A Book About the Film ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’: All the References from African Swallows to Zoot by Darl Larsen

Abstract

Darl larsen, A Book About the Film 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail': All the References from African Swallows to Zoot. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xxxii, 597. isbn: 978-1-4422-4553-2. $50.Perhaps you are such a fan of the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail that you have participated in one of the many late-night quote-along showings at theaters around the country. Perhaps you have a shelf of action figures from the film, wear a t-shirt with its graphics and play the computer game based on it. Perhaps you have purchased the special 40th anniversary DVD 'castle edition' which includes a catapult and rubber farm animals. If so, have I got a book for you! If one were to absorb its 533 unillustrated pages of text (with its forty-five page index and seventeen page bibliography), the experience could serve as a graduate course in the film. However, to make full use of this work-which is a gloss on the entirety of the movie, scene by scene, from the opening animated title sequence to 'Scene Thirty-Seven: Stop the Film'-the reader would ideally have at hand a DVD with a pause button as well as a copy of the script published in 1977. This reviewer admittedly did not, but extensive sampling, sometimes at random, sometimes by design, is similar to the experience of users who will turn to it as a research guide rather than read it from beginning to end.Larsen is a professor of film and certainly one of the most devoted experts on the comedy troupe. He has published a similar reference book on the Monty Python Flying Circus television series, as well as a study entitled Monty Python, Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama. He takes pains in his introduction to treat the film from a critic's perspective, discussing it as a medieval film (sort of ) and as an art film (or parody thereof ). He is not a medievalist, and he apologizes to those who are for 'playing in their yard' (xiii), but his interest in the Middle Ages is in how it is portrayed by the Pythons-Oxbridge educated comic actors with a bent for social satire who are living in a Britain stuck in the economic and social misery of the 1970s. The search for 'informing sources' (xiv)-what the Pythons might have had in mind creating the film-is really what the book is all about. The problem is that there's not always a record of what they had in mind, and identifying the sources of the filmmakers sometimes requires speculation, questionable associations, curious choices, and some irrelevant and even bizarre digressions.Proceeding through the film from start to finish, characters, incidents, imagery, even bits of dialogue (some occurring only in the printed script), are explicated in commentaries which sometimes enlighten but sometimes baffle. In 'Scene Four: Bring Out Your Dead,' the visual setting is related to the accumulation of garbage in London in the early 1970s due to union strikes. …