Monty Python’s silly quest still charms

Monty Python first appeared as a com­e­dy sketch team in 1969 in their BBC series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Members Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin all hailed from stu­dent com­e­dy groups at their uni­ver­si­ties of Oxford and Cambridge. The sixth Python (as they called them­selves) was Terry Gilliam. He had moved to England from the United States, and his con­tri­bu­tion to their show was the ani­mat­ed sequences. 

The show ran on the BBC for 45 episodes from 1969 to 1974. Many of us in the United States were intro­duced to them when the series ran on PBS back in the 1970s. However, with the end of the TV show, the Pythons were not yet fin­ished. They worked to com­pile var­i­ous sketch­es from their show into a fea­ture film titled And Now for Something Completely Different. This fueled a desire to make a fea­ture film. 

The Pythons ran into a major prob­lem with this ven­ture. They could find no stu­dio will­ing to back them. Fortunately, Monty Python had fans with mon­ey. The next film had an extreme­ly low work­ing bud­get of only about $410,000, and this mon­ey came from var­i­ous sources, includ­ing the bands Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Members of these bands were huge Monty Python fans and offered help. Also con­tribut­ing were Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull and sev­er­al record com­pa­nies (Island Records, Chrysalis Records, and Charisma Records). So, with their lim­it­ed mon­ey, the Pythons took off for Scotland to film their movie, which is today’s Reel Classic — Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Though extreme­ly lim­it­ed in funds, there was an advan­tage to not hav­ing a film stu­dio involved. In an inter­view, Terry Gilliam said, “Looking back, it always seemed to me very pure, what we were doing. We were just try­ing to make our­selves laugh, at the same time as say­ing inter­est­ing things, seri­ous things. There were no out­side forces. We, the six of us, made the deci­sions, end of con­ver­sa­tion, and that’s a rare thing. Musicians get away with that all the time. Not many film­mak­ers do.” 

The small bud­get brought prob­lems with it as well. The staff and crew had to share rooms at a local inn, which quick­ly ran out of hot water. Though the char­ac­ters were based on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, their bud­get would not allow them to have hors­es on the set. However, this made for one of their most famous con­cepts from the movie — they banged coconut shells to sound like hoof beats. This was an old ploy used on radio shows. 

So, to the sto­ry. In the year 932 AD, we find King Arthur and his squire, Patsy, trav­el­ing across Britain seek­ing men to become Knights of his Round Table. On this jour­ney, we learn how King Arthur received Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, his bat­tle with the Black Knight, and his thoughts on whether a swal­low could car­ry coconuts. 

On his jour­ney, he recruits Sir Bedevere the Wise, Sir Lancelot the Brave, Sir Galahad the Pure, Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot, and Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film. Accompanying these knights are their squires and Robin’s min­strels. King Arthur takes them all to Camelot, where he is vis­it­ed by God, who orders him to find the Holy Grail. 

So, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table set out on the ven­ture to find the Holy Grail. 

Their jour­ney brings them to a cas­tle occu­pied by French sol­diers who claim to have the Holy Grail. The French taunt the King and his men and dri­ve them back with an onslaught of barn­yard ani­mals. Sir Bedevere the Wise con­cocts a plan to con­struct a Trojan Rabbit, but unfor­tu­nate­ly for­gets to tell the oth­ers to hide inside it. Thus, the plan fails. 

King Arthur then makes the deci­sion to have the knights sep­a­rate and seek out the Holy Grail on their own. Another mis­for­tune occurs when a mod­ern-day his­to­ri­an, engaged in film­ing a doc­u­men­tary on the leg­ends of King Arthur is killed by an unknown knight, lead­ing to a police investigation. 

(I hear you. “What?” Remember, this is Monty Python). 

The knights have their var­i­ous adven­tures in their search for the Holy Grail. These include a meet­ing with the Knights Who Say “Ni!,” an appar­ent lady being forced to mar­ry against her will, a Three-Headed Knight, and the Rabbit of Caerbannog. We find our heroes deal­ing with the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” encoun­ter­ing the “Legendary Black Beast,” and attempt­ing to cross the “Bridge of Death.” 

Let me just say that this ends in a typ­i­cal Monty Python fash­ion — or as they say, “And now for some­thing com­plete­ly different.” 

This film is filled with humor. One review I read iden­ti­fied a total of 527 jokes, with 42 in the open­ing cred­its alone. The aver­age is one joke every ten and a half seconds. 

The six mem­bers of Monty Python each played mul­ti­ple roles in the film. In the cred­its, we see the role of Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film is Michael Palin’s infant son, William Palin. He does not appear in the film. Palin played the most char­ac­ters in the film — twelve. In addi­tion to play­ing the major­i­ty of the char­ac­ters, all six of the Pythons were cred­it­ed as writ­ers. Python mem­bers Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones direct­ed the film. 

Terry Gilliam spoke of the open­ing of the film in New York, and mem­bers of Monty Python attend­ed. He said that the line to enter cir­cled around the block, and two indi­vid­u­als came up to them to tell them how much they liked the film. It turns out those two indi­vid­u­als were John Belushi and Gilda Radner, who were very ear­ly in their own com­e­dy careers. 

When the film first opened in 1975, it was deemed a “mod­er­ate” suc­cess. It did recoup its costs, but crit­ics’ reviews were mixed. 

Monty Python were not well known in the U.S. at the time. That would change. 

Vincent Canby, crit­ic for The New York Times, wrote that though the film had “some low spots,” the gags were “non-stop.” The crit­ic for the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film “like Mad comics, is not cer­tain to please every taste. But its youth­ful exu­ber­ance and its rous­ing zani­ness are hard not to like. As a mat­ter of fact, the sense of fun is dan­ger­ous­ly contagious.” 

The crit­ic for The New Yorker called it “often reck­less­ly fun­ny and some­times a mat­ter of com­ic genius.” The review in the Detroit Free Press was also pos­i­tive: “Predictably, even depend­ably, the new film by the group that calls itself Monty Python’s Flying Circus is, like their first effort, some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, and for those with high respect for non­sense, it is some­thing com­plete­ly marvelous.” 

Other reviews were not so pos­i­tive. Variety described the film as “basi­cal­ly an excuse for set pieces, some amus­ing, oth­ers over­done.” Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune stat­ed he felt “it con­tained about 10 very fun­ny moments and 70 min­utes of silence. Too many jokes took too long to set up, a trait shared by both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.”  

I find that com­ment most inter­est­ing as many see both of those films as com­e­dy clas­sics. Oh well, it is a mat­ter of taste. 

As we have men­tioned in many of the reviews in the past, it is not uncom­mon to see a film’s rep­u­ta­tion grow with time. In a 2011 ABC TV prime time spe­cial, Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time, a poll of fans con­duct­ed by ABC and People mag­a­zine iden­ti­fied Monty Python and the Holy Grail as the sec­ond-best com­e­dy after Airplane!  

The crit­ics’ con­sen­sus at Rotten Tomatoes states: “A cult clas­sic as gut-bust­ing­ly hilar­i­ous as it is blithe­ly ridicu­lous, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has lost none of its exceed­ing­ly sil­ly charm.” Steven Schneider has includ­ed the film in his list­ing of “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” 

In 2005 an adap­ta­tion was brought to Broadway as a musi­cal writ­ten by Eric Idle. The title is Spamalot, but it is also known as Monty Python’s Spamalot: A New Musical (Lovingly) Ripped Off from the Motion Picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It received four­teen Tony Award nom­i­na­tions and won three. The orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion starred Tim Curry as King Arthur. 

Monty Python went on to make two more films, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983).  

The Internet Movie Database rates Monty Python and the Holy Grail at 8.1 out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Critics Score of 92% and an Audience Score of 95%. 

I found the film avail­able on mul­ti­ple stream­ing sites, includ­ing Roku Channel, Kanopy (avail­able with your Clark County Public Library card), Pluto TV, Fawesome, Plex, Filmrise, and Free Movies +. There is also a copy of the DVD on the shelf at the Clark County Public Library. 

I real­ize that Monty Python may not be everyone’s “cup of tea.” Even the trail­er is a bit bizarre. However, if you like your tea with a bit of zani­ness, farce, satire, par­o­dy and slap­stick humor mixed in, order you a large cup of Monty Python tea and enjoy it to the last drop! 

Information for this Reel Classic review was gath­ered from sources includ­ing the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), and Wikipedia.