Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

“A marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

SYNOPSIS

Arthurian legend is gleefully reduced to rubble in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the endlessly quotable medieval farce directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Graham Chapman leads the Python troupe as King Arthur, who traverses a conspicuously muddy Britain assembling his Knights of the Round Table before receiving a divine command to seek the Holy Grail. Their quest quickly disintegrates into an inspired procession of severed limbs, argumentative peasants, shrubbery-demanding knights, rude Frenchmen, suspiciously attractive temptresses, and one lethally adorable rabbit, all periodically interrupted by a modern-day murder investigation. Made on a shoestring budget that becomes part of the joke, most famously through the ingenious substitution of coconut shells for horses, the film applies Python’s anarchic mixture of intellectual absurdity, low comedy, and attacks on authority to the conventions of historical epic. Fifty years later, Monty Python and the Holy Grail remains a gloriously silly monument to the proposition that no institution, legend, or heroic ideal is too sacred to be demolished by a well-timed coconut.