Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python and the Holy Grail; comedy, UK, 1975; D: Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam; S: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Connie Booth, Carol Cleveland

England, Middle Ages. King Arthur and his servant arrive to a fortress and enter, but nobody recognizes them. Still, Arthur gathers a mass of Knights, from Lancelot to Bedevere. On a meadow, God appears before them and gives them an assignment: to find the Holy Grail. On their long journey, they meet a blood-thirsty rabbit and various wackos, until the police in the end arrests Arthur for murder.

Viewers annoyed by too serious movie depictions of King Arthur will surely enjoy the 2nd Monty Python film, "The Holy Grail": this hilarious grotesque is a grand spoof on sagas, legends, myths and theatrical cliches of knights, much more inspiring than Python's last film "The Meaning of Life". Those unfamiliar with the Pythons will need some time to "adjust" to their frequency, but once they get use to it the movie will turn out to be a blast: unlike numerous comedies that are just pretending to be funny, "The Holy Grail" is funny. To the tenth power. It is a howlingly funny comedy of the absurd, achieving laughs through dialogues, movements, slapstick, exaggerated situations or simple directorial intervention. It is insane at what lengths the Monty Pythons would go just to mess around with the audiences and tickle a chuckle out of them. For instance, in one scene there is this golden dialogue: "Who is that guy?" - "The King!" - "How do you know?" - "He hasn't got shit all over him!", while another line gives a genius comment on Excalibur ("Oh, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"). The scene where a boring historian is walking on a meadow and pretentiously giving a lecture about King Arthur until some knight passes by on a horse and sacks him is a riot; the sequence where the knights are dancing and jumping on the table while geese are flying around them is a comical 'tour-de-force' sight, whereas even one simple movement, the one where a knight constantly raises his visor up and down on his helmet just to say one word, slowly advances into a joke that will sooner or later cause the viewers to burst into laughter. A fantastic fun, despite an occasional empty, too abstract or bizarre scene: one of the funniest movies ever made.

Grade:+++