A Book about the Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail
All the References from African Swallows to Zoot
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired from 1969 until 1974, but the conclusion of the series did not mark the end of the troupe’s creative output. Even before the final original episodes were recorded and broadcast, the six members began work on their first feature-length enterprise of new material. Rather than string together a series of silly skits, they conceived a full-length story line with references to the real and imagined worlds of the mythical King Arthur, the lives of medieval peasants, and the gloomy climate of 1970s Britain. Released in 1975, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a modest success but has since been hailed as a modern classic.
In A Book about the Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail:All the References from African Swallows to Zoot, Darl Larsen identifies and examines the cultural, historical, and topical allusions in the movie. In this entertaining resource, virtually every reference that appears in a scene—whether stated by a character, depicted in the mise-en-scène, or mentioned in the print companion—is identified and explained. Beyond the Arthurian legend, entries cover literary metaphors, symbols, names, peoples, and places—as well as the myriad social, cultural, and historical elements that populate the film.
This book employs the film as a window to both reveal and examine “Arthurian” life and literature, the historical Middle Ages, and a Great Britain of labor unrest, power shortages, and the common man. Introducing the reader to dozens of medievalist histories and authors and connecting the film concretely to the “modern” British Empire, A Book about the Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail will appeal to fans of the troupe as well as medieval scholars and academics who can laugh at themselves and their work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Larsen (Monty Python's Flying Circus), a film and animation professor at Brigham Young University, presents an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting look at Monty Python's last film, 1983's The Meaning of Life. Larsen posits that the film is a pessimistic look at life during the time of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. For example, the film's opening featurette of elderly office accountants rebelling against their corporate masters is a deep critique of America's "financial dominance" of London, which created the conditions for Thatcher's "strict sado-monetarist policies had proven so effective at reducing inflation, but also reducing employment." No line in the film is without comment (some lines get a tedious multiparagraph examination). A brutal look at hospital childbirth in "Every Sperm Is Sacred" is shown to be a part of England's 1980s debate "about skyrocketing health care costs and the seeming inability to control its spending or quality of care." And the film's final sketch, a parody of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, hammers on upper-middle-class Thatcherites diminishing the specter of Death by trying to treat him "as an adorable local." Hard-core Monty Python fans will be thoroughly delighted, but those with a more casual interest would do fine sticking with the film.
