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...Did I injure you in another life, Will Scarlet, that you harbor such ill will against me...

...But whether the dials have been set for 1181, England, or 1840, Paris, the results are the same...

...Initially portrayed as a lass who can buckle her swash with the best of the lads, she suddenly becomes helpless at the climax just so Costner can get to perform a conventionally heroic rescue...

...But to give or withhold approval on the basis of whether your characters do or don't fit into current political/social movements is the mark of the propagandist, not the artist...

...We gaze out of the machine only to find ourselves stuck in la-la land...

...You have to watch that Constance Congdon...

...Alas, just as you can't uninvent the hydrogen bomb, you can't expect the latest generation of moviegoers to accept a modestly exciting Robin Hood...

...When this movie is being unabashedly sophomoric, as when Chopin shouts, during a keyboard duet with Liszt, "Chromatic glissando...

...It seems to 486: Commonweal...

...And why is George Sand so clearly intended by the fllmmakers to be the heroic opposite of Peters's character...

...But this device burdens the admirable Morgan Freeman with a character who, between bouts, can only stand around looking stiffly noble when he isn't rescuing babies with superb Caesarean surgery...

...he James Lapine-Sarah Kernochan movie about George Sand's pursuit of Frederic Chopin, Impromptu, reminded me at best of fairly bright, artsminded teen-agers putting on a charade in someone's back yard, a charade consisting of consciously half-baked, deliberately silly notions of how great artists of the nineteenth century lived and loved...

...Love, hatred, pity, anger--this is the first vocabulary of emotions, and of moral reasoning, according to Rousseau...

...Which brings us to the truly repulsive: this movie, targeted primarily at children and adolescents, features not only handlopping, flaming arrows shot into foreheads, close-up batterings on faces and skulls, but, at length and fairly explicitly, an attempt by Nottingham to impregnate Marion by rape before Robin can rescue her...

...What sort of conception do Lapine and BOOKS Kernochan have of Liszt to think that his vitality of all vitalities could be smothered by a mistress or by anyone else...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Love, hatred, pity, anger hen Jean-Jacques Rousseau, polemicist and provocateur of the first rank, threw down his gauntlet to challenge the Enlightenment philosophes' rather lofty opinion of themselves and the power of reason in general, his gesture was decisive and gained force through repetition: "Regardless of what the Moralists may say about it, human understanding owes much to the Passions which, as is commonly admitted, also owe much to it...

...a virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so Natural that the Beasts themselves sometimes show evident signs of IN GOOD CONSCIENCE Reason and Emotion in Moral Decision Making Sidney Cailahan HarperCollins, $22.95, 250 pp...

...then we must simply relax and enjoy the dumb fun...

...Every gesture, every nod of the head, every raise of an eyebrow is underscored by the flaring and swooning accompaniment...

...But what is the character flaw supposedly revealed or underlined by all this physical grotesquerie...

...Sidney Callahan, a professor of psychology at Mercy College, and a sensitive observer of the perils and possibilities of our times, seems to me more in an Augustinian or Rousseauian vein than she herself might acknowledge...

...And how did Chopin and Sand and Delacroix and Liszt live and love, according to the kids...

...When the rather reedy Sheriff Rickman simply places the robust Ms...

...In this he may be indebted to the great Augustine, though he did not acknowledge the indebtedness, for Augustine, too, spoke of a natural morality, written in human hearts, and basic to the entire sentient human race---a category he celebrated as including the Sciopodes, who shelter themselves from the sun in the shade of one foot, and the Cynocephali, who had dogs' heads and barked...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN IGNORANTS ABROAD 'EOBTN' & 'IMPROM?TU' hen Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves sticks to high jinks and stunts, it entertains...

...So there are the novel features of the new Robin Hood: multiculturalism, feminism, and gleeful sexual sadism...

...The wings of a butterfly...

...She, with Rousseau, would start with feeling...

...Now a promise of death...

...Just as Freeman seems about to develop his reaction into an interesting moment, Reynolds (or somebody on the producer's staff) cuts away...

...Mastrantonio on the flagstones, throw her skirts over her head, force her legs apart (this last being played strictly for laughs), and strain over her supine form as she shrieks and kicks helplessly...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain it...

...But too much oflmpromptu is neither camp nor full-bodied drama, neither truly funny nor grippingly serious, but only the latest example of that form that is so drearily typical of our time: the cartoon that takes itself seriously, that seems to hug itself precisely because it does not probe, does not care about its own subject matter...

...His diction, bearing, and sense of character are all equally slack...

...It would seem so...

...and the mournful lowing of Cattle entering a SlaughterHouse conveys their impression of the horrible sight that strikes them...

...Just like SoHo artists, heavy metal rockers, or drama department undergrads, only in frock coats and lace cuffs...

...The time machines of these American filmmakers whirl and spin and hum, colored lights flicker on and off, a mighty noise is made...

...He's trying to fulfill a prophecy about his heirs...

...True, today's precocious kids might not be impressed by the traditional cliff-hanger in which the villain merely tries to marry the heroine before the hero arrives, but will you really feel comfortable letting your kids watch Alan Rickman dump Ms...

...Instead, its makers are content to goose the audience with name-dropping, deliberate but senseless use of anachronisms (Sand's children giving each other the high five, Musset wearing sunglasses), and the smirkiest possible portrayal of the sexual and social fuss with which artists live without a hint of the passions behind that fuss...

...Not quite repulsive but getting there: this is a politically correct Robin Hood that doesn't know what to do, dramatically, with its own raised consciousness...

...To say nothing of the tenderness Mothers feel for their young and of the dangers they brave in order to protect them, one daily sees the repugnance of Horses to trample a living Body underfoot...

...an animal never goes past a dead animal of its own Species without some restlessness: Some even give them a kind of burial...

...Azeen the Saracen returns with our hero from the Third Crusade so that the movie can be multicultural...

...Both are lamed by a radical inability to imagine the European past as a place that is truly different from the American present...

...Rousseau spoke, he said, of "Pity, a disposition suited to beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are...

...Or: "Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature...

...Was this musical battering an overcompensation for Kevin Costner's phlegmatic performance in the title role...

...But, playing opposite the well-spoken, beautiful, even formidable Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Costner seems so inadequate in every respect that his Robin Hood constantly threatens to turn into Robin Nerd...

...Both films are examples of American provinciality...

...Why do the politically correct always end up being so brutal...

...The director, Kevin Reynolds, even cheats Freeman of his (potentially) most interesting moment: when King Richard, back from holy warring, puts in his traditional appearance at the end, the Islamic warrior recognizes his most hated enemy and oppressor while everybody else is dropping to knees in rapture...

...Thus, Robin the Buddhist Zen archer to an unruly follower...

...And occasionally the movie is better than that, as when Sand petitions her Polish 9 August 1991:485 prey for but a minute of his time and he sullenly assents by playing the "Minute Waltz...

...Thus, Bernadette Peters, as Liszt's harridan-mistress, is directed by Lapine to carry on like some drag-queen creation of Charles Ludlam's: screaming, pouting, pursing eyes and mouth, toting her suckling babes around like so many rag dolls...

...But there are some elements in this version that are objectionable and others that are downright repulsive...

...to which Franz replies, "Yes...

...True, the grandiose special effects turn this version into something closer to a space opera than a medieval ballad, but, after all, the kids in the audience have been brought up not only on Star Wars and Indiana Jones but on preshow concession-counter trailers in which the soda sizzles like the unholy brew in a witch's caldron and the popcorn thuds into cavernous boxes with the audibility of dropped cannonballs...

...For theirs--and Callahan is more generous in her assessments than am I, perhaps--is too often a cheese-paring approach to moral problems...

...Because the babybedecked, shrewish Peters is supposed to represent the man-dependent woman...

...Mastrantonio under his arm like a football and runs with her, you may wonder what happened to the amazon who entered the film in full armor and nearly cleft Robin in half...

...First, the merely objectionable: Michael Kamen's music, though not itself contemptible, is overused...

...True, the California space cadet dialogue doesn't help...

...Ditto the feminist treatment of Maid Marian...

...At the end of the film, Liszt screams at Peters that she has murdered his vitality with guilt...

...Yet there is a connection...

...While the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking, successful novelist Sand is a progenitor of the liberated woman...

...Indeed, it never ceases...

...Who could ever have predicted that a film about Chopin and his friends could have anything in common with a Robin Hood movie...

...The world is wondrous indeed...

...She gives the rationalists their due but not, thank goodness, the day...

...I enjoyed the flaming arrows whizzing by like meteors, the tree-to-tree vine-swinging, the cudgel bout between Robin and Little John that starts out per tradition on a footbridge but is soon extended into a sort of white-water rafting contest without rafts, Alan Rickman's brilliant rendition of the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hapless but irrepressible coyote of the Road Runner cartoons, the use of Robin's treehouse as a sort of arboreal playboy's pad where he woos Maid Marian, the catapulting of Robin and his Saracen sidekick over a high stone wall, and, indeed, everything else in this movie that is purely kinetic, swashbuckling, silly, childishly fearsome, or deliberately sophomoric...

...But how has she done this...

...There are more things than are dreamt of in the works of most moral philosophers, at least those of a harshly rationalist or cognitivist bent...

...Blood gushes from Casanova's crotch, spreading across his white costume, a startling image that recalls the nosebleeds of Casanova as boy which his Grandmama sees as a promise of sexual prowess...