Fifty years of the funniest movie in the world!

By: David Quantick, screenwriter and film critic / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Tuesday, April 30, 1974. That day, Michael Palin wrote in his diary: “First day of filming … We put on the red cross armor and tunic … John (Lancelot) and I (Galahad) traveled through Glencoe in a cheap hired van, completely covered in armor … The camera broke down during the first take.”

This is how the filmmaking began. Monty Pajtoni and the Holy Grail [Monty Python and the Holy Grail], the second film by the Monty Python troupe (after the 1971 film, And now something completely different / And Now for Something Completely Different), and the first to be conceived as a film with a single narrative – not a series of occasional skits – albeit with a loose structure. As an artistic and commercial success, The Holy Grail became a defining moment in the troupe's career.

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Before the premiere, Monty Python's Flying Circus [Monty Python's Flying Circus] was just a popular comedy show on the BBC, with some funny sketches. After the film The Holy Grail, the Pythons became the most famous and influential comedians in America – and by extension, the world. Now, 50 years later, despite the success of their later works, both as a group and individually, nothing else – not even Life of Brian [Life of Brian], neither hostels [Fawlty Towers], not even Michael Palin's televised travels – has had a cultural impact like The Holy Grail.

As funny today as it was half a century ago, this is a film that broke with the traditional format of big-screen comedy. “It was funny, fresh and crazy,” said John Cleese, “and it really wasn’t like anything else.” But what made it so different? After all, Monty Python didn’t invent surreal comedy: British playwright NF Simpson, the American stage revue Hell's Cabaret [Hellzapoppin] and Spike Milligan's legendary radio show [The goon show] had happened before.

Historical comedies were not new either: from Bob Hope to Danny Kaye, many had made humorous films set in the past, while British novelists Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon had taken the genre further – in the 40s – with stories that mixed anachronism with irreverence for serious things (like There is no bed for the ham. / No Bed for Bacon and No, Mr. Disraeli! / Don't, Mr Disraeli!).

What made it really special The Holy Grail It was an approach that was first tested on television by two future members of the troupe, shortly before Monty Python was formed in 1969. Earlier that year, Michael Palin and Terry Jones produced a series called The complete and absolute history of Britain [The Complete and Utter History of Britain]. It featured historical parodies with a modern twist – for example, a Bronze Age estate agent showing a couple houses at Stonehenge, or interviews with William the Conqueror shortly after his conquest of Britain – and represented the first television version of what would soon become a Python trademark: characters from the past acting like people in the 20th century, with a dash of absurdity thrown in. (The complete and absolute history of Britain (It's also known for being the show that inspired John Cleese to call Palin and say, "You're not going to do any more of this stuff, are you?")

There is an extraordinary and free-flowing sense of creativity that permeates the entire film. The Holy Grail, starting with the utterly absurd opening scene. Graham Chapman, as King Arthur, and his servant Patsy (played by future great film director Terry Gilliam), gallop noisily onto the stage; and almost immediately get into an argument with an overly talkative soldier (played by Eric Idle), who criticizes them because, instead of horses, “you have two empty coconut halves and you’re banging them together.”

After that, the audience feels that anything can happen – and it often does. For the next 90 minutes, Arthur and his companions face harassment from a French knight (Cleese, at his most scathing: “I fart in your general direction”), temptations from scheming ladies (Carol Cleveland, often underrated in her role as the Witch), violence from the Black Knight (“It’s only a scratch!”), terror from the Knights Who Say “Come!” and, finally, contrary to [medieval writer] Thomas Malory’s original text, the indignity of being arrested by the police for murder. The film’s ending has always caused controversy: it’s not dramatically satisfying, but it’s funny (and perhaps unintentionally mirrors the ending of Flaming saddles / Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks's film, released the year before). Eric Idle admitted a few years later: "We didn't know how to end it."

The lack of a traditional ending was essential to the Monty Python troupe's way of thinking. The group members had previously worked on mainstream comedy shows (such as The Frost Report; Cleese had even written for the program The Two Ronnies), where they had become frustrated by the limitations of the sketch format – particularly the convention that each segment had to end with a clever and fitting conclusion. But despite their efforts, they could not find an alternative – until, in 1969, Terry Jones happened to see a new television show featuring one of their comedy heroes.

"I saw the show." Q5 "I saw Spike Milligan and thought, 'Oh, shit! He did it,'" Jones later admitted. "He broke the classic sketch show format. There were sketches that never ended and others that just turned into something else."

The cycle was broken, thanks to Milligan – and also to Terry Gilliam, whose animations flowed naturally from one to the next, with a unique logic. The Pythons were no longer bound by rules. Just as Milligan could end a skit by having everyone leave chanting “What do we do now?”, so his followers could end a film with a deliberate anticlimax.

However, by 1975, Monty Python were contemplating a different kind of ending: the end of the troupe itself. By then, John Cleese had already left (to pursue a career in comedy). hospice with Connie Booth), and despite a forthcoming fourth series of Flying circus, written with the help of the future creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy], Douglas Adams, the Pythons were heading for a suspension.

At least, that's how it seemed. In fact, across the Atlantic, the success of the show on the public television network PBS in the US and the enthusiasm it generated on university campuses meant that Monty Python – already considered a fading creative force at home – gained a new audience in America. Instead of disbanding, they returned, made films and embarked on a US tour.

Sunday, April 27, 1975. Almost a year after filming began for Holy Grail, Michael Palin was in New York for the film's American premiere.

“We were to be at the Second Third Avenue Cinema at 11:00 a.m. to welcome the first spectators and distribute coconuts as they left the theater,” he wrote in his diary. “The telephone rang … Could we get to the theater as soon as possible; there were people waiting in line since 5:30 a.m.!”

The Holy Grail saved the Pythons – and gave them a future. (“For the first time in my life,” John Cleese said, “it felt like people were climbing the stairs under my window and throwing money at me.”) Without it, we wouldn’t have Life of Brian as The meaning of life [The Meaning of Life]. The commercial success of the film also led its two directors – the two Terrys – to gain the trust and budget to realize their own projects, giving us various films, such as The bandits of time [Time Bandits], The Twelve Monkeys [12 Monkeys], Personal services [Personal Services], Erik the Viking [Eric the Viking] and Nonsense [Jabberwocky]. He also secured John Cleese to direct the film. The fish named Vanda [A Fish Called Wanda] and Eric Idle to create the project with the rock band The Rutles.

The latter – the first rock parody in documentary form, made in 1978 about a four-piece Beatles-like band – is doubly important, because while Eric Idle filled The Rutles with British talent (including the brilliant composer Neil Innes, who had also played in The Holy Grail, doing a parody of John Lennon), he also included a number of American comedians, such as Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and John Belushi, all part of a relatively new American show, which, as The Holy Grail, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2025: Saturday Night Live (SNL)).

It’s an understatement to say that the creators of SNL—producer Lorne Michaels and his cast—were impressed by Monty Python. They saw the troupe in the same way that the Pythons had seen Milligan’s work—as a true artistic liberation. Up until then, with a few exceptions (like the surrealist Ernie Kovacs), American television comedy had been a mix of sitcoms (some brilliant, some not so great) and variety shows. But times were changing.

By 1975, corrupt President Richard Nixon had resigned and the Vietnam War was coming to an end. Gone were the conformism of the 50s and the idealism of the 60s, and in their place had come a new, tougher America.

In this context, SNL needed to offer something different from its predecessors – and in the Monty Python troupe it found what it was looking for. “For me it was a miracle, a revelation,” Michaels said of his first impressions of the Pythons. “It seemed to me that, once again, the winds of change were blowing from England.”

Although SNL's live format didn't suit the Pythons' style, the show embraced an Americanized version of the British group's attitude. In other words, it adopted the grittiness of Cleese and Chapman's sketches, the characterful observation of Jones and Palin, Idle's linguistic humor, and Gilliam's visual chaos.

For years, several members of the Monty Python troupe hosted SNL, with Eric Idle and Michael Palin each hosting the show four times. The Pythons' popularity and influence on SNL stood in stark contrast to their first appearance on American television in 1973 [in The Tonight Show], when they were introduced by Joey Bishop as "a comedy group from England, who I've heard are funny;".

If SNL saw the Monty Python troupe as inspiration, then The Holy Grail was the film that cemented the Pythons' connection to America. Comparing their two most famous films, Cleese had observed: "All Americans love it." The Holy Grail, while the English love it Life of Brian". Whether this is true or not, The Holy Grail conquered America. Even Elvis Presley liked the film – he had seen it four times in a row: his favorite scene was the one with the Knights Saying “Come!” …

The film's influence was not limited to the United States. The list of writers, actors, directors, and artists who have been particularly inspired by the film's unique blend of Holy Grail – between surrealism, history and anachronistic comedy – is long and impressive. It includes Terry Pratchett, who drew on the Pythons' treatment of the medieval world to create his own Tolkien-inspired version of comedy; Richard Curtis, creator of Black viper [Blackadder], and his collaborator, Ben Elton, who continues to explore historical comedy with the Shakespeare sitcom [Upstart Crow]; as well as Taika Waititi, who not only directed the dark historical comedy Uncle Rabbit [Jojo Rabbit], but also made a great comeback The bandits of time Gilliam – on Apple TV+ last year. And, of course, there’s no shortage of the obvious DNA of Holy Grail in the series Horrible stories [Horrible Histories] of the BBC, which took author Terry Deary's books and turned them into the longest-running homage to the Pythons ever broadcast.

It could be argued that, more than anything else they've done – more than the extreme comedy of Mr. Creosote in The meaning of life, more than the famous sketch Dead parrot adored by students everywhere, more than stage plays or LPs, even more than the controversial film Life of Brian - The Holy Grail represents the purest and best expression of the Monty Python troupe. The loose narrative gives it extraordinary freedom to be simply and consistently funny. The medieval fabulist setting means it never gets old (it also helps that it is probably the only Python project in which most of the female roles are played by real women). And its historical subject matter made it the model for many of the Pythons' later works, both collaborative and solo – from There are no myths without nonsense. [Ripping Yarns] to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [The Adventures of Baron Munchausen].

Even after half a century, its presence in the global psyche has not diminished at all. Like a cross-cultural Easter egg, The Holy Grail still appears everywhere, in every medium. Perhaps the most famous recent reference occurred in one of HBO's most uncomic series, Game of Thrones [Game of Thrones], which not only included scenes filmed at Dun Castle in Scotland (the location of Holy Grail), but also a moment where the Champion of Meereen taunts Daenerys Targaryen: “Your mother is a rodent and your father stinks like dog grapes.” It’s hard to find a more fitting tribute to the lasting influence of the Holy Grail. /Telegraph/