masterpiece of satirical film-making

Rating: 10/10 (14 October 2007)

Much of the work by the Python crew has dated badly, looking more weird than funny. Much of the best of it is a manic-depressive's visualization of the old radio "Goon Show"; the innovations the Pythons brought to their material are really drawn from Beckett and Ionesco and other playwrights of the "Theater of the Absurd", which had exhausted itself by the time the Pythons turned it into pure comedy, thus reviving it for one last go around.
"The Holy Grail" is the exception to this general historical trajectory. There are two reasons for this: 1) Plot. There are actually two plots here: one is the search for the Grail, the other only makes its appearance in brief (but important) episodes - yet this is actually the grounding plot of the film.
Basically, someone is making a movie for television about Arthur and the Holy Grail. They don't have much money to spend, so they touch up the legend a bit to add some violence, titillation, and even magic, although they can't afford decent special effects. (So they're reduced to fighting a rabbit rather than a dragon). However, to give their project credibility, they hire a historian to jabber platitudes to cover up the holes in their plot-line. However, one of the cast goes crazy and kills the historian. After a brief investigation, the police decide to arrest the whole lot.
This double plot development works very well, largely because it is accomplished through purely cinematic methods - editing, camera angles, etc. - rather through any exposition.
2) Theme. "The Holy Grail" was released more than a year before the appearance of the Sex Pistols punk band, but the Pythons are clearly on the same wave-length as the Pistols here. There has never been an approach to the "legendary past" of Great Britain so viciously and energetically iconoclastic as this. It's impossible to laugh your way through this film and then find anything half-way believable in "Camelot" or "Exclaibur" or "Sword in the Stone." It's not by chance that, since the making of this film, the Arthur legend has had to be seriously revised until the films concerning it have become little more than sci-fi fantasies without the science. We know now what the ancient Britons were - mud-wallowing, lice-infested dullards, with "knights" who were only interested in loot and rapine. (Let the Disney people make a movie about that!) Over all, then, this remains a great one-off masterpiece of satirical film-making. That the Pythons never bettered it only makes it all the more remarkable.