Robin Hood: Men in Tights *** (1993, Cary Elwes, Roger Rees, Amy Yasbeck, Tracey Ullman, Patrick Stewart, Dom DeLuise, Mel Brooks) – Classic Movie Review 2636

‘The legend had it coming… Find out where Robin Hood put his Little John, what made Will Scarlet, and what did Friar Tuck into his tights that Maid Marion all of a quiver?’

Co-writer/producer/director Mel Brooks’s good-natured, scattergun 1993 spoof of the Robin Hood films and particularly the then recent 1991 Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is always amiable and sometimes funny. But it is a gleefully amateurish, uneven and old-style satirical comedy, and sometimes it falls rather flat. It’s all very mild but it has a PG-13 rating for off-colour humour.

English actor Cary Elwes is suitably dashing as a smug and smirking hero Robin of Loxley (‘well at least I can manage an English accent, unlike other Robins’) and Roger Rees isn’t at all bad as the rotten Sheriff of Rottingham. Both actors are well cast and pretty good, though neither have quite enough comedy dynamism, zest and brio to carry the flat moments in the script by Brooks, Evan Chandler and J David Shapiro.

Tracey Ullman is funny as Latrine (I’ve changed my name’ ‘what was it before?’ ‘Shithouse’) and Don DeLuise gives an amusing Marlon Brando impersonation as Don Giovanni – cue an off-topic parody of The Godfather. Mel Brooks gives himself bit part as a mildly funny rabbi, Rabbi Tuckman, alias a reconstituted Friar Tuck.

The payoff line (on the election of a black sheriff) ‘Well it worked in Blazing Saddles’ is a rather bad idea because it emphasises how much better Brooks was at this kind of movie spoof thing in the Seventies. Still, scattergun and shaky as it is, it’s a whole lot funnier and better than History of the World – Part One or Spaceballs. It’s certainly no worse than the equally cheerfully silly Carry On spoofs, with gags and character names just as groan worthy.

Also in the cast are Richard Lewis (Prince John), Amy Yasbeck (Maid Marian), Dave Chappelle (Ahchoo), Isaac Hayes (Asneeze), Patrick Stewart (King Richard), Dick Van Patten (as The Abbot), Clive Revill, Mark Blankfield, Megan Cavanagh, Eric Allan Kramer (Little John), Matthew Porretta, (Will Scarlet O’Hara), Robert Ridgley, Steve Tancora (Filthy Luca), Joe Dimmick (Dirty Ezio) and Avery Schreiber.

Dick Van Patten, who also appeared in Brooks’s High Anxiety (1977) and Spaceballs, died on June 23 2015, aged 86.

Roger Rees, best known for playing Nicholas Nickleby on the West End and Broadway stage and on TV, died of cancer in New York on July 10 2015, aged 71.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2636

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