We’re nearing the end of blockbuster movie season, and you know what that means: People will soon stop urging me to see a Christopher Nolan film in the theater. Expect my hot takes on The Odyssey sometime around 2029. Meanwhile, buckle up for the summer hit of 1938: The Adventures of Robin Hood (free on Tubi, in case you’re wondering why I picked it).

This Technicolor assault on the eyes is ostensibly set in England during the 1190s, a few years after it’s been established that everybody has knives. King Richard the Lionheart has been kidnapped by a rival monarch on his way back from his latest Crusade—which isn’t even one of the top five occupational hazards of Crusading, to say nothing of the moral hazards. But he’s a “good guy” in this movieverse so we’re supposed to be sympathetic.

Richard’s loser brother Prince John (Claude Rains, valiantly acting from under some deeply unflattering wig fringe) is like I spoke to Richard on the phone for just shy of twenty minutes, he said I should be regent.* John’s righthand man, Sir Guy of Gisborne (a pre-Holmes Basil Rathbone), is on board for this soft-launch coup. So is the Sheriff of Nottingham, whose main role throughout the movie is to offer excuses for doing nothing, and who will go on to serve three terms as mayor of Minneapolis.

John’s agenda as Acting King is as follows:

In the movieverse, instead of an overt class conflict As Such, we’ve got a “Normans vs. Saxons” framework, with the Normans (elites) persecuting the Saxons (regular folks) while blithely noting that the stock market is at an all-time high. But the Normans’ tyranny does not go unopposed!

Enter Sir Robin of Loxley, aka Robin Hood (Errol Flynn, swashbuckled to the max).** Dressed in the world’s tightest and greenest leggings, he swans around Sherwood Forest cheerfully poaching game, swiping cash, and exacting revenge for the suffering souls of Nottingham. If you meet this man on the road, it’s a tossup whether he invites you to join in a feast of shoplifted venison or puts an arrow through one of your vital organs. He’s basically a cross between Matt Bomer’s character from White Collar and Luigi Mangione.

And naturally Robin has sidekicks. Here are some:

Robin and his Merry Men are at least as good at PR as they are at redistributing wealth. That’s why Robin crashes a royal banquet at Nottingham HQ to…

The fights in this movie are cinematic slapstick gold. People occasionally do some fancy sword-swinging, but more often, they lean on classic moves like ducking and weaving, pushing their opponents aside, cartoon face-punching, and jumping off of stuff. Aided by a massive production budget, these scenes are extremely colorful, extremely crowded, and extremely silly.

Speaking of silly: Welcome to our obligatory romantic subplot. Lady Marian (Olivia de Havilland, in an amazing wardrobe that should absolutely be used as Met Gala inspo), is King Richard’s ward and Sir Guy’s aspirational girlfriend. (It is established that Sir Guy has barely spoken to her. This tracks.) Robin’s first impression of Marian when they meet at the banquet is, and I quote, “Pity her manners don’t match her looks.” Her first impression of him is Ew, a Poor. Today, Hinge would call this your Most Compatible Match.

Before Robin makes his first of many dramatic exits, Marian reacts to his anti-John rhetoric with a scandalized “You speak treason!”

“Fluently,” Robin replies. I go to his campaign website and buy a T-shirt with his face on it.

A while later, Marian is traveling through Sherwood Forest and gets politely waylaid by the Merry Men. After an egalitarian feast and a quick spin through Occupy Nottingham, she’s converted to the Gospel of Robin. It helps that the Merry Men pledge to use their latest windfall to ransom King Richard rather than keep it for themselves, lest anyone fear we’re drifting toward a truly just society here.

Marian pronounces our hero a “strange man.” He asks, “Because I can feel for beaten and helpless people?” She clarifies, “Because you want to do something about it.” I order a yard sign that reads HOOD-TUCK 2028, destined to baffle passersby.

Meanwhile Marian’s doting nurse, Bessie, gets hit on by Much, the ONLY man in Sherwood with negative charisma. Bessie’s been married five times, yet somehow still looks at this guy, who has “never had a sweetheart” and brings nothing to the table (except, occasionally, a bootleg deer) and thinks, “Yeah, might as well.”

Sidenote: Here’s where the suspension of disbelief fails me. If, after living with and presumably poisoning five husbands, Bessie still has the willpower to date, she could at LEAST bag Little John. Friar Tuck’s vows might have some room for flexibility. I’m pretty sure Will swings both ways. This forest is TEEMING with testosterone and good politics, Bessie; don’t settle!

Once Marian is safely back at Nottingham HQ, the Sheriff makes his singular contribution to the plot: devising a trap for Robin, in the form of an archery tournament. He’s correctly surmised that Robin is into Marian, so the tournament publicity emphasizes that Marian will hand out the competition’s big prize.

Marian, now both radicalized and down bad, fears for Robin’s safety. But it takes her another twenty minutes of runtime to develop agency, so all she can do is rock her current outfit and nervously watch the tournament. Robin does indeed turn up to compete, cunningly disguised as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. He wins with a bullseye shot that splits his opponent’s arrow right down the shaft, which apparently was not a Hays Code violation.

Alas, his usual tactics of pushing people over and jumping off of things fail him this time. He’s arrested, show-trialed, and imprisoned pending execution.

But Marian springs into action! Bessie, who has insider knowledge thanks to dating Much, directs her to the local tavern where the Merry Men hang out. Marian pitches them a plan to save Robin, which is basically just crash the execution. It works! Thanks to the disruptions his pals create, Robin escapes.

Of course, he immediately sneaks back to Nottingham HQ to visit Marian. After some smooching and declarations of blah blah blah, Marian declines Robin’s offer to join him in Sherwood, saying she’ll be more useful to him as a spy on the inside of John’s operation. Hang on, what’s happening here? Is Marian actually becoming cool? Is she getting to do more than one token act of usefulness? Am I a Marian fan now???

Let’s not get carried away. Marian’s espionage game has a lot of room for improvement. For my money, the funniest bit of this movie involves John, Sir Guy, and the Sheriff discussing a dastardly plot, while Marian stands on an extremely exposed staircase directly behind them, completely unshielded from view, wearing one of her haute couture sparkle-fests—and even so, the villains only notice her right as she turns the corner at the bottom of the steps.

So what’s the dastardly plot she overhears? Well, time to back up a bit. Remember Richard? He’s been ransomed now and he’s just arrived in England. He and his Crusader buds are traveling incognito, presumably because they know John won’t be a good sport about handing back the reins of absolute power. This has helped them get an unfiltered lay of the land, and it’s clear the land is laying POORLY under John’s stewardship. They do keep hearing good things about this guy Robin Hood, though.

Richard’s Crusader buds are very bad at being incognito. Perhaps almost as bad as they are at Crusading.*** They call him “Sire” in front of a member of Team John, who promptly reports Richard’s whereabouts to John.

John, Sir Guy, and the Sheriff are like GENIUS IDEA: We’ll send a random dude named Dickon Malbete to assassinate Richard. Why does this minor character have a full first and last name? I don’t know! Why do they send only one assassin? Well, Dickon Malbete works alone. He was clearly a loose cannon when he was on the force and that’s why he had to turn in his badge.

Anyway, Marian is about to send a message to Robin conveying all this when Sir Guy, finally willing to talk to her, busts her for treason and has her arrested. At her trial, he declares, “She has betrayed her own Norman people.”

She sure has, she retorts, and she’s ashamed that she was complicit in Norman oppression for so long. “At first I wouldn’t believe. Because I was a Norman, I wouldn’t let myself believe that the horrors you inflicted on the Saxons weren’t just and right.” But now she knows the truth about these “beasts who are drunk on human blood.” Dang, Marian! Louder for the white folks in the back!

“You’ll be sorry you interfered,” John warns.

“Sorry? I’d do it again if you killed me for it.”

Sounds like a good idea to John. He schedules Marian’s execution for right after his upcoming coronation as OFFICIAL king of England. He’s very confident in Dickon Malbete’s ability to deliver on that assassination!

But Team John has made one (well, we’ll start with one) crucial mistake: They’ve failed to account for Bessie’s whereabouts!!!

Bessie was in fact standing literally behind a curtain while her beloved Marian got hauled off to her show trial. As soon as the coast is clear, Bessie beelines for the tavern and shares the whole scoop with Much.

And TWIST: Much—a man as mid as they come—a man whose sole combat experience up to this point involves jumping out of trees to tackle people on horseback and presumably scare the horses within an inch of their lives—Much the freaking Miller’s Son tracks down Dickon Malbete, royal assassin, and TAKES. HIM. OUT.

I mean, yes, he does rely heavily on jumping out of a tree and tackling Dickon off his horse, but this is followed by a whole lot of hand-to-hand combat in which Much inexplicably prevails! Now that’s what I call seizing the means of production!

Will soon finds Much taking a well-deserved nap and brings him to Robin. At the same time, Robin has cordially captured Richard & Co. In Disguise. When Much gets everyone up to speed on John’s plot, Robin’s like We have to find Richard! Whereupon Richard throws off his cloak, in the manner of a high school wallflower removing her glasses, to reveal his Crusade-branded armor and his kingly aura. His loyal subjects rejoice. And it’s time, once more, to crash an exclusive event at Nottingham HQ.

John’s coronation is starting right on schedule. Having heard nothing whatsoever from Dickon Malbete, John assumes that the plot has worked and Richard is donezo. No news is good news, right? This man has clearly never watched a Fast & Furious movie or he would know you need to see a body, preferably in multiple pieces, before you get too confident that your target is eliminated. I would be flabbergasted at John’s dimness, if not for… well. You know.

About ten seconds into the ceremony, Richard de-cloaks again, and the copious supply of extras on set freaks out. We have a full-on ballroom blitz between good guys and bad guys. The good guys win handily. Robin duels with Sir Guy, ultimately not only stabbing him through the heart but allowing him to fall off that exposed staircase—bad for spying, great for workers’ comp! Robin also liberates Marian from the dungeon while the Merry Men corral John and the Sheriff.

Richard, now restored to his rightful place as a single human with the arbitrary power of life and death over an entire populace, is magnanimous to his allies. He grants Robin bonus lands, plus Marian’s hand in marriage (though he does at least check in with Marian to make sure she’s happy about it). He also banishes the surviving members of Team John and promises, “Under my rule, Normans and Saxons alike will share the rights of Englishmen.” Free venison for everybody!!!

Plot, pacing, and structure: 3. At various points I was like “How is this movie almost an hour and 40 minutes long? How are there XYZ minutes left? What else can possibly happen?” But then something else would happen! Gotta be honest, it was kind of a romp.

Characters: 3. What can I say, these archetypes have lasted through the centuries for a reason. Robin is charming. John is a despicable dingbat. And Marian, who could’ve easily just been There, emerges as a surprisingly proactive race/class traitor with at least as many barn-burner lines as Robin. The Merry Men only get a handful of chances to shine individually, but I must admit, I underestimated Much! Bessie, of course, is the MVP.

Historical accuracy: 2. King Richard I (1157-1199) existed; that’s one point. King John (1166-1216) existed; that’s two points! Richard actually did get captured by Leopold V of Austria on his way home from the Third Crusade in 1192. And John, when he succeeded Richard as king, was indeed known for his cruelty and volatility, which was partially why his barons Magna Carta’d him.

Themes: 4. The movie lost me every time it hit a “Good King Richard” loyalty line, but overall it offers a bracing amount of Punch the N*zis Energy! Lots of defying unjust laws, standing up for the marginalized, coming together as a team to defeat bloodthirsty villains, and finding reasons to laugh amidst dark times. Can’t beat that.

*I gotta stop making topical jokes in this newsletter; the Great McConnelling of 2026 is sure to be obsolete within the next few months.

**Flynn was a deeply upsetting person IRL but a very hot screen presence. Luckily he’s dead, so we’re in the clear to swoon.

***The Third Crusade (1189-1192) has been spun as a partial “success” due to various land gains the Crusaders made, but they failed to retake Jerusalem or open the Strait of Hormuz. (There I go again!!)