James Goldman's original script must have been -- or otherwise ought to have been -- intended as a rumination on middle-aged malaise in the Middle Ages. Robin Hood and Little John return to Sherwood Forest after twenty years of Crusading with the demented King Richard, and they find all the battles of their youth still raging, unresolved. However, under Richard Lester's sour-apple direction, a bit callous and a lot capricious, it is no longer easy to tell what was intended: something mythic (Robin Hood rides again!), or something realistic (gritty color images, gory battle scenes, and My Lai-like tales of the Crusades), or something satiric (debunking the deeds of demi-gods in the manner of Lester's Musketeers movies, or even in the manner of Monty Python's Holy Grail movie). The movie's first action scene provides its most stirring moment. There, Lester's slapstick tendencies do not quite undermine the pathos of middle-aged decay. As Robin and John fight their way out of entrapment on the ramparts of the Sheriff's castle, they accomplish the same things that Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn once did, but with a good deal more sweating, grunting, huffing-and-puffing. In the final analysis, though, the moviemakers seem to expect previous versions of the story to do their work for them. Not enough transpires here between Robin and the Sheriff to prepare you for their climactic broadsword duel on an open battlefield, although Sean Connery and Robert Shaw are aided in this scene by memories of their mano a mano in From Russia, With Love. And not enough transpires between Robin and Marian to prepare you for her big speech at movie's end, although Audrey Hepburn suggests some of the regret of Marian's twenty-year separation from her lover simply by virtue of her own eight-year absence from the screen. With Nicol Williamson, Richard Harris. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
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