Top 25 Favourite Films: #20 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1975)
#20. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Directed by Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1975
There are few comedy groups like Monty Python, and 1975's Holy Grail, a loose adaption of the Arthurian mythos, is the jewel in their crown, six of the finest comedians of the 20th Century let loose in an epic pastiche of the Quest for the Holy Grail, a gutbustingly funny, endlessly quotable masterpiece of comedic cinema that has aged like fine wine, remaining as funny today as it did nearly half a century ago, and a true comedic classic that shows the Pythons at their irreverent best.
On the surface, Holy Grail is a relatively straightforward adaption of the key elements of Arthurian mythos, best seen in the works of TH White and Malory's Mort D'Arthur, with Arthur, King of the Britons, (Graham Chapman) bringing together his Knights of the Round Table to quest for the Holy Grail, after a vision of the Grail appears to them. Thus, Galahad (Michael Palin), Lancelot (John Cleese), Bedevere (co-director Terry Jones) and Sir Robin (Eric Idle) all set out to track down the grail, have individual adventures and face perils, only to reunite with their king for one final battle against the forces of darkness. Of course, despite Grail being relatively faithful to the structure of this mythology, the devil, and the humour, is in the details.
This is obvious from the opening seconds of the film, where, in one of cinema's great fakeouts, we get a full three minutes of typically Pythonish oddness, with mock Swedish subtitles, recounting the adventures of its subtitler, in moose related activities, interspersed with intertitles recounting the fate of successive subtitling teams, before, with what I can only describe as proto chipmunk music, the screen begins flashing as that classic beast of comedy, the Llama, joins the fray. Cut to black. Cue coconuts.
Part of Holy Grail's genius is in its playing off the serious against the utterly absurd and often surreal. Take, just for example, the opening scene of Grail. We get fog, the sound of horsehooves and out of the fog comes, in perhaps the defining ongoing joke of the film, Chapman on foot, imitating horseriding, followed by his servant, Patsy (Gillam), who, of course, is banging coconuts together. It's 1967's Camelot, a film that practically killed the big-screen musical, on a shoe-string budget, mostly raised by miscelanous 70s British rockbands, from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin, ofsetting their taxes, and the cheapness, this clash of cheap and cheerful quasi-pantomine shot like Bergman and Kurosawa in a rainy and very wet Scotland.
Arthur, having battled the infamous Black Knight, collected his knights, avoided the song and dance numbers of Camelot, dismissed, as another wry aside to the film's low budget, as only a model, and finally encountering God, (animated by Gillam, voiced by Chapman, using cricketing icon WG Grace as a basis in Gillam's usual cutout animation style) who tasks them to find the Grail, arrives at a nearby castle, calls for its lord to join him on his Quest for the grail.
Over the battlements pops Cleese, in a helmet and chainmail. His character, the French Taunter, that responds to Arthur and his Knights is not just one of Cleese's best performance-the entire Python troupe play at least half a dozen characters each, and some, such as the Knights Who Say Ni and a colossal three-headed knight are truly spectacular, even on Holy Grail's tiny budget-but one of the finest comedic foils in cinema. The entire sequence is perfectly comically timed, floating between verbal, with the French Taunter's infamous lines some of the best jibes in comedy, physical and surreal humour, with the French finally driving off the attack by firing first livestock then the Trojan-horse esque rabbit over the wall, leading our heroes to retreat in disarray.
This, in essence, feels like a blueprint of the film, with each of the Knight going on their own adventure, from Galahad's temptation by the risque maidens of Castle Anthrax, to Lancelot's butchering of an entire castle in his attempts of valliant rescue of what turns out to be a rather sickly young man, before throwing them back together in what may be one of the funniest, if weirdest cinematic finales, including the iconic Killer Rabbit and the equally iconic, and utterly out of left-field ending, a perfect compromise of plot and cost-cutting measure.
It is a film that practically plays every comedic card it has at its disposal, from the obvious pastiche of Arthurian mythos well known to most British schoolboys of the era, to the overblown mess of Camelot-both musical numbers, by collaborator Neil Innes feel like escaped Broadway songs dumped into the middle of an otherwise dramatic film-to even style pastiches of everything from the then nascent sword and sorcery genre to, in one memorable moment, historical documentary. The genius of Grail, even when compared to the equally beloved Life of Brian is that it manages to juggle a half-dozen concepts at once, often in the same scene, sliding tonally with ease between the myriad types of humour the Pythons traded in.
As for the comedy itself, it's less scattergun and more scatterbomb, with everything from political satire-the oppressed peasants-to the enjoyably purile-no fewer than half a dozen fart jokes, mostly in Gillam's manuscript style animation, not to mention the entire Castle Anthrax section-to the surreal-too many scenes to list, but highlights include the Beast of Aaaaargh, killed off by Gillam's onscreen death as The Animator of this fearsome beast, and the utter destruction of the fourth wall on no fewer than three occasions, as various character refer to other scenes and yell at the cast to GET ON WITH IT.
It is difficult to regard, in short, the history of comedy, and in particular the debts entire sections of geek subculture owe to this effortlessly silly, wonderfully quotable film, without its existence in the canon of comedy cinema. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest independent films of all time, one of the greatest British films, and to boot, the finest hour of what may be one of the great comedy groups of the 20th century. It only leaves to say...we are the Knights who say...Ni!
There are few comedy groups like Monty Python, and 1975's Holy Grail, a loose adaption of the Arthurian mythos, is the jewel in their crown, six of the finest comedians of the 20th Century let loose in an epic pastiche of the Quest for the Holy Grail, a gutbustingly funny, endlessly quotable masterpiece of comedic cinema that has aged like fine wine, remaining as funny today as it did nearly half a century ago, and a true comedic classic that shows the Pythons at their irreverent best.
On the surface, Holy Grail is a relatively straightforward adaption of the key elements of Arthurian mythos, best seen in the works of TH White and Malory's Mort D'Arthur, with Arthur, King of the Britons, (Graham Chapman) bringing together his Knights of the Round Table to quest for the Holy Grail, after a vision of the Grail appears to them. Thus, Galahad (Michael Palin), Lancelot (John Cleese), Bedevere (co-director Terry Jones) and Sir Robin (Eric Idle) all set out to track down the grail, have individual adventures and face perils, only to reunite with their king for one final battle against the forces of darkness. Of course, despite Grail being relatively faithful to the structure of this mythology, the devil, and the humour, is in the details.
This is obvious from the opening seconds of the film, where, in one of cinema's great fakeouts, we get a full three minutes of typically Pythonish oddness, with mock Swedish subtitles, recounting the adventures of its subtitler, in moose related activities, interspersed with intertitles recounting the fate of successive subtitling teams, before, with what I can only describe as proto chipmunk music, the screen begins flashing as that classic beast of comedy, the Llama, joins the fray. Cut to black. Cue coconuts.
Part of Holy Grail's genius is in its playing off the serious against the utterly absurd and often surreal. Take, just for example, the opening scene of Grail. We get fog, the sound of horsehooves and out of the fog comes, in perhaps the defining ongoing joke of the film, Chapman on foot, imitating horseriding, followed by his servant, Patsy (Gillam), who, of course, is banging coconuts together. It's 1967's Camelot, a film that practically killed the big-screen musical, on a shoe-string budget, mostly raised by miscelanous 70s British rockbands, from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin, ofsetting their taxes, and the cheapness, this clash of cheap and cheerful quasi-pantomine shot like Bergman and Kurosawa in a rainy and very wet Scotland.
Arthur, having battled the infamous Black Knight, collected his knights, avoided the song and dance numbers of Camelot, dismissed, as another wry aside to the film's low budget, as only a model, and finally encountering God, (animated by Gillam, voiced by Chapman, using cricketing icon WG Grace as a basis in Gillam's usual cutout animation style) who tasks them to find the Grail, arrives at a nearby castle, calls for its lord to join him on his Quest for the grail.
Over the battlements pops Cleese, in a helmet and chainmail. His character, the French Taunter, that responds to Arthur and his Knights is not just one of Cleese's best performance-the entire Python troupe play at least half a dozen characters each, and some, such as the Knights Who Say Ni and a colossal three-headed knight are truly spectacular, even on Holy Grail's tiny budget-but one of the finest comedic foils in cinema. The entire sequence is perfectly comically timed, floating between verbal, with the French Taunter's infamous lines some of the best jibes in comedy, physical and surreal humour, with the French finally driving off the attack by firing first livestock then the Trojan-horse esque rabbit over the wall, leading our heroes to retreat in disarray.
This, in essence, feels like a blueprint of the film, with each of the Knight going on their own adventure, from Galahad's temptation by the risque maidens of Castle Anthrax, to Lancelot's butchering of an entire castle in his attempts of valliant rescue of what turns out to be a rather sickly young man, before throwing them back together in what may be one of the funniest, if weirdest cinematic finales, including the iconic Killer Rabbit and the equally iconic, and utterly out of left-field ending, a perfect compromise of plot and cost-cutting measure.
It is a film that practically plays every comedic card it has at its disposal, from the obvious pastiche of Arthurian mythos well known to most British schoolboys of the era, to the overblown mess of Camelot-both musical numbers, by collaborator Neil Innes feel like escaped Broadway songs dumped into the middle of an otherwise dramatic film-to even style pastiches of everything from the then nascent sword and sorcery genre to, in one memorable moment, historical documentary. The genius of Grail, even when compared to the equally beloved Life of Brian is that it manages to juggle a half-dozen concepts at once, often in the same scene, sliding tonally with ease between the myriad types of humour the Pythons traded in.
As for the comedy itself, it's less scattergun and more scatterbomb, with everything from political satire-the oppressed peasants-to the enjoyably purile-no fewer than half a dozen fart jokes, mostly in Gillam's manuscript style animation, not to mention the entire Castle Anthrax section-to the surreal-too many scenes to list, but highlights include the Beast of Aaaaargh, killed off by Gillam's onscreen death as The Animator of this fearsome beast, and the utter destruction of the fourth wall on no fewer than three occasions, as various character refer to other scenes and yell at the cast to GET ON WITH IT.
It is difficult to regard, in short, the history of comedy, and in particular the debts entire sections of geek subculture owe to this effortlessly silly, wonderfully quotable film, without its existence in the canon of comedy cinema. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest independent films of all time, one of the greatest British films, and to boot, the finest hour of what may be one of the great comedy groups of the 20th century. It only leaves to say...we are the Knights who say...Ni!
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