Cinema
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (PG', selected cinemas)
Trite fit
Mark Steyn
Tie standard Hollywood line is that the associate producer is someone who's pre- pared to associate with the producer. In the case of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the associate producer is Evan Chandler, who produced the son who claims that Michael Jackson associated a little too much with him. Chandler is a celebrity dentist who wants to break into movies. On the evi- dence of his writing of Men In Tights, he'd be well-advised to stick to root-canal work and suing rock stars.
That's not to say Men In Tights doesn't have a lot we should be thankful for. For one thing, it gives us the chance to see Mel Brooks doing his movie-plug routine on the TV shows. Films come and go, but the Brooks plug is an all-time classic: 'My mother said to me, "Melvyn, it's terrific. It should only make a million dollars." I said, "If it does, we're finished. It cost two mil- lion."' Or three or five or 14: from Blazing Saddles through High Anxiety and To Be Or Not To Be, inflation has exaggerated the jest but not diminished it. These days, like most of Brooks' plugging act, it seems a churlish technicality to insist it should actu- ally be related to a newly released motion picture.
And yet, and yet . . . hard-core fans of The Producers and Young Frankenstein can't quite stem the suspicion that the talk-show pitch operates in inverse proportion to the `Look, Mary — three of a kind beats a full house.' film itself. It's not entirely Brooks' fault: every time he sets his sights higher, critics and audiences demand he gets back to what he does best. So his remake of Lubitsch (To Be Or Not To Be) was fol- lowed by Spaceballs; now, his hommage to Preston Sturges (Life Stinks) has sent him scurrying back to Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Older movie-goers will sigh, `They're playing our song', as Robin (Cary Elwes) serenades Maid Marian (Amy Yas- beck) with 'The Night Is Young And You're So Beautiful'. Even older movie- goers will sigh, 'They're playing our joke', as the hangman chortles, 'No noose is good noose' or the Sheriff of Rottingham says, `Walk this way' and the Merrie Men fall in line, mimicking his mincing gait.
Alas, the older the jokes the more you need of them. And the more you need a plot, or an environment, or a character, or something in which to embed them. Much of this film seems happy to recycle its pre- decessors — sometimes literally, as when the new black Sheriff of Rottingham says, `Well, it worked in Blazing Saddles.' And, unfortunately for Brooks, his early success- es have prompted untold imitators — most successfully, Leslie Nielsen's Naked Gun pictures; least successfully, the recent Loaded Weapon.
The latter film sums up Brooks' difficul- ty. It was a spoof of the Lethal Weapon series, but they're done so tongue-in-cheek, what's to spoof? These days, you're hard put to find a Hollywood movie which believes in itself anyway: Bruce Willis openly mocks his action pictures on talk- shows; the stars of the forthcoming Three Musketeers openly mock their action pic- ture while they're still up on the big screen acting in it. By comparison with that, Brooks' treatment of the Robin Hood leg- end seems almost touchingly naïve.
As always, the best bits are when Brooks attends to detail: Elwes' Errol Flynn pose — hands on hips, head back laughing; Yas- beck's Maid Marian — all Celia Johnson vowel sounds (I'm sear happy'); and the small-laugh lines, the internal chuckles rather than the explosive side-splitters: 'He is headstrong and cocksure. Or is it the other way around?'
But it still looks like a cute TV variety show sketch stretched to a full-length motion picture. Maybe that's enough to score a hit with the home video crowd. But some of us pine wistfully for those inspired juxtapositions of two decades ago: the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles riding through the desert and passing, for no par- ticular reason, the Count Basle band jam- min' in the sand; the uncannily accurate parody of Sinatra in the Hitchcockian High Anxiety. Brooks often puts his greatest effort into the musical sequences: in this film, it's the title song, 'We're men! We're men in tights! We roam around the forest looking for fights.' Time for Mel Brooks to bite the bullet and do a full-scale film musical.
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