Sherwood Week: A jest of Robin Hood

ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS

1993

Directed by Mel Brooks

Written by Evan Chandler, J. David Shapiro, and Mel Brooks

Spoilers: still inapplicable

As hard as it might be to comprehend today, for I do not comprehend it myself, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves really was a big deal; and, were we chasing down a different path, what that would lead us to instead is the 90s' burgeoning phenomenon of large-budgeted action-adventure period pieces eventually culminating in Gladiator—a path circling back to another Robin Hood in the end.  But for now, there could be no better proof of Prince of Thieves' status than the fact that in 1993 Mel Brooks made a parody of it, and this was, itself, a modestly big deal.  Indeed, this parody, called Robin Hood: Men In Tights, was destined to be the last big deal of Brooks's filmmaking career.

By 1993, the then-67 year old had already cemented an enduring legacy, arguably still the household-name director of comedies; but though I think it must be easy to misremember the 80s as the height of Brooks's powers, because that's how I remembered it, it's objectively untrue, given that even a film of such renown as Spaceballs had soft-flopped, and while it's neat that it predicted its own home video success, that wasn't as helpful as making Blazing Saddles money in the first place.  Even less helpful, Brooks had kicked off his 1990s on a tangent with Life Stinks, his first movie since The Producers in 1967 that wasn't a parody of something,* a My Man Godfrey-meets-Sullivan's Travels-meets-A Christmas Carol-by-which-I-mean-it-meets-Scrooged class fable that nobody saw, even on home video.  That's a pity, because it's a good movie that deserves to be seen, and perhaps a pity, also, because it sent Brooks right back into the same rut, that didn't have much left in it afterwards.

I might wonder if means something, then, that Life Stinks shared theaters (however briefly) with a certain blockbuster in the summer of 1991, though we might postulate factors besides bitterness informing Brooks's choice of subject.  We can even ask if it was Brooks's choice, since the screenplay originated with J. David Shapiro, and the idea originated with, apparently, Shapiro's dentist, Evan Chandler, who himself seems to have appropriated the idea of a Prince of Thieves parody, specifically, from his eleven-year old son, whom I suppose, like many, saw it, and, also like many, wasn't impressed by it; authorship was sufficiently questioned that, after Brooks bought the script and he and Shapiro redrafted it, it wound up being arbitrated what credit Chandler would get (he did, in fact, receive "screenplay by"; the kid, for the record, received nothing).  If Brooks swooping in like that seems odd, then maybe it had something to do with Robin having always been on his radar, with intimations that he could've been part of History of the World, Part I, and of course, going back to 1975, we have one extremely concrete expression of Brooks's belief in the comedic potential of the legendry, an entire short-lived Robin Hood sitcom, When Things Were Rotten (possibly in Rottinghamshire, as we'll see, but I didn't watch the whole thing).

But something cynical inside me suspects much of it was to recharge Brooks's fortunes while the getting was good: all of Brooks's previous spoofs, including Spaceballs and Young Frankenstein, where things got the closest to "we're making fun of a specific film series," had been more about taking on whole genres, movements, oeuvres; meanwhile, almost all of Brooks's previous spoofs came at a significant remove from their targets, sometimes a generation or more, making his parodies feel like they were just what he was into that week.  (Even Spaceballs feels like this.)  Men In Tights, though, is some topical shit, not to mention after a soft target: the huge hit movie that came out two years ago that pop culture had already made a joke out of without Brooks's help, blasted into theaters in time to exploit the backlash, so that the period 1991-1993 found our beloved auteur laughmaker operating with more ruthless efficiency than the producers of Scary Movie.

That doesn't mean Brooks's Robin Hood is bad—many would aver that parodies should be topical—so let's be unambiguous: I like it!  However, if you inferred that I think it's not Brooks at his best, then you inferred right, despite Brooks having more than two dozen 25-minute blocks of preparation for it (the show, which does also seem decent, appears to be more similar in spirit than in substance to the movie, actually, so isn't exactly a "prototype").  It's a deeply uneven thing, and one could imagine that headlong pursuit might be a reason why.  Either way, Men In Tights does prove one thesis of this retrospective, namely that in a hundred-plus years there have been just two filmed Robin Hoods of any real cultural impact, plus a Disney cartoon, which, still, isn't all that bad a place for a major fixture of English folklore/literature to land (in a hundred-plus years there have been just two filmed Hamlets and two filmed Arthurs of any real cultural impact, plus their respective Disney cartoons).

It's crazy that one of those Robin Hoods is Prince of Thieves, but these are the only two Robin Hoods Brooks or his collaborators ever even consider making fun of (not even Ivanhoe—with the Jewish princess! Mel!), so that the very organizing principle of Men In Tights—its centrality cannot be overstated—is "what if, in Prince of Thieves, they dressed like it was The Adventures of Robin Hood?"  And, elastic fabrics in the 1190s or not, that means Dodie Shepard's done probably the conventionally-best costume design in any Brooks movie, even if I also mainly mean "what if the men dressed like it was The Adventures?", and I still don't want you to think that even the men's costumes (let alone the women's) are a patch on Milo Anderson's.  (Plus, if it matters, and it matters some, Michael O'Shea's done some of the prettiest photography in a Brooks movie.)  Nonetheless, the idea comes across.

So: Prince of Thieves: in 119X, there is an amusing title sequence involving Prince John's (Richard Lewis's) goons burning down a village of extras who, it turns out, know they're extras in a Robin Hood movie, and are sick of every Robin Hood movie starting with goons burning down their village, a thing that happens (and then just sort-of) only in Prince of Thieves, but it's a cute way to begin.  (As is its second framing device, a rap ballet, because... it's 1993, I think.)  So, then, also in 119X (and also only in Prince of Thieves), Robin of Loxley** (Cary Elwes) has been captured by the Saracens, escaping with the help of a friendly Moor named Asneeze (Isaac Hayes), who, with well-wishes, sends Robin on his way back to England where he's asked to check on Asneeze's son, Ahchoo (Dave Chappelle)—an "exchange student"—and Asneeze may well exist solely to prompt this joke about Arabic names, sort of a prevision of how Men In Tights' runners are not usually going to be great, but since we could've just had Chappelle on-site and starting with the "bless you's" already, he may exist solely to prompt the much better joke about Robin literally swimming back to England from the Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Which dialogue identifies as in Africa, complicating my willingness to believe that Brooks is doing a dry, intellectual joke that nobody would ever laugh at (one of his lesser-seen capabilities) with the map that's, arguably, making fun of the historical illiteracy of movies when it names, besides Jerusalem, the Ottoman Empire and Gaul.  But then, they also could've just had Ahchoo swim to England with him, which I suggest could've driven some comic exchange, and while this would've been early in Chappelle's career to rest too much on him, it would've been something for him to do, and Ahchoo kind of exists solely to be the Moorish (read: Black American) Merry Man who wears a backwards green cap and says "honky" occasionally.  I do enjoy, however, Elwes getting a mouth full of disgusting wet sand when he replicates Kevin Costner's passionate return to his native soil, as well as his discovery that his family castle is being repossessed and literally dragged away, trailer park-style, leaving only his blind servant Blinkin (Mark Blankfield) masturbating to an (embossed) Ye Olde Playboy, unaware that the structure around him has disappeared.

A nice density of jokes up till now, then, more-or-less hitting, and so far it's more like I should pick up my own pace.  Alright: Robin rescues Ahchoo from English cops, has his first encounter with Mervyn (okay, Melvin), Sheriff of Rottingham (Roger Rees), picks up Little John (Eric Alan Kramer, a quietly outstanding Little John, really) and, if we must, Will Scarlet O'Hara (Matthew Porretta), and declares war on John, Adventures-style, by busting into a banquet, where he makes the acquaintance of Marian (Amy Yasbeck), who needs substantially less persuasion than Olivia de Havilland; suffice it to say, subsequently "Robin Hood" happens, since they are all basically similar, though Brooks takes advantage of the now-commonplace resituation of the story to the regency of John, and not the reign of Edward I or later, where this would have been rather less likely, by having Robin and his Merry Men meet Rabbi Tuckman (Brooks, naturally), who asks them as kindly as possible, considering the presumably fake Yiddish word he uses to do so, whether they're a bunch of gays.

So the movie certainly earns its title, a title it got surprisingly late, replacing Robin Hood: The True Story, thank God.  I would be exaggerating to say this is the whole movie—it's only an entire musical number that ends with the protestation, "WE'RE BUTCH!", a pretty swell Leggs eggs joke with giant plastic containers for Robin's chosen uniforms, and their relief when they can dispense with a drag subterfuge to get back into the comfort of their manly clothes—but it is the most visible "in" to its principal mode, which is comparing Prince of Thieves to The Adventures and finding the latter superior.  Hence Elwes, declaring directly to the camera, "unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent,"*** which isn't the important part; the important part begins with Elwes's resemblance to Errol Flynn, and continues into his performance, which likewise embodies the charisma of a swashbuckling hero (a thing intensely lacking in Prince of Thieves), modified for a slightly-dopier "classical" Robin, yet still smart enough to reflect our contempt for all the complete dum-dums surrounding him.  It's a role Elwes had basically already played in The Princess Bride, and no scene with Elwes manages to completely float away; he's a terrific rendition of the kind of protagonist Brooks pursued in this period, like Bill Pullman before him managing a sort-of straight-man, who can anchor the narrative to something halfway-credible but who still gets to have as much fun as anybody in the cast.  Elwes, even, could be having more.

In respect to the other ways it pits The Adventures against Prince of Thieves, it has a John—Lewis's "Jewish neurotic" prince is by-and-large a pleasure, and John gets the movie's by-far best running gag (maybe because it has the best punchline, maybe because it has a punchline), in a mole that constantly relocates all over his face—whilst Rottingham, because some characters get stupid names with irritating randomness, is probably more like a lame-ass Gisbourne even if he's styled like Alan Rickman's sheriff and has Rickman's witchy subplot (that's "Latrine" (Tracey Ullman), barely a pun on Arthur's "Morgaine," if it's even that).  Rottingham's runner, incidentally, is mixing up the words in sentences, and Rees is game, though if I don't think it's supreme comedy, neither must the movie, since it abandons it halfway through.  After a fashion, "Dave Chappelle doesn't do much here" is commentary on "Morgan Freeman didn't do much there"; and in another drily intellectual parody, we have the famously English Patrick Stewart doing a Scottish accent for Richard in imitation of Prince of Thieves' Sean Connery's (b)rougish cameo, though I'm not sure the actual joke isn't "we also selected someone who'd previously played Robin Hood, except Stewart played Robin as Captain Picard, a result of Q's whimsies," thus highlighting how this was a dumb connection to make.  But, you know, give that direct Prince of Thieves parody this much: Blinkin, Prince of Thieves' blind servant figure now promoted to full Merry Man—and you could predict this from first principles, "the blind and also-stupid man is, now, an integral part of the action scenes"—is this comedy's indispensable side character.

Now, I mentioned a "density of jokes," which does not always maintain.  It could be a matter of taste—one person's "hilarious gag sequence" is another's "these are jokes?"—but I'll confess that, for me, a disappointingly large proportion of Men In Tights dies onscreen.  One reason why is that this parody has a deeply troubling penchant for scaffolding out its own, fully-bespoke set-ups for comic elaborations that are completely removed from the actual subject, and are unfunny regardless.  Brooks's puns can be dire.  Take the pun title for this review, "a jest of Robin Hood."  That's a play on A Gest of Robyn Hode, "[j]est" meaning "tale" in Middle English.  Whether that's funny, especially now that I've explained it—and don't assume that Men In Tights itself will always refrain from explaining its jokes—I believe it, objectively, "works."  "Rottingham" works.  Now take "Loxley and Bagelle," a combination that sounds good to Tuckman.  Get it?  It doesn't explain that one, though I correctly guessed it had something to do with bagels.  So, you get it now, right?  Of course you fucking don't, because it's a "pun" about the marriage of Robin of Loxley to Marian Bagelle.  Who is "Marian Bagelle"?  Nobody who ever existed before this movie did.  Though it's not as sloggy as the endless-seeming riffing on "Will Scarlet O'Hara."

"Sloggy" is not usually a word that describes entire scenes, but it can describe at least two: our introduction to Ullman's shrill witch and a Godfather parody with Dom DeLuise—who, the more I see of him, the more I want to kick over his grave—though it's not entirely his fault that even though I finished the movie yesterday, his scene (they're from Jersey, oh) might actually still be playing.  And Yasbeck (or Marian's singing voice, Debbie James) gets a whole original song, and it's not—even nominally—a comic song, just a ballad-for-the-movie-we're-watching, reprised over the end credits, about finding true love Disney-style; I don't hate this, because I've never begrudged spoof films for having actual emotional spines (consider Spaceballs, or beyond Brooks, Airplane!), but I'm perplexed by it.  It's worth noting the 104 minute runtime: maybe it makes sense that the parody of Prince of Thieves, a shockingly overlong Robin Hood, should be worrisomely beyond the mean of a Brooks movie, which mostly go about 95; and it's just ever-so-slightly noticeably slack in its editing, a fair number of shots overstaying, or that shouldn't be there at all (now contrast Spaceballs, and its tight-as-a-drum editing), which is a reason that "sloggy" can often describe individual parts of scenes.

I guess the "incontinent lizard" addition to the "Godfather parody" is original.

But it's mostly the script, and the movie's almost always on firmer footing in its visual humor.  I'm not sure any anachronism stressed in dialogue is funny, but almost every anachronism that doesn't have some character pointing it out is (the exception: the "Patriot Arrow" isn't too stressed, but isn't very funny, and, au courant as it was, it had been prototyped by When Things Were Rotten, and isn't half as cool as the Raimiesque "arrow POV!" shot from the trailer, but not the film itself).  To the extent it has setpieces, they're funny—there's a "domino" gag too superb to spoil—and, in Brooks tradition, it gets faster, funnier, and more physical as it strikes towards its finale.  I'll say I'm a little puzzled they don't lean more on Elwes's unflappability in the face of his (intermittent) incompetence, since that's at least as reliable as his effortless mastery over the buttmonkey, Rottingham.  Regardless, I think Brooks did perceive the inherent challenge of parodying Prince of Thieves, a movie where anytime its Nottingham was on camera, it got pulled fully into Rickman's orbit of self-parody.

Brooks doesn't really try to match that particular energy, instead making fun of Rickman's flailing rape monster with some live-action anarchic cartooning that gets extraordinary by the end, thanks to the creative conceptual novelty that I suppose is the best individual thing in the entire movie besides Blinkin, Marian's chastity belt.  Hell, if nothing else, to establish it, we're compelled to look at Yasbeck's pelvis for a while.  But it's always funny, never moreso than in the parody of Prince of Thieves' climax that has basically the same stakes, except rendered wonderfully and trenchantly stupid (even with more poetic justice, oddly, plus a loveable "Curtizian shadow" gag) in this more avowedly-silly sheriff's pursuit of Marian's virginity.  (There's an argument that the film's denouement—a, shall we say, "anticlimax"—is even funnier.)

Unfortunately, the dismal sticks as readily as the good, and there aren't as many immortalities as in Brooks's best films.  Yet there are some, and even as it does evidence a decline, I'd prefer to consider it part of Brooks's very long and successful classical period, with enough of a valedictory impulse to it (the maybe-too-long ending is maybe-too-long in part because it calls back not to one but two of Brooks's proudest achievements) that perhaps it could've been the capstone to a career that was nothing besides "classical period."  I mean, I haven't seen Dracula: Dead and Loving It in a while, but...

Score: 7/10

*Evidently, even The Twelve Chairs is a parody of the novel it's based on.

**Apparently Loxley, not Locksley.  Hooray!  The true story!

***I understand that in the Hungarian dub, where this joke would've collapsed, they changed it to "unlike some Robin Hoods, I have a shapely bottom."  Ouch.