**** (out of ****)
Starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and Connie Booth
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones & written by Chapman, Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam, and Idle.
1975 PG
I’ve learned that either you get this movie, or you don’t. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is absolute cinematic insanity and, Jesus help me and God forgive me, it’s probably the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. The Marx Brothers were three goofballs in a world that at least tried to be reasonable, but the cosmos of “The Holy Grail” is one in which the craziness is everywhere, like a plague. This is a film in which the characters tumble into one bizarre, asinine situation after another. If a film review is supposed to encourage or discourage someone from seeing a film, the only proper way to review “The Holy Grail” is to reveal one or two of its gags and hope that readers will be convinced to see it. Problem is, the gags are so bizarre that telling them doesn’t make them nearly as funny as seeing them.
The film’s basic modus operandi is to take one or two elements of the Arthurian legend at a time, twist a few things out of perspective, then carry everything to it’s anarchic end. The straight man—that is, the man to whom funny things happen but who himself remains basically reasonable—is King Arthur (Graham Chapman), leader of the Knights of the Round Table, charged by God to find the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and caught His blood at the Crucifixion. A noble quest, to be sure, only in “The Holy Grail” God is a cartoon cut-out Who appears in the sky and becomes irate when Arthur and his knights continually turn away from His Glory and constantly beg His Forgiveness. “Every time I try to talk to someone it’s always ‘forgive me this’ and ‘I’m not worthy that,’” God grumbles.
So the knights divide up and the quest begins. Sir Lancelot (the lanky John Cleese) receives a letter tied to an arrow (rather, the arrow lands in the chest of his squire) from someone begging to be rescued from a forced wedding. Lancelot thinks this is a damsel in distress but no, it’s actually a young prince, but too bad, because Lancelot slaughters everyone at the wedding feast. This doesn’t sound funny at all, but it just is, because the music is so exciting and no one at the wedding fights back and Lancelot gets so carried away and the violence, while bloody, is so cartoonish. Then there follows a conversation between Lancelot and the king of castle, in which Lancelot tries to apologize. The king realizes that Lancelot is connected to the Round Table and is therefore too wealthy to offend by getting really mad at him. In mid-conversation, someone yells out “but he killed the father of the bride!” so the music starts back up and Lancelot kills a few more people while the king yells “Stop!” and then Lancelot stops and says “Sorry, sorry, I got carried away again.”
At one point the knights are pursued by a giant monster. Since “The Holy Grail” does not nearly have budget enough for a real monster, a cartoon cut-out is used, and to interact with it there are cartoon cut-outs of the knights. The chase goes on for some time until it is clear that the monster cannot be slain so, as if out of desperation, the narrator informs us that “suddenly the animator suffered a fatal heart-attack”—cut to animator Terry Gilliam at his drawing table, clenching in mortal terror and falling over—“and the Beast was no more.”