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EDIT NEWS: Monty Python - Holy Grail Press 1975 |
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Hollywood Reporter, 13th March 1975, page 18
FILMEX REVIEW
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
The six comedians who wrote and acted in this bananas send-up of all that's sacred are the British counterparts of Woody Allen, or Mel Brooks. Their humour is mostly verbal, taking a familiar genre setting (the medieval Arthurian legend) and relentlessly destroying conventional narrative expectations.
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Gladiole Films Ltd.
Producer..........................................Mark Forstater
Executive producer........................John Goldstone
Directors.......................Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
Screenplay.............Graham Chapman, John Cleese,
Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle,
Terry Jones, Michael Palin
Music.......................................................Neil Innes
Sound...............................................Garth Marshall
Technicolor
Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Carol Cleveland, Connie Booth.
Running time � 89 minutes
No MPAA rating
It is effective nonsense, and the group effort guards against overly precious routines. The comedian-writers are Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Together they are known as Monty Python's Flying Circus.
This is their second feature. The first, "And Now For Something Completely Different," was simply a collection of hit or miss jokes leering at sex. The Holy Grail plot gives the new film enough of an excuse of unity and structure to make breaking the usual narrative rules funny.
Produced by Mark Forstater for Gladiole Films, Ltd., the basic visual design is of romanticised picture book compositions in carefully staged static set-ups � again providing the familiar base from which anarchy can digress. Gilliam and Jones are credited as directors, Gilliam being responsible for several animated sequences.
Any attempt at rationality quickly lapses into lengthy nonsense explanations. The "hard times" of the Arthurian legend corresponds with contemporary hard times in which anything established is automatically fair game for desecration. Their philosophy seems to be: if you ain't got nothing, you might as well have a sense of humour about it.
This is desperation comedy. King Arthur tries to assert his authority as king, but peasants spout Marxist political slogans at him, and castle guards string together endless grand insults instead of opening the gate. Authority is dead.
Typical of the many breaks of usual movie continuity is a maiden who suddenly turns to the camera to ask if the audience thinks her scene should have been cut or not, as there was much debate about it when it was written. The other characters all yell at her to "Get on with it," and the movie lurches irreverently along.
John Goldstone was executive producer for this Python (Monty) Pictures production. It has no American distributor as yet, but was the first picture to sell out in the Filmex event.
� John H. Dorr
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Variety, 19th March 1975
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
(BRITISH-COLOR)
Hollywood, March 11.
A Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd. film. Produced by Mark Forstater; exec producer, John Goldstone. Directed by Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Screenplay, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Gilliam, Eric Idle, Jones, Michael Palin; camera (uncredited color), Terry Bedford; music, DeWolfe; songs, Neil Innes; editor, John Hackney; production design, Roy Smith; assistant director, Gerry Harrison. Reviewed at L.A. County Museum of Art, March 10, '75. (No MPAA rating.) Running time: 89 MINS.
King Arthur........................Graham Chapman
Sir Lancelot..................................John Cleese
Also: Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin.
Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British comedy group which gained fame via BBC-TV, returns to the screen with its second film, following its 1971 outing, "And Now For Something Completely Different." New pic, handsomely produced by Mark Forstater with John Goldstone as exec producer, is a send-up of Arthurian legend, performed in whimsical fashion with Graham Chapman an effective straight man as King Arthur. Though the film often indulges in sophomoric antics, that won't diminish its appeal to young audiences, particularly Britons who can follow dialog nuances and know more about Arthur than was shown in "Camelot."
Despite obvious budget limitations, pic has a pleasing look due to inventive lensing by Terry Bedford, resourceful production design by Roy Smith, and good period costumes by Hazel Pethig. Direction, which pinches from sources as disparate as Ingmar Bergman and Richard Lester, is by two members of the Flying Circus, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, who also appear in the film.
Story line, dealing with Arthur's quest for the Holy Grail and his battles along the way with various villains, is basically an excuse for set pieces, some amusing, others overdone. Dialog, by the six members of the Flying Circus, has a self-consciously jokey flavor, and scenes are often interrupted with asides to the audience, such as, "Do you think this scene should be cut?" Pic also has a gag intermission eight minutes before finish.
Running gags include lack of horses for Arthur and his men, and a lackey clicking coconuts together to make suitable hoof noises as the men trot along. This situation is blamed on "economic stress," and British audiences will enjoy the occasional digs at present state of their country.
Some good comic mileage is obtained out of scenes dealing with a Trojan Horse shaped like a rabbit, religious penitenti whacking themselves with boards, and a fight scene with a ferocious rabbit finally bested by means of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The extravagantly gruesome fight scenes, including one which ends with a man having all four limbs severed, will get laughs from some and make others squirm.
Film meanders along its 89-minute course, despite crisp editing by John Hackney, because it has such a cavalier approach to story and character, lacking any balance from what Mel Brooks has called "serious relief." As a consequence, pic gives the impression of an uphill climb to the end.
� Mack.
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Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1975
[An unflattering extract from this review is read out by
Terry Jones on the Holy Grail Special Edition DVD. And,
yes, it does say "the Knights of N1"]
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Great Britain, 1974
Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
Cert-A. dist--EMI. p.c-Python (Monty) Pictures. In association with Michael White. For EMI. exec. p-John Goldstone. p-Mark Forstater. p. manager-Julian Doyle. asst. d-Gerry Harrison. sc-Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin.
ph-Terry Bedford. col-Technicolor. anim-Terry Gilliam. sp. ph. effects- Julian Doyle. ed-John Hackney. p. designer-Roy Smith. sp. effects-John Horton. m/songs-Neil Innes. addit. m-De Wolfe. cost-Hazel Pethig. choreo-Leo Kharibian. titles-Lucinda Cowell, Kate Hepburn, Francine Lawrence. sd. rec-Garth Marshall. fight director and period consultant-John Waller. l.p-Graham Chapman (King Arthur), John Cleese (Black Knight/Sir Lancelot the Brave/French Knight/Tim the Enchanter), Terry Gilliam (Patsy/Soothsayer), Eric Idle (Sir Robin the-not-Quite-So-Brave/Concorde/Roger the Shrubber/Brother Maynard), Terry Jones (Bedevere the Wise/Herbert), Michael Palin (Sir Galahad the Pure/King of the Swamp Castle), Terry Jones, Graham Chapman and Michael Palin (Three-Headed Knight), Michael Palin and others (Knights of N1), Eric Idle and Graham Chapman (Guards of Swamp Castle), John Young (Famous Historian), Carol Cleveland (Zoot/Dingo), Connie Booth, Neil Innes, Bee Duffell, Rita Davies, Sally Kinghorn, Avril Stewart, Mark Zycon, Mitsuko Forstater, Sandy Rose, Joni Flynn, Elspeth Cameron, Sandy Johnson, Romilly Squire, Alison Walker, Loraine Ward, Sally Coombe, Yvonne Dick, Fiona Gordon, Judy Lams, Sylvia Taylor, Anna Lanski, Vivienne MacDonald, Daphne Darling, Gloria Graham, Tracy Sneddon, Joyce Pollner, Mary Allen. 8,073 ft. 90 mins.
932 A.D. King Arthur persuades Sir Bedevere, Sir Lancelot the Brave, Sir Galahad the Pure, Sir Robin the-not-Quite-So-Brave and Sir Not Appearing In This Film to join him in the fellowship of the Round Table; their first goal is Camelot, but God appears in the skies and directs them to seek the Holy Grail. At the foot of a French castle they suffer the sarcastic remarks of a French Knight, who also bombards them with assorted animals. Before being slain by a rider on horseback, a Famous Historian informs us of the Round Table's decision to seek the Holy Grail individually. Each knight undergoes various trials: Sir Robin encounters an argumentative Three-Headed Knight; Lancelot rescues a damsel in distress, only to discover that the damsel is the idiot son of the King of Swamp Castle; after being advised by a Soothsayer, Arthur and Bedevere appease the Knights of N1 with the sacrifice of a shrubbery. The police meanwhile begin their investigations into the murder of the Historian. Eventually all the knights team up and are led by Tim the Enchanter to the cave of Caerbanog, where they do battle with the Beast of Aaaargh; they then endeavour to cross the Bridge of Death (guarded by the Soothsayer), but only Arthur and Bedevere manage it successfully. Voices lead them to an enchanted boat, which carries them to the Castle of Aaargh, resting place of the Holy Grail; on the ramparts, however, they find the sarcastic French Knight again, who upturns manure over them. Just as Arthur is organising his troops for battle, the police arrive to arrest those responsible for the Historian's death, and filming ceases abruptly.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is, in some ways, completely different from And Now for Something Completely Different: instead of revisiting their television sketches, the jesters (John Cleese still included) have struck out with some new ideas and situations, filmed amongst the lovely lochs, castles, moors and mists of Scotland. As characters, they play members of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail, plus a sprinkling of loquacious bystanders and obstinate opponents: Graham Chapman leads the band as King Arthur, whose main eccentricity is saying five when he means three; Eric Idle (looking in mediaeval costume remarkably like Tyrone Power) is memorable as a guard of Swamp Castle, struggling to understand a simple command; John Cleese provides a little gallery of upstanding lunatics, including a French Knight with a line in strange insults ("Your mother was a hamster"). In other ways, the movie is completely identical, for the team's style is unaltered; for all the occasional delights their work throws up, they remain mechanical purveyors of the Absurd, whose gifts have been dangerously diminished by too much method and too little inspiration. The credit sequence demonstrates the kind of comic over-kill which made The Brand New Monty Python Book [sic] almost unreadable: there are so many joke credits, joke subtitles, joke apologies, and joke apologies for joke apologies, that one fears the movie may never get off the ground at all. When it does, such irritants are thankfully rare, and the team settle down to spinning out their sketches on a loose but serviceable story-line. A fair amount of the material comes from the mediaeval romance genre and its screen manifestations: there are no horses � servants clack coconut shells instead; Terry Gilliam's occasional animated inserts draw on mediaeval painting an manuscript illustrations (through the neatest one is in modern style � a sun and two clouds all with legs, noisily bouncing up and down); and the most developed sequence has Cleese, as Lancelot, hacking his way through a wedding gathering to rescue an annoyingly male damsel in distress ("He's come to rescue me!" "Well let's not jump to conclusions!"). But the team's visual buffooneries and verbal rigmaroles (some good, some bad, but mostly indifferent) are piled on top of each other with no attention to judicious timing or structure, and a form which began as a jaunty assault on the well-made revue sketch and an ingenious misuse of television's fragmented style of presentation, threatens to become as unyielding and unfruitful as the conventions it originally attacked.
GEOFF BROWN
[When this review was reprinted on the Programme Notes
for Monty Python and the Holy Grail for its showing at the
NFT as part of their "Gigantic Guffaws: A Retrospective of
British Comedy" season, Geoff Brown added this back-
peddling disclaimer:]
Had the writer of this review (myself) known what Python films would follow, he might have been a little more charitable to THE HOLY GRAIL. For as the Python team advanced in cinematic confidence, the over-kill aspect advanced alongside, reaching a climax in the juvenile, lumbering MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE. In retrospect, THE HOLY GRAIL blends the best of both media � the inconsequentiality of the Python TV shows, with the wider stylistic horizons of cinema. |
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Evening Standard, 3rd April 1975
[No writer credited]
A medieval signpost directs the wayfarer "To Certain Death." A churlish peasant turns down his king's claim to rule him with an indignant snort of: "This is an autonomous commune." A three-headed giant lets its victim escape because the heads can't agree on tactics. And "A Famous Historian" giving us a running commentary on the events is cut down by a passing swordsman.
We're in Monty Python country, and I'm delighted to report the team's new film is far superior to their first.
No rag bag of familiar scraps from the telly series, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an inventively coherent piece of comedy that gets constant laughs out of the irreverent way it takes romantic legend and bends it to the absurd limits of logic.
King Arthur (Graham Chapman), claiming the right to rule with the sword given him by the Lady of the Lake, is briskly told that "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for representative democracy."
The Black Knight (John Cleese, who also appears to play every second part) challenges all-comers to a duel. He meets his match, but obstinately refuses to acknowledge he hasn't a leg left to stand on when all his limbs have been chopped off. "Stand and fight, you coward," cries the head and trunk as the victor rides off.
Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin) penetrates Castle Anthrax to withstand all temptation by 120 blondes and brunettes "all between 16 and 19�." and all, as they explain, "busy bathing, dressing, undressing and making exciting underwear."
Down at Camelot the knights are going through chorus girl routines worthy of the Follies. A minstrel follows his master, constantly singing of his cowardice: "When danger reared its ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled."
No writers are credited with the script, although I imagine that to Terry Gilliam belongs the credit for the animated manuscript lettering, as well as the cartooned scene where the knights in full flight from a monster are only saved by the animator's heart attack.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail sounds as funny as it looks. The serfs, when they're not thick in the skull, read the riot act to their masters like bloody-minded shop stewards and the knights approach the notion of endless derringdo in the damp as if it was as holy a game as cricket.
It is quite the brightest home-grown comedy in ages. |
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Daily Express, 3rd April 1975
[Written by the man who later edited 'Gilliam On Gilliam'
and gave my parents two cats, Murray and Irving]
[That's enough name-dropping - ED]
SURRENDER TO THESE INSPIRED LUNATICS:
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (A)
Casino, ABC Bloomsbury and ABC 1 Fulham Road
It is difficult to know just how to approach a film with such a wild, lunatic spirit as this one, writes Ian Christie.
You could, I suppose, approach it cautiously in stockinged feet with a concealed club at the ready to defend yourself should it jump off the screen and attempt to bite you in the leg.
On the other hand you could attempt to meet it on its own terms by turning up with a fake nose and pelting it with radishes, dead mice, and old usherettes.
I think the best course is to leave your sense of reason at home, wave a white flag and surrender to the inspired idiocy of the Monty Python team.
The saga gets off to a flying start with the credits which have sub-titles dealing with some moose or other that doesn't appear in the film, and announcements that the people responsible for the credits have been sacked.
Then we are immediately involved in the adventures of King Arthur (Graham Chapman) as he searches for the Holy Grail.
Arthur, along with the other knights who accompany him on his quest, gallop about briskly on horseback on the instruction of God � a testy old gentleman who appears in the sky and hates people who grovel before him.
Apart from Graham Chapman, the leading maniacs in the romp are John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, and they all behave quite splendidly.
To be sure, some of the episodes fall rather flat, but in a film so crammed with gags, I suppose this is inevitable.
There are enough moments of sheer comic brilliance to make you forget the few dull patches and sweep you along on a tide of mirth. It should even make you laugh. |
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The Guardian, 3rd April 1975
[By Derek Malcolm, who's obviously been sent a copy
of the press release]
Any resemblance between Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Casino, A) and the average hand-to-mouth British comedy spin-off is happily absent. The film looks good, and shows signs of being carefully thought out and put together. It suggests that the Python team aren't content merely to reproduce their television triumphs and that their search for a developing style could be made as effectively in the cinema as anywhere else.
To be fair, the mixture here of Gilliam animation, revue sketches, cinematic parody, and surreal humour is a thing of threads and patches, sometimes hilarious, sometimes not. And 90 minutes on the same theme puts a strain of the proceedings that they can't always bear. But one can at least see the beginnings of something that could grow into a more coherently incoherent whole. The basic order out of which the most laughable anarchy flows could eventually be achieved (� la Marx Brothers) if the team sticks together.
It is, in all conscience, an exceedingly good one. Messrs Cleese, Chapman, Idle, Graham, and Jones are very funny people and react to each one another with the same sense of belonging as Groucho, Harpo, and the rest. Cleese, in particular, has a comic persona second to none and the priceless ability to use it superbly. But one should also note the location work of the lighting cameraman, Terry Bedford, which is often excellent, and the constant search of the Terrys Gilliam and Jones as co-directors to do something just a little different, if not completely.
Other people's favourite moments will doubtless be different, but mine was the Peckinpah pastiche, in which John Cleese as Sir Lancelot hacks his way through the guest at a wedding to save a damsel in distress who turns out to be a camp prince called Herbert. He is, of course, most frightfully sorry. And I liked the line flung at Graham Chapman's cherishable King Arthur � "You can't expect to assume complete power just because some watery tart throws a sword at you."
I have been asked to mention that the ice-creams are nice, and that the supporting feature, unfortunately glued to the main one, stars the Hall� Orchestra, bellydancer Concita MacBeth, Mafia boss Enrico Marx, and Doug and Bob, two Metropolitan Policemen with a difference. I don't believe it, but I will mention it anyway. |
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Evening News, 3rd April 1975
FILMS
Felix Barker
Will the real Monty Python stand up and identify himself? I must say, I think the chances are extremely remote.
In the week of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (A, Casino, ABC Bloomsbury and Fulham Road) your intrepid critic-reporter has been in pursuit of the damned elusive Python.
It is a search as fraught with difficulties as the quest for the Grail itself, because Mr. Python is not one person but six.
This extraordinary co-operative of writing, acting and directing talent is involved in the current caprice, but its members are shrouded in additional mystery � beards, helmets and a great deal of swirling Scottish mist.
LARKS
Also, they are attempting something rather different from their usual larks. Instead of riding off furiously in all directions, they are firmly (well, nearly firmly) immersed in the 10th century Britain of King Arthur.
A de-horsed King Arthur (Graham Chapman) mimes the motions of a rider followed by his squire beating out hoof-beats with a pair of coconuts.
Arriving at various castles, he recruits some reluctant, inefficient Round Table Knights. Among them may be discerned Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin), Sir Robin the not-Quite-So-Brave (Eric Idle).
There is also Sir Bedevere who has constant visor trouble. He is played by Terry Jones, joint direction with that other Terry (Gilliam) who appears in Lon Chaney make-up as the Soothsayer.
Their Adventures include a visit to Castle Anthrax where twin sisters (Carol Cleveland) live with 120 lusty girls, aged 16 to 19� - the erotic possibilities of which, alas, are not fully explored.
I have to report that this exercise is not quite so riotously funny as previous Pythonmania because they have imposed a medieval discipline on the surrealistic humour.
For a wild farce, it has the extraordinary quality of seeming more authentic than most serious period films.
The characters maintain a mad logic within a formal historical framework. |
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The Sun, 4th April 1975
By Fergus Cashin
At long last, lovers of Monty Python get a full-length movie "that makes Ben Hur look like an epic."
Monty Python And The Holy Grail (A) is, as the film proudly proclaims, "a film completely different from some of the other films which aren't quite the same as this one is."
We are back in the time of King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his knights of the round-the-twist table.
There's not a lot in the plot about Camelot, but plenty about Lancelot (John Cleese).
At one stage Arthur's right hand clot of a knight manages to kill off an entire wedding party by going to the rescue of a damsel who turns out to be a chap in distress.
RIDER
Halfway through the action, the team introduce historian A.J.P. Taylor, in the guise of John Young, to explain what is going on.
But hardly has he cleared his throat before it is cut by a mystery rider on horse-back.
This allows the introduction of two policemen with a difference.
Pc Doug likes nothing more than slipping into little cocktail dresses, while Pc Bob bouffantes his hair for a night on duty.
As a Monty Python fan, I laughed more than somewhat. But I can understand those who sat through it with strained, pained faces.
There is no sense to a sense of humour. |
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The Times, 4th April 1975
By David Robinson
Monty Python and the Holy Grail chances its arm with parody, which is always a risky undertaking, involving as it does commitments to the original that can become onerous. A duty, however vague, to a story makes it harder to take off into the inconsequences and interruptions that are the essence of Monty Python comedy. The story becomes less an excuse than an obstacle to the gags.
At its best, Monty Python combines low variety with Alice in Wonderland. The special logic of Alice is uppermost in choice moments, like the attempt to prove a case of witchcraft by weight, wood and a somewhat elusive analogy to a duck; or the taunting Frenchmen who hurl astounded cows from the battlements upon the equally astounded besieging Round Table knights below. The music hall elements are to the fore in Terry Jones's trouserless and falsetto Prince in the tower.
Monty Python's special brand of humour lies in the joke of inappropriate reactions � as when the Black Knight, shorn, Peckinpah fashion, of all his limbs, continues sportingly to battle, with British phlegm and fortitude; or a small-time king escorts Sir Lancelot through the ranks of guests dead and dying from Lancelot's excessive energy with his sword, discussing possible improvements to the property. It is all hit-and-miss; but the hits are often rich fun. |
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Daily Telegraph, 4th April 1975
By Patrick Gibbs
Historical burlesque is really for too obvious and too familiar for the usually unpredictable Monty Python team of writers and actors, and they get terribly bogged down in Arthurian England, circa AD 932, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Casino, A B C Bloomsbury and the A B C I, Fulham Road, "A").
True, there are one or two good, mad conversations at cross purposes as in an early discussion on how coconuts got to England � by sparrow? � and it's quite funny when Arthur calls on occupants of a French castle to join in a quest for the Holy Grail only to be told they already have one.
But such moments are few, and even when the film has a bright idea, such as bringing on an historian, style of A. J. P. Taylor, to lecture on the period, only for him to be beheaded by one of his subjects springing out of the past, it isn't fully developed. Only the credits remain in the memory as wholly comic, with the dotty suggestion that they have been translated from the Swedish. |
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Morning Star, 4th April 1975
By Virginia Dignan [?]
"Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing," said Sam Goldwyn.
But devotees of the Monty Python TV series will need no second invitation to see the lunatic antics of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (A), Casino.
The running joke of the knights being horseless became a long, hard plod and gave me hoof and mouth disease, but the larky, off-beat humour was as inventive and surreal as ever and led to a refreshingly derisive ending.
A case of the mixture as before, but ever different. |
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Daily Mail, 5th April 1975
By Margaret Hinxman:
I HAVEN'T STOPPED LAUGHING YET...
Monty Python And The Holy Grail (A): Casino
If you can't see the humour of 'Monty Python', no one can explain it to you. It's like describing the flavour to avocado pear to a person who has never tasted it.
Why, for instance, should we rock with mirth at the sight of King Arthur and his assorted knights clumping around in imitation of men on horseback, while the minions behind provide the 'noises off' sound of horse's hooves? What is so amusing about the King of the Britons getting into an argument about dialectical materialism from grovelling Medieval peasants?
How can any comedy dare to stand still for ten minutes while the King and guardian of the local castle engage in a long discussion about how many swallows it would take to carry a coconut from Africa? And where is the humour in a sword fight in which the game loser, having had both arms and legs lopped off, keep rolling back into the fray shouting 'coward,' 'chicken' at the opposition?
I can't answer those questions. I only know I can't stop giggling even now at the thought of it.
And now for something completely different. I mean, let me be serious. This is far better than the previous 'Monty Python' film, which was largely based on their TV shows. It has a plot, or rather a feeling for continuity. It is quite lavishly staged. All our good friends are on hand, including John Cleese (who gives a stunning impression of a dastardly French milord) and Graham Chapman (the kind of reasonable King Arthur who should instantly be snapped up for the 'Any Questions' team). Directors Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam achieve a sort of comic order.
If you hadn't already guessed, I think it is a delectably funny film. Incidentally, don't miss the credits: they bolster one's faith in one of the few British virtues worth having these days � a sense of the ridiculous. |
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Sunday Telegraph, 6th April 1975
By Tom Hutchinson
If the sight of a limbless, armoured torso pleading with its victor to come back and fight makes you giggle then Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Casino, Old Compton Street, A.B.C., Bloomsbury, A.B.C. 1, Fulham Road: A) is for you. Something in such ferociously bad taste, carried through with such blatant indelicacy, made me, I confess, quite upset � with laughter.
A far more coherent film than the team's "And Now for Something Completely Different," this is still a veritable snake-pit of lunatic jokes that mostly work if they involve the deadpan mania of John Cleese.
It's impossible to explain the plot, which will ensure that Camelot will never be the same again, except to say that its comedy is the usual Python one of digression and aggression. It includes not only a killer rabbit, but a Trojan rabbit, besides such conceits as horseless knights galloping everywhere accompanied by vassal-sounded coconuts shells.
Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin � not forgetting a cartooned Jehovah in a bit part � all contribute their usual endeavours to the cinema of the absurd and it has all been lovingly photographed on beautiful location by Terry Bedford as though it were a cross between "Alexander Nevsky" and "The Sound of Music".
My main criticisms would be not abut the warts-and-all ugliness of everything but in the way women are depicted as either contorted or perverted � unholy frails, as it were � and the manner in which our heroes seem to run out of steam towards the end and stop abruptly without any preceding warning tension of action.
Still, addicts will doubtless forgive these lapses and know that their fix can be obtained at the cinemas I have named. It should be on the National Health, but I'm afraid you have to pay. See it from the beginning, though: the moose-gag running through the opening titles is very, very funny. |
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Sunday Times, 6th April 1975
By Dilys Powell
It is difficult to sustain a parody for the length of a feature film, or come to that for the length of a novel: even "Zuleika Dobson" falters or slips into false extravagance. The Monty Python lot, for whom I have a fond regard, have tried a parody of the King Arthur legend. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it is called (Casino: directors Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones; A). I have to say that it suffers from the failings of its kind. But there are compensations.
Somebody asked me after I had seen the film if I thought it would appeal to ladies; I said I didn't know anything about ladies, I was just a critic. I might have added, though I didn't, that the longer one has been a critic the rarer are the occasions on which one laughs � not smiles, but really laughs. The Monty Python piece gave me a laugh or two, and I am grateful for that. The best of the fun came early: some splendidly crack-brained credits, and then the pleasure, as King Arthur (Graham Chapman, providing his own hoof-beats) hopped into sight, of feeling that I was about to be reimbursed for the hideous hours I had spent watching preposterous films about knights and Vikings and general chivalry-bosh. Possibly the relative cost of coconut-hoof sounds and horses may have accounted for the absence of cavalry; but the substitute worked very well � and one admires anybody prepared to make a virtue of necessity. And as I thought of many a film I had especially disliked � and that goes for "The Seventh Seal" as well as lesser fables � I abandoned myself to delight in seeing the whole lot reduced to the ridiculous.
That pleasure, of course, wore off; and anyway later passages of knockabout were not up to the standard of the opening. But there were admirable inventions among the wizards and other impediments confronting Lancelot, Galahad and the rest of the Grail-hunters. Ingenious special effects too � and an ending smashing in more senses than one. I fancy some of you, even ladies, might enjoy the jokes. |
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The Observer, 6th April 1975
By Penelope Houston
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Casino, A) comes lolloping on like the Shepherd's Bush shaggy dog, panting heavily over its jokey credit titles and conceivably convulsed by its own advance billing as 'the film that makes Ben Hur look like an epic.' Actually it looks unepically rather good in its own right, and Terry Bedford's camera does handsomely by some fine Scottish rocks and mists.
But there's some pervasive blight hanging over the transfer of television humour to the bigger screen, and it certainly hasn't left this second Python feature unscathed. The effortfully inane action, verbal tomfoolery and in-house TV jokes dangle limply from the cinema screen, waiting for a breeze which the directors, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, never manage to whistle up. Historical movie spoofing is a game anyone can play, without calling on more than the top surface of parody, and without even needing to. 'Churchill's People' got in first with the mumbling soothsayers in skins and the ancient Britons as a nagging lot already shaping up for an industrial dispute; and was rather funnier.
Russell Davies is on holiday |
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Listener, 10th April 1975
[Insubstantial piece here in between longer reviews of
The Gambler and Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, only
listed here because it's reviewer is Gavin Millar.]
[Cor, and it actually starts with "Some people..." too!]
Some people complain that there are dull patches in the very funny Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Casino). There are dull patches in Paradise Lost and the Bible, too, I dare say, but that has never prevented such carpers from paying their 75p, like the rest of us, for these enduring works of art.
As a portrait of the Middle Ages, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has no serious rival. On the other hand, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (Odeon, St Martin's Lane) has drawbacks as a historical survey of the Thirties in the United States... |
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CinemaTV Today, 12th April 1975, page 3
[A large blue and yellow advert is printed declaring
Holy Grail's total takings to date. It reads, in vaguely
Gilliamesque writing:]
A SMASH! AT THE
(NEWLY REFURBISHED)
CASINO
OLD COMPTON ST.
MONTY PYTHON
AND THE HOLY GRAIL
£9,692
FIRST SEVEN DAYS
IT'S ALSO HUGE AT THE
A B C BLOOMSBURY & A B C 1 FULHAM ROAD
EMI Film Distributors Ltd Film House 142 Wardour Street London W1V 4AE telephone:01-437-0444
[CinemaTV Today's regular page two feature
"Box Office: Facts and Figures" by Brenda Barton
column confirms this number in its list of box office
performances for the week. Compared to the other
two films also in their first weeks, Holy Grail is
beaten by Death Wish's £11,948 takings but
smashes The Blue Knight/Freelance double-bill,
making only £1,819 in its first week at two 20-seater
cinemas. The big films that week were Earthquake
and Emmanuelle, in their 19th and 27th weeks
respectively, making over £324,000 each. Also, in
this column from the 10th May 1975 issue it says:]
BOX OFFICE
FACTS and FIGURES
In New York, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was meant to open at cinema 2 at 11.00 a.m. Queues started to form at 5.30 a.m. and by 9.30 a.m. such a crowd had formed that the owner decided to put on special early morning showing. People continued to arrive and the owner was then forced to put the film into the larger house at cinema 1 for the afternoon shows. "Python" took $10,500 in its first day and finished up at $44,000 after the week in the 291 seater. We joined the ranks of the "silly" brigade last week by omitting "Python" from its rightful seventh place in the Top Ten. |
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The Spectator, 12th April 1975
By Kenneth Robinson:
There are some equally classy allusions in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A peasant argues with King Arthur, doubting his claim to supremacy in 'an autonomous commune.' There are lots of lines like this � straight from an end-of-term rag, you might suppose.
What really worries me is that Margaret Hinxman said in Saturday's Daily Mail that she was 'still giggling.' I'm sure she never giggled in her days with the Sunday Telegraph. Maybe she is just getting in the mood of her new readership of televiewers. And what an audience they make, these fugitives from television. I watched them pouring into the cinema the other afternoon, looking absolutely convinced that they are going to enjoy themselves. It was a terrifying sight. I wondered at first how they would stand up to the experience of seeing small-box comedy presented without the built-in studio laughter that is such a help when you're watching at home. Within a few seconds it was clear that everything was going to be all right. There were some easy jokes in the opening credit titles, and once the audience had got the idea that nothing was going to be too difficult they reacted with belly-laughs to every signal that a joke was being made.
I was once told by a BBC producer that the OK Thing to Say about the Python team was: "They may be immature; they may be amateur, but at least they are honest."
This time they certainly have been honest. They promised a search for the Holy Grail and that is what they gave us. Hour after hour after hour of it. Or so it seems. One critic tells me that here, instead of the usual Python rag-bag, we have a sustained theme. I really don't see any virtue in that. Admittedly one third of the film is nearly quite funny, but I was delighted when it veered away from the theme twice; once for a few seconds of Intermission with a ghastly electronic organ, and the other when a typical TV-for-schools lecturer got mixed up with the action. |
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CinemaTV Today, 19th April 1975, page 14
THE NEW FILMS
Reviewed by Marjorie Bilbow
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
EMI. British. 90min. "A." Technicolor.
Rel.: 25 May
Type of production: Comedy.
Stars: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin. Screenplay: by the stars. Photography: Terry Bedford. Editor: John Hackney. Songs: Neil Innes.
Story outline: 932 A.D. King Arthur and his page Patsy are seeking knights for the Round Table but encounter a lot of aggravation from bolshie peasants before eventually recruiting Sir Bedevere, Sir Galahad the Pure, Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave, etcetera. En route for Camelot they receive a personal message from God instructing them to search for the Holy Grail. They then have numerous adventures too numerous to mention, involving a rude French night an argumentative 3-headed knight, a dainty prince, a soothsayer, the knights of NI and 122 damsels who all fancy Sir Galahad. Meanwhile a present-day historian has been slain by a passing warrior and the police are investigating. Eventually after more adventures too numerous to mention, Arthur and Bedevere enter an enchanted boat which carries them to the Castle of Aaaargh where the rude French knight is even ruder. Arthur then masses hit troops to storm the castle.
Audience rating: For Monty Python addicts.
Business prediction: Very good in popular cinemas where the regulars are under 35; otherwise variable.
Critical comment: Some are born liking Monty Python humour; some acquire a liking for it; others can't stand it at any price. As one of the first to become addicted, I have never expected to enjoy every single one of their television sketches. They always hit enough targets to make up for the ones they miss. So I didn't expect too much of this film and, consequently, was only moderately disappointed by their inability to sustain the high comedy of the opening scenes. Inevitably, the film is a collection of sketches with only the period and a shred of plot holding them together. But the shred of plot, flimsy though it is, ties the humour down into a sameness that eventually smothers their talent to surprise and shock. |
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Films And Filming, May 1975, page 40
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Produced by Mark Forstater. Screenplay by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Director of photography, Terry Bedford. Editor, John Hackney. Music, Neil Innes, De Wolfe. Designer, Roy Smith. Distributed by EMI. British. Technicolor. 90 mins approx (with laugh, 91 mins).
GRAHAM CHAPMAN; JOHN CLEESE; TERRY GILLIAM; ERIC IDLE; TERRY JONES; MICHAEL PALIN; CAROL CLEVELAND; CONNIE BOOTH; NEIL INNES; BEE DUFFELL; JOHN YOUNG; HITA [sic] DAVIS; SALLY KINGHORN; AVRIL STEWART
GORDON GOW
For the benefit of any purists who might be hovering, there is a passing awareness of the Arthurian legend and also a quest for the Holy Grail in this irreverent slice of nightmare. Translated into Pythonese, Lancelot and Galahad and others run a ribald gambit in which the sleaziness of the human condition is not infrequently juxtaposed with Scottish landscapes of a very pleasing prettiness. The surprise of the exercise, in fact, is its almost painterly element, in such sights as the insecure as the insecure bridge that trembles in a mist above a gorge, or the enchanted boat of Viking derivation with a dragon's head at its prow.
We are not permitted to dwell, of course, on these bounties. The gags are fast, the action plentiful. And contrasts abound in the most mesmerising fashion. There is, for instance, a schoolboy prankishness to the way King Arthur moves on foot but with a prancing step as he covers the countryside, while his diligent page provides the sound of a horse's hooves with coconut half-shells; but there is also a swift montage that is really quite Eisensteinian as a prelude to battle, with a close-up of a pair of hands clasped upon a weapon, and another of a soldier's weathered face. There are moments, forsooth, which plucked from their context might well appear to be the stuff of the epic drama which is being mocked.
Especially clever is the fore-flash of apprehension, at its best when a forest traditionally romanticised by sunrays is intruded upon by crosscutting to sharp little morsels of an activity which is not at all clear and yet evidently most violent. Thus alerted and apprehensive, we are presently confronted by the violent spectacle in all its clarity. I shall not spoil the surprise, but I must add to my Eisenstein reference an invocation of Kurosawa at his bone-breaking bloodiest.
This is one of several passages that attest to the savagery of the 1970s. Violence and gore in a jokey connotation might not be terribly modern: the history of such humour could be traced a long way back, as the Python practitioners must be very well aware. But its recurrence now comes with a jolt to the desensitised. Cinema, in its anxiety to arouse response, has steadily inoculated us against emotional shock, arguably to our spiritual disadvantage. Perhaps we both deserve and need the Python remedy, which dares us to look upon horror as a species of mirth.
Just as prevalent, however, are the more casual conceits, the flip quip and the kid-stuff caper., very seldom falling flat and frequently aglow with happy invention: the Grail quest leads, for example, to the Castle Anthrax which is chock full of girls between the ages of 16 and 19�, all of them apparently on heat. And there are marvellously funny anachronisms, in the present-day expletives of a minstrel or a knight, and in the time-spanning death of a historian whose slaughter is investigated by 20th-century British policemen. The range is so wild, and so conveniently and happily augmented by animation sequences, that any absurdity can be scooped up, and any dilemma averted � not least the problem of how to bring the film to its audaciously abrupt conclusion.
As well as being just the shot for Python aficionados, this is decidedly a work genuine filmic interest: a handy piece of plumage for the British cinema's somewhat tattered cap. |
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Film Review, June 1975, page 8-9
MONTY PYTHON REVIEWED
Some people may have been slightly disappointed with the first Monty Python film since it was simply an adaptation of many of the TV sketches. I'm glad to say that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a completely new and original screenplay.
The whole Monty Python team is present and each member pops up in various roles throughout. But the basic characters are King Arthur (Graham Chapman), his page Patsy (Terry Gilliam), Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin), Sir Robin the �not-Quite-So-Brave (Eric Idle) and Sir Bedevere the Wise (Terry Jones).
The film opens with Arthur travelling through the country in search of Knights for his Round Table. In this film nobody actually rides horses, so Arthur gallops around on his own two legs while Patsy runs along behind knocking two coconut halves together. As Arthur's knights grow in number he receives a message from God to go and seek the Holy Grail.
On their journey they come across a French castle and are pelted with cows and assorted animals. They meet a three-headed knight who can't quite make up his three minds, and a rather large Knight who, in traditional Monty Python madness, insists upon a shrubbery as a sacrifice from Arthur!
When a TV series is transformed on to the big screen the results do not always come up to expectations. But in this case I think that the film is actually funnier and more entertaining than the TV series. Motion picture treatment can allow certain things to be played up a little more, and it is done here by hilariously exaggerating the violence in many scenes, such as the confrontation between Arthur and the Black Knight. Suffice to say that Arthur "disarms" the Black Knight who eventually falls apart at the seams.
In another such scene Lancelot receives a message on an arrow, which unfortunately lands in his page, from a "damsel in distress". Lancelot makes haste to the castle where a wedding feast is under way, and proceeds to massacre about 80 per cent of the guests in order to reach the "damsel", only to find that the victim is the bridegroom! Realising his embarrassing mistake, Lancelot turns to the survivors , says "Oh, sorry," and proceeds to fight his way out again.
Surprisingly enough, the music by DeWolfe is a stirring composition and would seem to be tailor-made for an epic such as El Cid.
Everything possible is turned into a gag of some kind � burning witches, collecting plague-stricken corpses, 20th Century police and so on � and there's even a skit on the Wooden Horse of Troy, but using a wooden rabbit.
Monty Python And The Holy Grail (Cert. A) is distributed by EMI Films.
M.M. [Mike Munn]
MONTY PYTHON INTERVIEWED
After laughing his way through Monty Python And The Holy Grail (reviewed on the opposite page), IAIN F. McASH talked to Terrys Gilliam and Jones who not only appeared in the film but also co-directed it.
"We shot the film on location in Scotland," Terry Gilliam told me. "It was crazy, almost like making a home movie. We were lucky with the weather and we made the whole picture in five weeks. Six if you count working on Saturdays."
"We were staying in a place called Doune", interrupted Terry Jones. "It's near Glencoe and Ben Nevis. There isn't a single studio shot in the entire film. We worked at three castles which looked just right for Monty Python � Doune Castle, Castle Stalker and Arnhall Castle. We also used a castle in Wales for a long shot, so we cheated a bit. And the opening scene was shot on Hampstead Heath."
I wondered aloud how the good residents of Doune had reacted to the unexpected arrival of a Monty Python invasion. "Oh, they had a great time," chorused the two Terrys in unison. "The 'extras' we had as knights in armour for the battle scenes were mostly students. Word soon got around we were filming in the area. And there was even a lady who came from Glasgow every day just to be in the film, so we used her wherever we could."
"Another man came up from Birmingham", added Jones. "He arrived by taxi one day just where we were shooting and walked right into a part. He was in the right place at the right time."
I remarked that some of the fighting scenes, in which armoured knights hack at each other with broadswords, must have been performed by professional stuntmen. "Oh, no!" Jones and Gilliam informed me. "The boys did most of the stunts themselves. We did have a fight director and period consultant. But that was John Cleese inside the armour when King Arthur (Graham Chapman) fights the Black Knight."
To have made Monty Python And The Holy Grail, surely the team must have been influenced by similar types of historical epics which Hollywood used to provide so regularly? "We all loved those swashbuckling movies like Errol Flynn used to make", admitted Terry Jones. "And most of our picture is based on the Arthurian legends of Camelot. The names of the Knights are the same. The only character we made up was Sir Robin (Eric Idle), the Not-Quite-So-Brave. We even used the same sort of music they used to have in those big historical epics � fanfares and that sort of thing.
"Sound was very important to us", continued Jones. "When we were shooting in Scotland, we got bird-song and other moorland noises on the sound-track. We had to tone down these background noises because they were too distracting. It was important to us that audiences could hear the dialogue!"
So how did Monty Python And The Holy Grail come into being? To find out I spoke to Mark Forstater, a young American from Philadelphia, who has lived in Britain for ten years. This is the first commercial film he has produced.
"The boys came to me with this script they had written themselves and asked me if I could help them to raise the money to make the film", he told me. "It took me twenty months to get it set up. All the money came from independent sources, mainly from within the 'pop' music business and recording companies. People like Charisma Records, The Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin all put money in, as well as theatrical impresario Michael White. We got a distribution deal with Nat Cohen of EMI Film Distributors. When we had the cash and a very funny script, we were all ready to go ahead.
"We wanted Holy Grail to stand up as a cinema film in its own right. The first Monty Python film, And Now For Something Completely Different, was really a television spin-off. It was a disappointment for British audiences because they had seen most of the sketches before on TV. We didn't want this to happen with Holy Grail, so we want to a lot of trouble with our costumes, make-up and lighting to make it look good. We used animation techniques to bridge the continuity gaps in the story and make it look like an expensive film. The first Monty Python picture was made very cheaply. As we say on poster ads. for Holy Grail, it makes Ben-Hur look like an epic...!"
"Which was the most difficult scene to shoot?" I enquired. "That was the sequence at the Bridge of Death", producer Forstater replied. "We shot it near the side of Ben Nevis. There was simply nothing there before we arrived. The bridge was built for us by a famous Scottish mountaineer who lives there. He and his assistant were the ones you actually see making the crossing of the bridge which had great gaps between its spars."
Monty Python And The Holy Grail is certainly something completely different from anything you've ever seen before at the cinema! |
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Films Illustrated, Volume 4, number 45, May 1975
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Certificate A. Producer Mark Forstater. Directors Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam. Script Monty Python. Additional music De Wolfe. Director of photography Terry Bedford. Technicolor. 90 mins. EMI. GB 1975
With: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin.
Admirers will know what to expect � a string of surrealist gags and sketches (though surprisingly little animation), this time in support of a common theme: King Arthur's quest for the Holy Grail. Nothing Pythonesque ever bears repetition � suffice to say the material is all new (though some sequences are rephrasings of the better television ideas) and the production handled with care. Under no circcumstances miss the credit titles which are exhaustingly funny. Nothing subsequent touches the same daft heights, but this is probably a question of acclimatisation on the part of the audience rather than the company's difficulty in sustaining the level of invention. � Mark Whitman.
NOTES:-
Paperbacks: "Monty Python's Big Red Book" (Methuen, £1.50) and "The Brand New Monty Python Papper Bok" (Methuen, £1.50)
Records: "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (BBC REB 73); "Another Monty Python Record" (Charisma CAS 1049); "The Previous Monty Python Record" (Charisma CAS 1063); "Matching Tie and Handkerchief" (Charisma CAS 1080); "Monty Python Live at Drury Lane" (Charisma CLASS 4). Dialogue from the soundtrack of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will be released by Charisma during May. |
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New Yorker, 5th May 1975
Credits in English, with quite unrelated subtitles that make remarks about Swedish travel, written in an English that is spelled as though it were Swedish. A mournful-looking wench being weighed against a duck as a test for witches. Approximately fifteenth-century monks hitting their foreheads with what appear to be butter boards, or perhaps early wooden don't-forget pads. We are up to here in the Middle Ages as seen by "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. The picture is a cheerfully loused-up reworking of the legend of King Arthur's Grail hunt. This is the legend that has been such a nuisance to children and others who have tried to sort out the difference between "Iseult (Isoud, Ysoulde, or Ysoude), La Beale, in the Arthurian legend, [who] is the sister or daughter of the King of Island," as in "The Oxford Companion to English Literature," and "Iseult (Isould, Ysolde, or Ysoude), La Blanche Mains, in the Arthurian legend, [who] is the daughter of the Duke of Brittany and the wife of Tristram," as in "The Oxford Companion to English Literature." Neither of those ladies is investigated by the film, but everything else that has ever worried you about the Holy Grail, wimples, King Arthur, Malory, and the general mucking about of poets with the same old story is tackled head on.
The Monty Python lot, a band of voluble English surrealists made famous by BBC TV, unexpectedly began to collect hoards of fans in America with their film "And Now for Something Completely Different" (1972). They have lately been keeping growing numbers of New Yorkers in on Sunday night to watch Channel 13 at half past ten. The writers and actors of the new chaos about the Holy Grail include all the original Monty Python repertory steadies: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, the two Terrys, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin, with Connie Booth and Carol Cleveland as their sexpot aides. The film also includes Neil Innes, who wrote the music, and John Young. In this version of the Grail-tale, King Arthur's knights are extremely cowardly, dirty, testy, and ill-starred. One of them has a visor that falls down whenever he lifts it for purposes of nicely-brought-up conversation. The King himself, who hesitantly presents himself as Arthur, King of the Britons, to everyone he meets, has remarkably little effect on the lowly for a man of such high estate. He does especially badly with the workers, represented by a couple of medieval Marxists who are never at a loss for a combative piece of cant. Rattily held in conditions of total slush, the peasant seminar on anarcho-syndicalist communes continues in spite of the presence of the enemy class. The enemy class, being Arthur, quails. He seems exceptionally underprivileged as well as mentally underendowed. Perhaps this is because he is such an early king. He hasn't even got a horse. To make up the lack, he jogs or canters, playing both rider and mount in styles as close as possible to the look of England's present queen and her best horse. The enterprise is egged on by hoof-like noises provided by his manservant, called Patsy, who bangs a couple of coconut shells in time to his royal master's horsey bumps. The coconut shells lead, for some sublime absence of reason, to a quarrel between one of the Grail-questers and a local type about whether coconuts migrate. Don't be silly. Of course they don't. But they could be taken by swallows who gripped them by the husk. But there, it's not a question of where a swallow grips it, it's a question of weight ratios. Like many of the best debates in the film, this particular one is yelled between someone on the ramparts of a castle and someone in the filth below. Musical geniuses have begged for centuries that arias in opera should advance the action; the creators of Monty Python now beg that rows in drama should have an equivalent right to drag the action to a standstill, and quite possibly send it packing.
If the film can be said to have a theme, it had three. These are swallows, mud and the Grail. Swallows keep recurring. So does mud, and all manner of other dirt. The King is brusquely recognised as being quite likely to be a king because he hasn't got mud on his clothes. There is also a certain amount of wistfully lewd talk from eight-score young and cloistered medieval blondes (some with "basic medical training") when they see one of King Arthur's knights. And a very large number of mud-soaked animal corpses are thrown from castle battlements, all with a strong look of being the works of a taxidermist so abysmally uninterested in his job that he never reached second-year apprenticeship. As to the Grail, the quest for that leads every which way, because no one seems at all certain what he is looking for. The confusion grows when King Arthur and his trusty knights meet the Enchanter, who puts them on the Grail's course; this Enchanter, who bolts out jets of fire as though he were barbecuing steaks with a laser beam, is blessed with a Scottish accent so heavy that he pronounces "Grail" as "grill". The thought that the Grail is the third theme brings to mind a fine scene in which Scriptural advice about counting to three in launching a Holy Hand Grenade is taken as a text by some very etiolated-looking monks: "And the Lord spake, saying, first shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.... Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch toward thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall croak." This is a typical quote from the film, which belongs to a serio-loopy school of one. So are the strange oaths that John Cleese as an Anglophobic Frenchman hurls at King Arthur and his band ("English k-niggets!... Sons of a window dresser!"), and a scrap of chatty scientific counselling held en route to somewhere or other which marks England's emergence from the Dark Ages. (Sir Tristram: "And that, my Lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped." King Arthur: ""This new learning amazes me, Sir Tristram. Explain again how sheeps' bladders may be employed to prevent these so-called earthquakes.") One also grows fond of an Angry Young Mannish other king, with a throttling North of England accent. He is encumbered with two hopelessly inefficient guards who prove to have the verbal-retention capacity of toddlers when the King gives them a simple order to keep a watch on his son. The prince is a pale youth named Herbert, sometimes casually referred to as Alice by his impatient and beefy father. At his most Alice moments, the prince will obey a recurring urge to lean out of a castle window into the gloaming and burst into overorchestrated melodies, which are doused by the angry monarch after half a bar. The whole film, which is often recklessly funny and sometimes a matter of comic genius, is a triumph of errancy and muddle. Its mind strays like an eye, and it thrives on following false trails. The Monty Python people have won a peculiar right to be funny even when they make a mess of things, because their style accepts floundering as a condition of life.
� PENELOPE GILLIATT |
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Time, 26th May 1975
LEGENDARY LUNACY
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
Directed by TERRY GILLIAM
and TERRY JONES
Screenplay by GRAHAM CHAPMAN, JOHN CLEESE, TERRY GILLIAM, ERIC IDLE, TERRY JONES, MICHAEL PALIN
King Arthur, as London's Monty Python troupe imagines him, is really an awfully sensible, decent chap. Played by Graham Chapman, he is the kind of tweedy fellow who should be sitting on the Tory party backbench in modern Britain rather than running around 6th century England forming Round Tables and looking for holy grails.
The king's enlightened path is always blocked by problems. One of them is a movable castle full of French knights who defend their ramparts by shouting down intolerable sexual insults and pelting would-be attackers with a hail of dead farm animals � most unchivalrous. Another obstacle is a Black Knight of uncompromising combativeness; after Arthur has severed all four of his limbs, the knight perversely insists on trying to bite the king on ankle. Then there are the guardians of a sacred forest who demand a tribute of shrubbery � something with "a nice layered effect" � before allowing Arthur and his party to pass. That, of course, only brings them closer to such perils as a murderous bunny rabbit who is improbably but effectively charged with defending a cave where a vital clue to the grail's whereabouts is located. Bunnies indeed are much on the Python group's mind. One of the stratagems that the heroes devise to gain access to the French castle is a Trojan rabbit. It does not work out, but then not much else does either.
Arthur's adventures reach no logical conclusion. They are simply brought to an abrupt end when a police car rolls up and the entire Round Table is rounded up. The knights are charged with being accessories to the murder of the historian who popped up midway in the movie � BBC style � to supply some useless background on the traditions of medieval romance. The intervention of the bobbies also leads to the fine sight of a fully armoured knight spread-eagled against the squad car and being patted down for concealed weapons.
This is a key image in the film, which pats down the entire chivalric tradition for bloody and dangerous residual ideas. Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture � as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on the propensity.
Richard Schickel
[Oddly, above this is half of another article about Monty
Python's Flying Circus's first airing in America not reprinted
in the MPFC microjacket, a shame as it looks quite interesting.
It reads:]
SHOW BUSINESS & TELEVISION
KILLER JOKE TRIUMPHS
At least 2 million Americans are now aware of the Ministry of Silly Walks. College students are finding new meanings for the word stupid, and old ladies may even be getting ideas about beating up kids. What is this pernicious influence, bordering on a cult, that is now sweeping the U.S.? The word is Monty Python. Five roopy young Englishmen, who methodically take the world apart each week in a series of sketches mysteriously called Monty Python's Flying Circus, have conquered the U.S. air waves. The Pythons are getting the kind of following that that a presidential candidate might envy; 78 public-television stations are now committed to run the show, which is one of the most popular in public TV history. Doubtless there will be many more as their new movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (see box), is released across the nation. The flick has already opened in Manhattan, where on the first days, crowds lined up four deep around a city block. Said the Pythons' U.S. manager Nancy Lewis: "And they thought no one would understand them here."
Real People. Whether or not Americans actually do understand the Pythons' uniquely English nonsense is moot. Their comedy is crowded with jokes about British TV announcers and politicians; their best sketches are intimate parodies of the idiocies of British life. Moreover, their style is the opposite of hard-hitting American humor. The Pythons can hardly summon a wisecrack among them. However, Program Director Ron Devillier of KERA in Dallas knows what endears them to Americans: "They have a nice sense of sex." Says a Philadelphia insurance broker: "They're the only real people on television."
This verdict would delight the Pythons. They have done their best to remove themselves from boring reality and construct something far more pleasurable. It was in a London pub in 1969 that John Cleese and Graham Chapman, gagwriters for the Frost Report, teamed up with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, similarly disaffected writers from Britain's then booming satire business. They decided to start their own program. The BBC did not balk when told that the show would be "anarchic and free." Recalls Cleese: "They thought they were getting another late-
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Cin�aste, Volume 7, Number 1, Fall 1975, pages 15-18
[Cin�aste appears to be some sort of privately-printed
'underground' cinema magazine, indicated by an advert in the
same issue where one can rent 16mm prints of Holy Grail,
along with films like Scenes From A Marriage, Stavisky, and
Love & Anarchy. Also, the cover features a fantastic scratchy
line drawing of the six big-chinned Pythons as their various TV
characters drawn by Bill Plympton]
THE WONDROUS RETURN OF THE WACKY MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
LENNY RUBENSTEIN
They dare to ridicule accountants, homosexuals, Frenchmen, pretentious TV talk shows, and middle-aged English housewives. They have a mastery of the old movie cliché that far surpasses that of either Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, with a little nasty streak thrown in for good measure. Their humor relies less on current affairs or modern neurosis than it does on sheer silliness. Their television series, since premiering here last Fall, has become the highest-rated show on Public Broadcasting System stations throughout the country and in New York City alone is watched by almost a million people every weekend.
Their following includes precocious 10 year-olds, retarded copy-writers, video freaks and bibliophiles who form a special free-masonry whose secret signs and codes are catch-phrases from their TV series, two movies, three books and five record albums. For the 70's, with its corrupt politicians and dreadful economics, Monty Pythons' Flying Circus is a most apt symbol and appreciated release.
The six � or is it five?, no, six! � men who comprise the Circus come from diverse backgrounds. One was a historian, another a lawyer, and a third a physician. The fourth was a hard working candlestick maker while the fifth was to have been a happy classicist. They all forsook their honest trades (except their American animator who never had one) to become comedy writers. At first, they went through the discipline of writing for others � including David Frost, Peter Sellers and Marty Feldman � receiving, according to ill-willed informers, little financial remuneration, sparse recognition and minimal ego satisfaction. They stumbled across one another in the late 60's and in the Fall of '69, after fast-talking the BBC into letting them have their own series, Monty Python's Flying Circus was born.
Today, Monty Python's Flying Circus � their name a clever device to evoke World War I dogfights, nasty snakes and His Lordship Viscount Montgomery of Alamein � is seven years old, just like the European war of that name (1756-63). Years of careful plagiarism, clever toadying, demonic pacts and astro-physical projection have finally paid off � they're Pop Stars, with thousands of teen-aged girls hurling themselves against their collective anatomy. Yes, now the shoe is on that horse of another color and is getting the old boot in!
The five writers responsible for creating and enacting in this assault on what is left of decency in the world are Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Each specialises in particular character types: Cleese is often the BBC-style moderator as well as the barracks square sergeant-major type and a ridiculous Frenchman; Chapman alternates between British Army officers with curled mustaches and frowsy middle-aged women with querulous voices; Idle burlesques David Frost-style celebrities, lecherous marriage guidance counsellors and shabby voyeurs; Jones impersonates gangsters, incompetent athletes and government officials; and Palin plays mousy clerks, rural nincompoops and grinning quiz masters.
Their first film, AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, is a collection of the best skits from their television series and was released in this country before most people knew who they were, the silly fools. As a result of their current success on public television, the film had to be dusted off and re-released. Most of the skits are parodies of familiar television programmes that have gone awry. They frequently conduct interviews in which the interviewer pointedly insults his guest or questions him about pointless topics. They also take the quiz show format and make interesting improvements such as "Blackmail", in which bits of embarrassing information or film clips are revealed with decreasing subtlety until the subject promises to pay up. Other television burlesques include the "now it can be told" story of the Killer Joke which helped win the war, or the in-depth news feature on a small town terrorised by geriatric delinquents. In these sketches they display an ability at absurd parody unseen since the days of the 10� Mad and early "Show of Shows."
Their best skits, however, are equal mixtures of commonplace experience and absurd theatrics and this is where Terry Gilliam's surreal animations are involved. Cannibalistic baby carriages and killer cars are only some of Gilliam's creations and they frequently play an intrinsic part in the acted skits. Much of their humor is based upon a solid base of everyday experience which is altered so that it spins off into absurdity. Just as the presence of the commonplace ridicules the unusual, so the intrusion of the extraordinary into the banal destroys reality. As a result, there are pet shops which deal regularly in dead animals and where disgruntled customers must go to great lengths to prove their purchases are dead. Suicide is seen as a concomitant part of business executives' meetings, while employment counsellors rate their clients as dull, dreary dullards fit only for dull, dreary jobs � that is the logic of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
A good part of the Circus' success lies in their teamwork and discipline. Skits are tightly edited and well rehearsed; few run on longer than they have to for a laugh. No sole performer dominates the group and, as a matter of fact, it is only since their latest film that American fans can determine which face on the screen matches which name in the credits.
The role of women in the Circus' humor is problematical; they are made the mouthpieces for every clich� in the book, particularly those dealing with foreigners or other races. Among their favourite stock characters are their female impersonations of typically English lower-middle-class housewives whose opinions and speech patterns are mimicked to perfection. Male characters are similarly treated, however, from the stock boring to have any opinions to the milkman with a taste for public forture. The few women performers who appear are seldom given the best lines, sometimes no lines at all, and that in itself becomes a joke � perhaps because the Circus is the creation of six men who reserve the best bits for themselves, perhaps because the field of humorous writing is by and large male-dominated, perhaps because women are genetically less absurd than men, who knows? Homosexuals also receive their share of satire; after all, if a homosexual is to be treated equally, then his life-style is as open to burlesque as much as a playboy's. A transvestite lumberjack or a pair of flirtatious judges is not more insulting than a Ministry for Silly Walks or a Killer Joke. No occupation group, nationality or sexual sub-group is spared from the Circus' ridicule. To quote them in their infamous Piranha Brothers skit, they are "cruel, but fair."
Their second film, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, provides more of a narrative structure for the Circus' anarchic humor. The old theme of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and their endlessly boring quests is nothing new � Camelot has fascinated a lot more people besides John F. Kennedy, T. H. White and Mark Twain. Robert Bresson has recently captivated film critics and countless real people by using this same old dodge. The Circus, however, has added something even Mark Twain dared not � a sense of absurd silliness. After all, who made Arthur Pendragon a King? Weren't there other knights out there questing, even foreign ones? Whose bright idea was it to look for a Holy Grail and what is it anyway? Does it have something to do with a silver chalice or is that another film? Topics like these occur with the regularity of a price increase in this Monty Python epic, and an epic it is, with a huge cast of cheap extras in for a scene or two, special effects lifted from a British Army supply truck, one or two bloody sword fights and lots of authentic period furniture. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL is not merely another dreary cinematic account of feudal beastliness and patched garments. It is not even a costumed statement about the nature of man and faith on a crumbling sound stage movie-set � there's no fun in that, is there? The Circus establishes the wretchedness of medieval life and then proceeds to make a good joke of it.
The plot is fairly simple: what misadventures can befall a group of King Arthur's knights in their trumped-up quest for the Holy Grail, and how silly can those misadventures be? A Scots wizard with all the pyrotechnics of a F-111 attack bomber, serfs with the anachronistic politics of anarcho-collectivists, French knights with outrageous accents and silly mustaches, ferocious man-eating rabbits and mysterious woodland spirits are just some of the obstacles from which our gallant heroes tend to flee. For audiences whose knowledge of Arthurian legend is weak, there is a stereotypical English academic whose intense but learned commentary is blissfully short-lived. Each member of the troupe plays several parts � this keeps expenses down and provides them with all sorts of opportunity to display their dramatic ability in an ever-increasing range of eccentric performances.
Knights of old were heroes bold, the old saying has it, but Monty Python's Flying Circus feels that they were more likely psychopathic swordsmen, upper-class cowards and feckless yes-men than anything else. John Cleese's Sir Lancelot-the-Brave is terribly gallant and, when the spirit moves him, kills everyone within broadsword range, including little girls, aged musicians and sleeping sentries. His murderous charge through Mudswamp Castle is probably the funniest multiple homicide in screen history. He also plays a ferocious knight whose fury is unabated even though he loses limb after limb in a duel with King Arthur. Eric Idle, as Sir Robin-the-Not-So-Brave, is no knight to march into the arms of death, tending instead to run ungracefully in the opposite direction. Michael Palin is Sir Galahad-the-Chaste, who almost finds the Holy Grail, almost has a cosy time of it in a castle full of beauteous maidens, and almost crosses the Bridge of Doom but, then again, Sir Galahad always was a tragic figure. Terry Jones' major role is as Bedevere the Wise, the Round Table's version of an intelligent human being. It is Bedevere who confronts witches, concocts foolhardy plans and accompanies Arthur to the Land of the Holy Grail. The troupe's respectable upper-class-part player, Graham Chapman, has to undergo the indignity of being starved of funny lines in the role as Arthur.
So far the film is basically a statement of medieval knighthood but the Circus is not content to depict only upper-class characters, no matter how much more interesting, sensitive and powerful they may have been. Terry Gilliam plays Arthur's squire, Patsy, the one responsible for carrying the extra clothes, food and crowns such a quest requires. He also supplies, with a pair of coconuts, the necessary sound effects of a trotting horse. The plight of the poor serfs receives equally satirical treatment. The muck-covered wagon of corpses and the business-like cry of "Bring out your dead" marks one of the film's opening sequences. When Cleese offers Idle, the wagoner, a person who "isn't quite dead yet", the audience has some idea of the humor inherent to English village life of the Sixth Century. Feudalism did have its sore-heads, however, and Arthur's confrontation with a pair of anarchist communards who dare question his Divine Right to Rule is probably the best political statement to be seen in a film since DUCK SOUP. There are also the daily concerns of beating the cat or torturing witches, features that the Circus exploit to the limit of their comic possibilities.
These realistic questions of social class and material conditions are ephemeral because the Middle Ages was a period of great faith. The teachings of the Church, the beauty of its ceremonies, the wealth of its cathedrals and the excruciating horror of its tortures were real concern's in Arthur's time. It is a very autocratic and fussy God who appears to the knights and orders them on their holy quest. Religion was important because the competition had a thing or two going for it, as well. Wizards, magicians, demons and monsters also appear, each one funnier than the last, until the knights meet Tim the Enchanter (played by Cleese) whose fearsome warning of a great monster, the Beast of Aaaargh, is foolishly ignored in a sequence that may be the best in the film.
There have been a score of novels, plays and films about Arthurian legend and the Circus takes advantage of this, whenever the action slows down, to remind the audience that better scenes are to come. The Lord of Mudswamp Castle, a sullen and greedy Midlands type (played by Palin) has his hands full trying to prevent his weak-kneed son (Terry Jones) from starting a song that might, God forbid, turn into a lavish and sentimental musical production number on the order of "Camelot." For the Circus, like all good pre-adolescents, mushy parts in movies are to be avoided like homework.
Sentiment, or its poorer cousin, sentimentality, are the arch foes of humor and the disrupters of silliness. Any healthily warped child will tell you that the Wicked Witch is preferable to Glinda in THE WIZARD OF OZ or that Jaffir the Magician is a thousand times more interesting than Sabu in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD or that Ming the Merciless is a better drawn character than annoy, not evil, and Monty Python's Flying Circus undercuts and ridicules pomposity and bravery with a combinations of weapons unseen since the last good Marx Brothers film.
By introducing realistic but illogical elements into their skits, the Circus is able to ridicule anything. In one of the TV episodes they played with the idea of Hitler living under the false name of Hilter in a small resort town in England. In their current film, King Arthur and Bedevere are almost stymied by a group of woodland spirits with a semantic imagination who demand as their due "a nice piece of shrubbery with a fence around it, and not too expensive." At times this misuse of logic produces truly hilarious sequences, both in their films and television shows, while at other times the combination is so far out as to be almost incomprehensible.
"But where," you may ask, "does Monty Python's Flying Circus get off ridiculing reality and acting stupid?" The Circus is firmly embedded in a tradition that sees humor in the logical but absurd mixture of reality and whim. If this were a learned article, their comic roots would be traced back to an obscure Elizabethan farce but, since it isn't, we won't. If credit is to be given where credit is due, however, Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics don, should be noted as the first of the bright-but-silly in our era. Silliness was raised to such an art by the 33 year-old Dodgson when he published Alice in Wonderland that in his wake, like depth-charges from a destroyer, there erupted a whole generation of silly writers masquerading as "writers of children's fiction." Kenneth Grahame, Anthony Hope and Edward Lear are among them, although a few, like Dickens or Gilbert and Sullivan, were able to disguise their humor in adult clothes. Several members of the Python troupe had earlier written for a British children's television program.
The Circus' more recent comic roots, however, can be traced back to 1951 when, at Broadcasting House, the nerve center of the BBC, Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan prepared a shock the repercussions of which can still be heard on certain tape decks today � the Goon Show was born. Amid the still bomb-damaged public lavatories of central London, the Goons developed a fast-paced blend of theatrical and literary spoof that captivated millions of BBC listeners and directly influenced Monty Python's Flying Circus. The style was deceptively simple: create a set of madly stereotypical characters � an upper-class, brainless hero, a diabolically clever villain and a few mumbling types from the rear of the Coventry railway station � place them in a typical adventure plot, for example the search for Napoleon's long-lost bathtub, and then shatter the continuity any time you want to introduce a character or tell a joke. And the jokes came thick and fast, often too fast for the uninitiated.
The Goon Show marked the rebirth of British humor and effected a plague of silliness up and down the country. Many of the cabaret and university reviews � Cambridge Circus, Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore � owe a great deal to the Goon Show's scatter-brained asides and surreal plots. Richard Lester is also firmly in this tradition; he does not hesitate to lard jokes and silly characters into any of his hilms, even JUGGERNAUT. His neglected and bewildering comedy, THE BED SITTING ROOM, is a conscious homage to the Goons.
"But why Monty Python," you may ask, "and why now?" All those grandiose hopes of social transformation and revolution which marked the late 60's have hit the floor with a resounding thud, and humor has always been one of the last refuges for the cynical, the sensitive and the defeated. Behind a barrage of slapstick, one or two parting shots can be fired in the victors' general direction, a small roadblock can be erected to slow down their advance and, since it's all so absurd, a good joke is called for. Many people seem to sense this and there is a widespread demand now for jokes, slapstick and satire. There is a genuine human need for humor but it has reasserted itself recently with an energy once reserved for rock music and nudity. Whether the guerrilla actions staged by Monty Python's Flying Circus will turn into a full scale war by the silly on the powerful remains the only question of importance to a waiting army of militant absurdists, communist clowns and veteran Dadaists.
AN INTERVIEW, OF SORTS, WITH MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
The following interview � actually a series of puns, double-entendres, one-liners and generally rude comments between Monty Python's Flying Circus and members of the CINEASTE staff � took place in a closet-sized office in the basement of the Cinema II theatre in Manhattan at the Sunday morning premiere of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The Pythons were taking a coffee break after passing out thousands of free coconuts to fans attending the first show. Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam were too busy drinking coffee to participate, but Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones talked with us, and John Cleese was absent-without-leave.
EI: What is Cineaste? It sounds like some kind of pervert... I am a closet cineaste. At any rate, I don't remember the photo in your magazine being in that particular porno film.
C: I think our art director put it in on purpose; he likes porno films. Do you think porno films are boring and dull?
EI: They have to be, because sex isn't a spectator sport.
MP: I'd like to see lots of spectator sex with fleshy girls but I get so frustrated.
C: Don't you meet a lot of women in your work?
MP: Yes, why just this morning I was able to feel up some girl, but I think Terry Jones was feeling me up!
C: What do you like about New York or America?
EI: Well, after seeing lots of American films, it's fun to see the actual spots. Some of us have been here visiting before our TV program was shown here. America is somewhat fascinating.
C: Even the subway?
EI: Yes, indeed, the subway is great. Unlike London where they try to keep up pretences, here there is no such attempt. All they do is keep the trains moving and moving quickly which is all they're supposed to do. After all, how do you keep something that is basically noisy and dirty and dangerous, quiet, clean and safe? The stations are different here; they smell of donuts and coffee.
C: And flowers, too.
MP: Do Americans eat flowers then?
C: No, but they eat far too much.
MP: Yes, we wondered why everybody in our official entourage seems so overweight. And these rolls they gave us are far too sweet and dreadful; do you want one?
C: How's the coffee?
MP: Cold, do you want a cup with your roll?
C: No thank you. Now that England is a member of the Common Market will your TV shows be broadcast to Europe?
TJ: It has for years. They did a German-dubbed version three years ago that was shown over North German TV.
C: How was it received?
TJ: They didn't understand it at all.
C: Do Europeans have a sense of humor?
TJ: No, I don't think so, but Eric Idle says he met a chap in Bologna who did.
C: Is humor dead in Europe?
TJ: No, but we are doing our best to kill it.
C: Is humor dead in America?
TJ: No, just a lot of presidents, I thought.
C: There are rumors that many of you have had sex change operations.
MP: Yes, but they failed.
C: What TV shows are the Europeans giving you in exchange for yours?
MP: None, but their television programs are rotten. Have you ever seen French or German TV?
C: No, but I could believe it. How far behind are we in New York as far as the TV series goes; how old is the stuff that we see?
TJ: It's about three years old. The second series of ours was originally broadcast in the Spring of 1972 and those are the ones they have at Channel 13.
C: Are there any other groups performing the same kind of humor in Europe?
TJ: The people at NATO and the Warsaw Pact seem to try to imitate us, but they aren't very good at it. Idi Amin does a fair imitation, but I don't know if he writes his own material.
C: Thank you for giving us this chance to talk with you, and where are those stale rolls?
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