Cry of the Banshee (1970)

          After American International Pictures scored in the ’60s with several Edgar Allan Poe-derived movies starring Vincent Price, the company pushed its luck by occasionally slapping the Poe brand onto Price movies that weren’t derived from Poe stories. For instance, Cry of the Banshee opens with a poem falsely attributed to Poe, then tells an original story that riffs on the narrative of a previous Price film, Witchfinder General (1968), which AIP dubiously reititled The Conqueror Worm in order to force a Poe reference onto the material. Cry of the Banshee is crammed with so many horror-cinema signifiers that it’s a confusing hodgepodge. Although the film does not include a banshee, it does include corrupt inquisitors, grave robbers, rabid dogs, rapists, Satan worshippers, a werewolf (sort of), torturers, and witches. In the course of cramming all of these elements into 91 minutes, AIP skimped on character development and narrative coherence—Cry of the Banshee is all about lurid scenes featuring curses, the degradation of women, and pagan rituals, with Price’s signature style of aristocratic sadism providing a tenuous through line.

          The movie takes place in 16th-century England, where Lord Edward Whitman (Price) is a vicious judge who abuses suspected witches for sport. After a long and ultimately pointless sequence of Edward overseeing the public whipping of a young woman, the movie introduces its proper plot when Edward causes the murders of two siblings from a coven overseen by a witch named Oona (Elisabeth Bergner). The incensed Oona puts a curse on Edward’s family, so a member of Edward’s household, the mysterious Roderick (Patrick Mower), periodically transforms into some sort of hairy monster and kills Edward’s relatives. Between deaths, Edward leads frantic searches for the identity of the killer and the location of Oona’s secret hideout.

          Cry of the Banshee suffers from needlessly obtuse storytelling that can be attributed to aimless scripting and messy editing. The movie’s also quite ugly in its treatment of women, since it seems as if some accused witch and/or innocent serving wench is having her clothes ripped open every 10 minutes. Women are also hung over hot coals, put in stocks, stabbed, violated, and whipped. Nonetheless, Price contributes his usual robust work, the production design is acceptably immersive, and it’s novel to see an animated title sequence created by Terry Gilliam outside of the usual Monty Python context. All in all, Cry of the Banshee is nasty stuff—but that’s probably the point.

Cry of the Banshee: FUNKY

Jabberwocky (1977)

          Terry Gilliam’s first solo directorial effort, the whimsical medieval fantasy Jabberwocky, occupies a peculiar place in the lore of Monty Python, the legendary UK comedy troupe of which Gilliam is the sole American member. Two years prior to the release of Jabberwocky, the troupe issued the beloved comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is also set in medieval times. Therefore, because Jabberwocky features a Python behind the camera as well as one in front of the camera—Michael Palin plays the leading role—comparisons between the two films are unavoidable. (A third Python, Terry Jones, plays a glorified cameo.) By any measure, Jabberwocky pales next to Holy Grail—which is slightly unfair, since the latter picture was never intended as a follow-up to Holy Grail. Quite to the contrary, Jabberwocky is a straight-ahead narrative, instead of a loose collection of sketches. It’s also a fairly grim examination of themes related to fate, heroism, and politics. Many of the gags in Jabberwocky have a tragicomic quality, since the story concerns an everyman who stumbles into greatness without ever actually being great. Gilliam, who cowrote this loose adaptation of a Lewis Carroll poem with Charles Alverson, must have known he was asking for trouble by making a project with so many similarities to Holy Grail—but then again, asking for trouble has been Gilliam’s modus operandi throughout his entire directorial career.

          For all of these reasons, Jabberwocky is more noteworthy as a Python anomoly than as a proper film. The narrative is sluggish, since Gilliam seems more interested in production design than in dramaturgy. One is hard-pressed to think of a filthier movie about the Middle Ages—nearly every location is slathered with putrid-looking sludge, and the overuse of haze filters gives the cinematography a murky look. This grubby aesthetic is accentuated by the handmade nature of the film’s costumes and props, especially the title monster, a dragon that Palin’s character must slay. Seeing as how Gilliam put his image-making gifts to better use in subsequent work—beginning with his next film, the wonderful fantasy-adventure Time Bandits (1981)—it’s not as if the exercise of making Jabberwocky was a waste. For many people, however, the experience of watching the film may be a waste. Despite being a tremendously nimble comic actor, Palin is far too gentle a personality to command attention in the contact of an action story. Similarly, even though Gilliam is a genuine visionary, he falls into one style-over-substance trap after another. Some viewers may be able to groove on Jabberwocky’s irreverence, but many more will get tired of sifting through dull scenes and second-rate jokes while searching for moments of inspiration.

Jabberwocky: FUNKY

Life of Brian (1979)

          Members of the famed British comedy troupe Monty Python were already drifting apart by the late ’70s, following the end of their BBC sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the success of their hilarious medieval spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Nonetheless, the public demand for new Python product proved irresistible. Coincidentally, troupe member Eric Idle used a running gag whenever anyone asked for the title of the collective’s next movie: He said it was Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. Idle’s idea stuck, after a fashion, so when the six Pythons finally reunited, they made the Biblical satire Life of Brian, which was written by the entire group, designed by in-house animator Terry Gilliam, and directed by troupe member Terry Jones. Audiences expecting the sustained brilliance of Holy Grail were disappointed, although in some respects Life of Brian is a better movie than its predecessor—the picture has a harder satirical edge and a stronger storyline. Unfortunately, those aren’t the qualities people want from Python, and Life of Brian underwhelms as a comedy.

          Set in Judea during the era of the Roman Empire, the film begins with the Three Wise Men arriving to bestow gifts on the baby Jesus. However, they accidentally enter the stable next door to Jesus’ birthplace and fleetingly anoint one Brian Cohen as the messiah. That humiliating mix-up foreshadows  a series of unpleasant events that befall Brian (Graham Chapman) once he reaches adulthood. Repeatedly mistaken for a messiah, Brian gets drawn into the world of Jewish radicals fighting Roman oppression; subsequently, he’s captured by Romans and sentenced to crucifixion.

          While the Pythons present a handful of inspired gags in the course of telling this brazen story, Life of Brian has significant handicaps. The narrative is inherently depressing, and presenting a linear storyline mostly precludes the sort of irreverent nonsense that distinguishes the best Python work. (The brief appearance of space aliens halfway through the movie is a welcome reprieve.) Plus, for every clever line—“We enter the Caesar Augustus Memorial Sewer”—there’s a cheap bit like the scene in which a lisping Pontius Pilate (Michael Palin) scandalizes his subjects by talking about his pal “Biggus Dickus.”

          As in Grail, the Pythons each play multiple characters, but Chapman dominates since the Brian character appears in nearly every scene. And while Chapman’s exasperation is droll (when forced to proclaim his Jewishness, Brian shouts, “I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and I’m proud of it!”), it’s no fun to watch the downward spiral of a condemned coward. Placing such a character at the center of a Biblical epic is a clever joke, but the narrative contrivance makes Life of Brian feel more cerebral than comedic.

          Still, even though Life of Brian is the least consistently funny of Python’s features, mediocre Python is better than the best efforts from most comedy troupes. Who else could come up with genius vignettes like the scene in which Brian paints anti-Roman graffiti on the side of a palace, only to be interrupted by an uptight centurion (John Cleese), who points out the grammatical errors in Brian’s writing and makes Brian paint his slogan 100 times on the wall as a lesson? That’s Python satire at its most sublime, and exactly the sort of thing Life of Brian does not have in sufficient abundance—although it must be said that the movie concludes with the most fabulously inappropriate musical number in cinematic history, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

Life of Brian: GROOVY

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

          Inspired lunacy from start to finish, the Monty Python comedy troupe’s first narrative feature is rightfully beloved as one of the funniest movies ever made. Clever, perverse, satirical, silly, and sometimes just playfully deranged, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is ostensibly an adaptation of the King Arthur myth, but it’s really the troupe’s first experiment at stringing their surrealistic sketches together as a (more or less) coherent full-length story. So, while the picture represents a significant moment in cinematic history because it was a milestone in co-director Terry Gilliam’s evolution from the Python’s resident animator to a world-class narrative filmmaker, its real value is as an irresistible laugh machine.

          Any list of unforgettable gags in the picture would go on forever, including brilliant contrivances like Sir Robin’s minstrels (who torment him by describing his cowardice in song), the snotty French soldiers guarding a decrepit castle (which they defend against invading Englishmen by launching a cow with a catapult), the persistent but eventually limbless Black Knight (“It’s only a flesh wound!”), the politically conscious farmers who taunt a visiting king (“Can’t you see him repressing me?”), and, of course, the coconuts the Knights of the Round Table use to simulate the sound of the horses they’re not actually riding.

          Right from the beginning of the picture—when ominous opening-credits music is riotously juxtaposed with bizarre subtitled discursions about llamas, Swedish tourist attractions, and crew members who’ve been sacked—the writer/performers who comprise Monty Python use every tool at their disposal to fill the frame with textual, verbal, and visual jokes so that each scene is jammed with dozens of comedy concepts. Ideas from the fertile minds of Gilliam, co-director Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin spill onto the screen so feverishly that watching Holy Grail is like getting an intravenous feed of their whimsical outlook, which is all to the good.

          Inveterate pranksters who take the piss out of every imaginable authority figure and social structure, the Pythons target everything from the media to monarchy to religion in Holy Grail, though some of their best stuff skewers those who are haplessly opportunistic; a great example is the classic “Bring out your dead!” scene in which corpse collectors aren’t too picky about whether the corpses they’re collecting have actually expired. Not everything in the picture is satire, of course, because many of the most heart-stoppingly funny moments in Holy Grail are unhinged non sequiturs, like the killer rabbit that causes one of the Knights of the Round Table to “soil his armor” (twice).

          The lore about Gilliam’s and Jones’ ingenuity is well-known, because the pair worked wonders with minimal resources, accentuating evocative costumes and grubby locations over the pricier production values they couldn’t afford, and, as in all Python projects, the gang saved a bundle by casting themselves in multiple roles. It’s hard to say which Python deserves the MVP prize, but a case could be made for Cleese, whose character roster includes the Black Knight, Sir Lancelot, and the Taunting French Guard—one should not challenge the virtuosity of the man who memorably threatens to “fart in your general direction.”

Monty Python and the Holy Grail: OUTTA SIGHT