May Movie: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

28th May 7.00pm

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Dir: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones     UK            1975

91 mins

Starring: Terry Jones, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman

Language: English

“Complete with some inspired digressions and shorn of some of the weaker sketches, the soundtrack album of the Pythons’ first story-based feature is even funnier than the film itself.  Yet this remains a wonderfully inventive comedy that brilliantly debunks the dark Ages and the legends of chivalry through King Arthur’s encounters with an anarcho-syndicalist commune, the Black Knight, God (courtesy of Terry Gilliam) and “the knights who say ni”.  The Camelot and Sir Robin songs also get beneath the visor, but the highlights are the trial of Connie Booth’s witch and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch sequence.”

(Radio Times Guide to films 2013)

 

“There’s something about feature films that brings out the best in the Pythons. The occasional indulgence of the TV series is replaced by a more focused approach which wrings every conceivable joke out of a given subject.

While Holy Grail falls short of Life Of Brian’s comic masterpiece status, it has more than enough killer lines, sight gags and inspired absurdity to qualify as a medieval-on-your-ass laff-riot.

Highlights include an encounter with a homicidal bunny, Launcelotís misguided wedding guest massacre, Michael Palin’s bolshy peasant ridiculing the Lady Of The Lake (‘some moistened bint’), and, of course, the use of coconut shells in place of actual trusty steeds.”

(Rob Fraser, Empire Magazine)

 

“The gags are nonstop, occasionally inspired and should not be divulged, though it’s not giving away too much to say that I particularly liked a sequence in which the knights, to gain access to an enemy castle, come up with the idea of building a Trojan rabbit. When Arthur calls retreat, he simply yells: “Run away!” And the morale of Sir Robin, the least successful of the Round Table knights, isn’t helped by a retinue of minstrels who insist on singing about his most embarrassing defeats.”

(New York Times)