Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 49
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warriors can win in an orderly world against enslaved men whose
master flings himself megalomaniacally against that order.
In the Erroll Flynn version, viewers are constantly reminded
that King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham are usurpers of the
power rightly possessed by King Richard. There is, nevertheless, a
grace and dignity about the behavior of the evil duo: their dinners
are correct; they stage an orderly shooting contest to trap the hero.
The evil in the Costner film, on the other hand, is worked
chiefly by a man who is always dangerous but sometimes absurd. Not
the Hitler who bestrode Europe, he is the Hitler who frothed and
threw himself on the floor and c