Robin and Marian

Maybe it was because audiences expected another Four Musketeers-style romp that this flopped on its first release. There are quite a few typical Lester gags on the fringes of its tale of an elderly Robin returning to Sherwood from the Crusades and finding that Marian has become Abbess of a local priory; but the movie is conceived and executed in an elegaic key (not unlike Siegel's The Shootist), and played with an unfashionable depth of feeling (especially by Connery and Hepburn, both terrific). It's one of those rare movies, like King Hu's Touch of Zen, that handles its historical imagery so cleanly, and contains its pretensions so solidly within sure characterisation and plotting, that it is often sublimely expressive.