Terry Jones (1979)

In the notorious debate chaired by Tim Rice on the BBC show Friday Night, Saturday Morning, at the time of the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the end of last year, John Cleese and Michael Palin were paired against Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark.  Stockwood said that, of course, he was quite used to ‘undergraduate humour’.  His condescending tone was irritating but there’s no denying that it’s the style of performance associated with Cambridge Footlights, in which several of the Python team began their life of comedy, that makes Life of Brian (like Monty Python and the Holy Grail) a lousy film.   When he collaborated with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on The Hound of the Baskervilles (an even worse picture) in 1978, the director Paul Morrissey explained on The South Bank Show how underrated he believed post-war English film comedy to be.  Morrissey cited the Ealing comedies (although they’re hardly underrated) and the Carry On films.  The best Carry Ons, although their humour may be primary school rather than undergraduate, are certainly far superior to The Hound of the Baskervilles and Life of Brian.  This is largely thanks to the quality of the acting.  In comparison, university revue comedy doesn’t just tend to be crude; it appears to derive from the crudest reasons for wanting to go on stage – to show off.

All the film set’s a stage to the Pythons in Life of Brian:  in the course of its ninety minutes, each man plays many parts – or, rather (since those words imply an acting ability not in evidence), appears in various wigs and costumes.  With the help of Stanley Donen, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore successfully grafted their comedy onto a feature film format in Bedazzled (1967).   The idea – the Faust legend in a Swinging London location – gave the picture a secure shape; the episodic structure allowed a pretty happy medium between conventional comedy acting and revue sketch-playing.  And Dudley Moore’s screen personality – more definite and more sympathetic than that of Peter Cook or any of the Python team – linked his several incarnations.  The Pythons might have done better in Life of Brian if the dramatis personae had represented a broader social range:  they’re all just as good playing toffs as playing proles – in short bursts, anyway.  This would have made better sense too:  while the Judaean lower classes are translated into modern British working-class types (except for Brian), Pontius Pilate and the Magi are parodies of the way these roles have been played in Hollywood biblical epics.

Although the Carry On team portray types rather than individuals, the type is animated by the very distinctive physical and vocal idiosyncrasies of the actor concerned.  The Pythons aren’t naturally eccentric to the same degree – several of them could pass for the chartered surveyors they’ve laughed at over the years – so their comedy characters typically depend on exaggeration of voice, gesture and appearance.  Apart from Michael Palin, they don’t have much personality on screen.  Graham Chapman (who plays Brian, one of the Magi and a Roman called Biggus Dickus – a name straight out of Carry On), Eric Idle and John Cleese have all developed a persona thanks to being the same whatever role they’re playing.  Terry Jones, who directed Life of Brian, is the least distinctive presence of all and, hardly coincidentally, the crudest performer in the film:  he yowls all his parts, varying the pitch only to differentiate the male ones from the female ones.  These criticisms aren’t meant to disparage the Pythons’ television work but, in a feature film, the effect of stretching ‘characterisations’ (as triumphantly gross as, say, the women in the laundrette discussing Jean-Paul Sartre) to many times their natural length, is tiresome – verging on embarrassing.  Even quite good TV sitcoms (like Man About the House) have made lousy cinema films:  the scriptwriters can’t get out of writing to a formula based on a different timeframe and attention span.  The lack of structure of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is proving an even worse handicap because chaos won’t work for an hour and a half.  The Pythons’ first picture, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), comprised sketches from the TV series and was funny enough – although not as funny as in the original format.  The team’s unpredictable humour escapes infrequently, almost defiantly, from under the blanket of plot that’s been chucked over Life of Brian.

Does the film aim to be a crushing anti-religious statement?  It obviously lampoons the idiocies of mob followers of a religious figurehead although it wouldn’t make any essential difference if he were a political or military figurehead instead.  On Friday Night, Saturday Morning, John Cleese and Michael Palin seemed to keep changing their mind about whether they were attacking Jesus or Christianity or religious believers or religious hysteria.  After Malcolm Muggeridge had been emphasising (to put it mildly) that all the achievements of Christendom derived from Christian belief, John Cleese quizzically mentioned the Spanish Inquisition.  This drew gales of laughter and applause from the studio audience, as if the remark sealed the argument against organised religion (it’s unlikely, of course, that the response would have been the same if Cleese’s barb hadn’t also referred, implicitly, to one of Monty Python’s most celebrated sketches).  Life of Brian is a pretty awful film but it would be even more awful if the Pythons thought that by making it they were doing a service to humanity.

[1980]