Review: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

As the title suggests, this 1975 comedy from directors Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (the latter of whom would go on to direct “Time Bandits” and “The Fisher King”, whilst the former helmed subsequent Python films “The Life of Brian” and “The Meaning of Life”), is the irreverent British comedy troupe’s interpretation of the story of King Arthur (Played by Graham Chapman as a noble but pompous and irritable sort), and his Knights of the Round Table, in their quest for the holiest of grails. The performers play several roles each (Michael Palin playing the most at 12), with the main characters being Arthur and his Knights. John Cleese is the heroic, but recklessly violent Lancelot the Brave, who could learn a thing or two about subtlety. Michael Palin is Sir Galahad the Chaste, whose virtue is tested by the buxom women of the Castle Anthrax. Eric Idle plays Sir Robin the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot, whose unfortunate exploits are joyously retold by his band of minstrel followers (Chiefly Neil Innes, who’s a riot). Terry Jones plays Sir Bedevere the Wise, who despite his title, is a moron, and seems to be just making up the numbers really. Oh, and we’re also told of a so-called Sir Not Appearing in This Film. Along the way our would-be heroes encounter everyone from God himself (actually a Terry Gilliam animation based on a cut-out of legendary 19th Century cricketer W.G. Grace), who can’t stand sycophants or apologists, the Black Knight (John Cleese, at his best) who is an aggressive and ridiculously persistent but hopeless would-be warrior, to the bizarre Tim the Enchanter (Cleese again, seemingly with Billy Connolly’s eyebrows and accent) who warns the Knights of a ‘a creature so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived’. Other indescribable characters include the annoying and petty Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, Roger the Shrubber (Idle), and the ugly Gatekeeper of the Bridge of Death, who will only allow to cross those who correctly answer his three questions of varying difficulty (though, part of the hilarity comes from one of the Knights’ inability to answer even the easiest of questions).

 

This is my second favourite film comedy of all-time, just behind “The Blues Brothers”, so this review comes from the point of view of someone familiar with, and an admirer of (to the point of quoting lines quite frequently), the Monty Python style of comedy, which for the uninitiated can be a little hard to pin down. I mean these guys employ crude animation, political satire and anti-establishment humour, buffoonish slapstick, and comedic cross-dressing. You name it, they do it, and this film is full of it. Python humour is also an acquired taste (as are the comedy stylings of Woody Allen, Benny Hill, Richard Pryor, Jerry Lewis), so I have no way of knowing whether this film is going to be compatible with your sense of humour. The best I can do is outline why I personally find the film brilliant, and give examples without actually spoiling the potential fun for anyone who has yet to experience this comedic masterpiece (That is, I’ll try not to use too many actual quotes from the film, spoiling the gags, but I will indulge in a few here and there).

 

Before I get on to the comedic aspects of the film, let me tell you something you’re unlikely to read anywhere else. As someone who is interested in the story of the Knights of the Round Table, my two favourite things about this film are its look and the heroic theme music that accompanies King Arthur, a most underrated aspect to the film. Whilst being brilliantly funny, the film actually gives us a surprisingly effective, muddy and depressing look at life in the Middle Ages, without getting too gloomy (ala “Excalibur”). The film goes out of its way to make everything look, for lack of a better description, like shit. And this is in keeping with Python’s comedic take on the class system, which has always been a favourite topic of theirs. The film has a truly side-splitting scene where Arthur encounters Palin as a disgruntled peasant named Dennis (though he only learns the chap’s name after first mistaking him for an old woman) who wants to rant and rave about being repressed by an ‘outdated Imperialist dogma’ that exploits the workers etc. His scoffing at the tales of the Sword in the Stone and the Lady in the Lake are just superb, and Chapman (going through personal, alcoholic hell at the time) is perfect as the pompous and mildly annoyed Arthur. The infamous ‘Bring out ‘yer dead!’ scene involving the removal of corpses (These were hard times, remember!) has a classic exchange where one person asks another how he can tell Arthur is a King. The response, unspoiled here, is classic stuff.

 

But Python weren’t just into political comedy. This is a film that also makes much fun out of Arthur and the Knights’ riding horses, which in actuality, are their trusty companions (Concorde, for Lancelot, and Patsy for Arthur) banging two coconut shells together to make clip-clop sounds. It’s stupid and very, very funny. The film takes this silly concept and takes it in an even more absurd direction when Arthur has a discussion with someone over the use of coconuts to simulate horse riding, and the logical impossibility of said coconuts being found in England at that time. Not to mention the discussion about swallows and migration. Arthur’s encounter with the Black Knight (played by Cleese) is in yet another comedic category. This segment, featuring a boastful, but incompetent swordsman who simply won’t give in, no matter how many limbs are lopped off or blood is lost, is gory black comedy mixed with sheer stupidity. My favourite exchange?; Black Knight: ‘I’m invincible!’ Arthur: ‘You’re a loony!’. Some might compare the scene to the grotesque (but hysterically funny) Mr. Creosote from “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”, but the comic blood here isn’t even remotely offensive, and is just silly. Like the film itself, it won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s their loss (the scene is also the first in a running gag of characters never quite dying, even when you think it’s impossible that they’re still alive). There’s even a bit of musical comedy, for those inclined. I’m not much into the song-and-dance ‘Knights of the Round Table’ (though the Lego version on the Special Edition DVD is priceless), but Neil Innes, as Sir Robin’s travelling minstrel is side-splittingly funny as the film makes a mockery of Medieval heroism and chivalry.

 

There’s also a bit of fourth wall-breaking at various points when characters from different scenes comment on the action, usually to tell everyone to ‘Get on with it!’. The opening credits are also clever and some of the funniest material in the film, as a silly credit designer starts giving faux Swedish subtitles, and yammering on about fjords, llamas, and moose-related humour before they are sacked, and it just goes on and on, getting absurdly funnier by the second. It’s far and away the best indicator of whether this film’s humour will be compatible with you or not. Gilliam, aside from the occasional subsidiary character and his co-director gig (which he apparently quit from about midway through out of frustration) is mostly on hand (no pun intended) to provide quirky and irreverent animations and transitions, the best of which is the title card for The Quest for the Holy Grail, in which trumpets get blown from disembodied derrieres. Completely insane, juvenile, and very funny. Speaking of juvenile, and it’s another very Gilliam moment, there’s the dreaded Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, a bunch of infantile, yammering fools with patently ridiculous demands, and then they go and change their name, seemingly on a whim. Visually, they don’t look too far removed from what Gilliam would later create for his Medieval/fantasy scenes in “The Fisher King”, but the humour is definitely indicative of the entire troupe. One of the more quotable encounters in the film for fan geeks such as myself comes with the Knights’ encounters with a castle inhabited by silly French soldiers (AKA the French Taunters) with outrageous accents. Cleese is in a class of his own here as the most prominent of the Frenchmen, hurling all manner of hilariously juvenile insults at Arthur who just wants to know if they’ve seen the Holy Grail. There’s so many insults used here that I can probably provide you with one without ruining the fun (Read with your worst, exaggerated French accent); ‘Go and burn your bottoms you sons of a silly person!’.

 

Terry Jones gets some of his best moments in Python history in this film. Sir Bedevere’s only genuinely funny moment involves a very Pythonesque spin on the old Trojan Horse story, that also features a line you’ll hear many a Python fan quoting; ‘Run away! Run away!’. Palin, meanwhile is a scream as the rather mincy (but definitely not gay!) Sir Galahad whose tale is a real hoot, turning the Quest for the Holy Grail into some kind of weird wet dream. The best moment for both Palin and Jones is a scene they both share, as a father and son. Jones is the effeminate Prince Herbert, whose dad (Palin, with a very funny gruff voice), in addition to never remembering his son’s name, is trying to arrange a marriage that Herbert has absolutely no interest in. In fact, he’d much rather...sing! But no, macho dad will have none of that, leading to an hilarious exchange between Palin and two numbskull guards (one, an hysterically rubber-faced Idle), Herbert sending a call for help that leads to one of the funniest lines in the film (I won’t spoil it, but it would make a great sound file for incoming emails), and a rescue attempt by Sir Lancelot that in addition to turning a wedding into a massacre (Talk about a Red Wedding!), doesn’t end up being the kind of happy ending Sir Lancelot was thinking of. I just love how the Python gang have subversively depicted the well-loved Knights of the Round Table; Arthur is pompous, Bedevere is stupid, Lancelot is sociopathic, Galahad is horny, and Sir Robin (was he ever a part of the legend? I’m pretty well-schooled on the subject and don’t think he was) is a coward.

 

Cleese’s Tim the Enchanter is one of my all-time favourite comedy characters, and I wish he were in the film more. Whether it’s the positively other-worldly

locations, the cheesy thunderbolts/explosions he creates, or Cleese’s side-splitting, literally frothing at the mouth performance delivering lines that I still quote to this day. And just wait until you see the foul creature Tim is forebodingly warning about. You’re gonna love that. Another great Palin character in the film is during the Holy Hand-Grenade scene, where he explains the rules for using it. I have no idea how Idle, standing next to him, managed to keep a straight face. The climactic Bridge of Death scene is a true classic (featuring very Python-esque questions from the Gatekeeper), with Idle’s Sir Robin and Palin’s Sir Galahad getting the best moments in the scene.

 

Obviously this is a film very near and dear to my heart, and as I said, my second favourite film comedy. It does, however, come with flaws. Firstly, a Special Edition DVD quibble; It’s a cute gag, but having the film start with a few minutes of an old British comedy “Dentists on the Job” before the mistake is corrected, is annoying to have to sit through every single time. I did, however, find it funny that the DVD packaging lists a bunch of other comedies to enjoy; “Jabberwocky”, “Gandhi”, and “Lawrence of Arabia”. I also think the modern intrusions into the film are unnecessary and not funny, especially the ending that screams ‘We ran out of money’. But these are just minor quibbles in a truly hilarious film, for me, the best-ever Python film (I’m not a “Life of Brian” fan, but “The Meaning of Life” contained some of their best work), despite the apparent hell it was to film it (Gilliam’s frustration, Chapman’s severe alcoholism, and several other problems on set). If you’ve made it this far into the review and haven’t yet seen the film, you might want to give it a try. I have probably neglected to touch on many other wonderful moments in the film, but perhaps that is for the best. Better you should experience the film for yourself, if you haven’t done so already.

 

Rating: A+