Monty Python: Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and John Cleese. Five Englishmen and one American that changed comedy when they came together in 1969. It started with a television program on the BBC called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was an immediate hit, combining silliness and subversion in a sketch format. No topic was sacred or off-limits, and it was made more innovative by Terry Gilliam’s animation.
The first Monty Python movie, And Now for Something Completely Different, was not so much a movie, but a compilation of sketches from the TV show, and made to introduce the Pythons to American audiences. It was released in 1971 and did create a following in the U.S., which prompted the importing of the comedy series to U.S. public television stations in 1974. Monty Python’s Flying Circus lasted four years and then the group wanted to get more into feature films. Much could be written about the TV series and live concerts and individual projects, but this is a class about funny movies, so I’ll stick to the three main Python films.
The first was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was written by the entire group and directed by Gilliam and Jones. Released in 1975, it had a small budget, which led to some of the funniest parts of the film. The film was a send-up of the King Arthur legend and the search for the Holy Grail. It eventually was the basis for Eric Idle’s play, Spamalot, a huge hit on Broadway and around the world.
The film begins as King Arthur (Chapman) searches on horseback for brave men to join his Knights of the Round Table. Since there was not enough money in the budget for real horses, Arthur’s squire banged coconuts halves together to simulate the sound of hooves. As he is not taken seriously by anyone he meets, Arthur fights a Black Knight who will not give up until he is completely dismembered, and then receives the divine revelation from above to find the Holy Grail. He and his knights run across taunting French knights (“I fart in your general direction!”) who pelt them with animals. The knights decide to storm the castle with a giant Trojan rabbit, but they forget to hide inside and the rabbit is flung back at them. They then split up and encounter different perils, such as the knights who say “Ni” and demand shrubberies, a three-headed giant that argues with itself and a vicious, bloody killer rabbit. Finally, they come to the Bridge of Death, where they must answer three questions in order to cross. Arthur and Lancelot make it across, but then the film reverts to current time, the knights are arrested and the film abruptly ends.
The film is much funnier than the description, because it is hard to describe satire and silliness and mayhem and general insanity. The film premiered in Los Angeles and was very well received. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it a 97% rating and the audience score is at 95%. The IMBD site has it at 8.3 out of 10. The reviews from 1975 are more relevant to what people perceived at the time. The New York Times reviewer says, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail… is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor. It's been collectively written by the Python troupe and jointly directed by two of them (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones) so effectively that I'm beginning to suspect that there really aren't six of them but only one, a fellow with several dozen faces who knows a great deal about trick photography.” A British reviewer from The New Republic says, “Here is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is neither as sparkling as it is said to be nor as bad as it seems to be at the start. But it's pretty good—thus, as British phenomena go these days, exceptional.” The reviewer then goes on a long explanation of British “humour”, which seems to imply that the film is not quite sophisticated enough for him, but he did laugh out loud once. I don’t know why he thinks the beginning is bad, because throwing dead bodies into a cart while calling, “Bring out your dead,” and then arguing with a man who insists, “I’m not dead yet”, is very funny. Later reviews, within the last ten years or so, are much better, I think because the humor and irrelevancy are not as unusual as they were about 40 years ago. Phrases like “timelessly brilliant”, “classic” and “riotously funny” are used, while one regular person reviewer on the IMDB site said that, “This is such a great film that a professor of mine actually used it in a Medieval Civilization class as extra credit. This was not because the movie was so historically accurate, but because the movie was so much funnier when we applied what we learned in her class to it!”
The second Python movie was Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Like The Holy Grail, this film was written by the entire troupe and directed by member Terry Jones. It premiered in the U.S. in August 1979.
Brian Cohen (Chapman) was born next to the stable where Jesus was born and temporarily confused the Three Wise Men following the Star of Bethlehem. He grows up resenting the Roman occupiers and joins The People’s Front of Judea, not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front, to try and free the commoners. He inadvertently becomes a semi-messiah when his speeches are taken to be doctrine by the masses. He tries to hide but eventually is captured by the Romans, who decide he should be crucified. The movie ends with Brian and other rebels hanging on crosses while the song, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” plays.
Again, this film is much better than described, is crazy funny and, in today’s world, politically incorrect. One of the funniest bits is when Pontius Pilate (Palin) and his visitor, Biggus Dickus (Chapman again), give a speech. Pilate has a speech impediment, he can’t pronounce r’s, and the crowd keeps yelling at him to say words that contain r. The reviews from the time reflect the growing appreciation of the Python’s humor. The Rotten Tomatoes site gives the film a 96% rating and audience score of 93%. IMBD give it an 8.1 out of 10 rating. Roger Ebert’s 1979 review says, “What's endearing about the Pythons is their good cheer, their irreverence, their willingness to allow comic situations to develop through a gradual accumulation of small insanities.” In referring to people who claim the movie was blasphemous and ridiculed religion, he says, “Life of Brian does not mock the life of Christ, but has its fun with the life of one Brian, born on the same day but in the next stable…Life of Brian is so cheerfully inoffensive that, well, it's almost blasphemous to take it seriously.” The New York Times review is even more effusive about this movie than The Holy Grail. The reviewer writes, “Monty Python's Life of Brian…succeeds in sending up not only movies like "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and "King of Kings," but also a lot of the false piety attached to the source material. It is the foulest-spoken biblical epic ever made, as well as the best-humored — a nonstop orgy of assaults, not on anyone's virtue, but on the funny bone.”
The final Python movie, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, was released in 1983, and also written by everyone and directed by Terry Jones. It is different from the previous films and more like their television program. Instead of a running story, it is a series of sketches, beginning with birth and ending, of course, with death. Some of the funniest bits, in my opinion, as follows. The Catholic father (Palin) who loses his job and comes home to tell his wife and their hundreds of children, discusses the church’s opposition to contraception and eventually breaking into a song, Every Sperm is Sacred, followed by a decision to sell off the children he can no longer afford for medical experiments. Then there is Mr. Creosote (Jones) a gargantuan man who enters an up-scale restaurant, pukes all over the place, orders and eats a massive meal, keeps vomiting in order to eat more, and finally eats a small after-dinner mint and then explodes all over the restaurant and other diners. Lastly, (and maybe the funniest thing ever consigned to film), is Chapman and Cleese as two paramedics who arrive at the home of a man who has an organ donor card and request his liver. The man points out that he thought he was supposed to be dead to donate, but Cleese calmly has at him in an orgy of protests and gallons of blood flying as his liver is removed.
This was the last movie made with all original members before the death of Graham Chapman in 1989. It has a 90% rating and 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB has it at 7.3 out of 10. Roger Ebert’s review from 1983 rates the film at 2.5 out 3. He discusses the movie in terms of one-upmanship, meaning the Pythons are trying to offend almost everyone. He says, speaking of the projectile vomiting scene, “We don't get just a little vomit in the scene, like we saw in "The Exorcist." No, sir, we get gallons of vomit, streams of it, all a vile yellow color, sprayed all over everybody and everything in a formal dining room…Anyone who takes the vomiting literally has missed the joke; the scene isn't about vomiting, but about the lengths to which Python will go for a laugh.” The New York Times review, by Vincent Canby, says’ “This latest endeavor by six of the funniest men ever to chip away at British tradition is sometimes hilarious and colossally rude but, as often as it evokes laughs, it overwhelms them by the majesty of its production and special effects…It has a theme of sorts, as defined by the title, but it's still an extremely loose collection of sketches, songs and interruptions that send up sex, religion, middle-class manners, upper-class twits, all things genteel and, perhaps for the first time on screen, goldfish that talk.” A majority of reviews by regular people agree that while it is not the Python’s best work, there are very funny parts of it, with most people choosing different ones.
Before writing this, I watched all three movies, which I had seen before, but not for a while. I also have all of the television programs and watched some of those, just to compare how they have changed throughout the years. Actually, not much. I think they have remained consistently the same, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. They seem to glory in making the establishment look ridiculous. They make fun of upper-class people, government, the military, sex and religion. All of their films have been banned at one time or another, particularly Life of Brian. On the other hand, different film groups have called their movies the funniest ever made. So why are they? I think it is because while they go out of their way to offend, they don’t do it in a mean way. And they touch on controversial subjects that many people agree with. When their films have been banned it is mostly by religious groups, people not known for their senses of humor. Sometimes I don’t even know why I like them so much, except that they are not like anyone else. They seem to be constantly on the edge of insanity, sometimes making no sense at all, and turning the most mundane, everyday things into chaos. Even the gross, bloody scenes aren’t that offensive or horrifying because they are not meant to look real. As well, I like the fact that most of the characters in the films, even the women, are played by the Pythons. They are experts at portraying lower-class, outspoken English women.
Finally, the animation of Terry Gilliam is absolutely one of the best parts of Monty Python. Although a great deal of his work was done for the television show, there is enough in the films to see what an artist he was.
While Monty Python may be an acquired taste, acquire it. I would recommend the movies to anyone who wants to laugh till their sides hurt.
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