You cannae do it with 50 million people but you can wi five million people.’’ (Herald) He doesn’t speak about England as an enemy, only as a country with a population that is too vast to incorporate into it a functioning political community. One way of looking at Rob Roy, set so soon after the Act of Union in 1707, is what happens when you complicate that governance with an English class system imposing itself on a clan culture that hasn’t quite disappeared, and where Protestantism and Catholicism remain pertinent questions when the Jacobites wanted Stuart on the throne and not William of Orange. We might say Sharp’s purpose is both generic and sociological, and we could say the same of many a great western, even if the Scottish environment creates a messier historical reality from which to draw upon. Yet the purpose of cinema, when it offers more than a generic predictability, is to find in genre the questions that might be too dispersed and difficult to address otherwise. All history is inevitably messy and complex, with causes and consequences that are too myriad to be shaped into ready narratives, and risk losing shape as the historian must try to be true to the time’s many facets. A film can be a work of strong causality without undermining complexity, and still manage to comment on the sort of world one might wish to live in. Rob Roy proposes it is one where revenge is a dish best served neither hot nor cold. It is, at best, an appetiser, and ought never to be a just dessert. The just lies elsewhere, in honour meeting community, and that the stratagems one deploys should be aimed at this end.

© Tony McKibbin