L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold). 1966. Italy/France/Spain. Directed by Mario Monicelli. Screenplay by Monicelli, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli. With Vittorio Gassman, Catherine Spaak, Folco Lulli, Gian Maria Volontè, Barbara Steele. US restoration premiere. DCP. In Italian; English subtitles. 120 min.
Some 13 years before Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Mario Monicelli had Italian audiences rolling in the aisles with this brilliant parody of Arthurian legends and the kind of peplum (sword-and-sandal movies) that packed movie houses in the 1950s, leaving no medieval stereotype, from the “noble” peasantry to the “devout” clergy, unskewered. Vittorio Gassman, who got his first real break in Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and La grande guerra (1959)—groundbreaking classics of commedia all’italiana by the inimitable screenwriting duo of Age & Scarpelli—returns as the dimwitted, pompous young knight who leads his merry band of brigands into a series of misadventures culminating in the Crusades. Enough blood is spilled on the battlefield that you half expect a Black Knight with severed limbs to show up exclaiming “’Tis but a scratch!,” and Barbara Steele is also on hand to provide some cat-o’-nine-tails kink.
Digitally restored by Cineteca di Bologna, in collaboration with Titanus, from the original negatives.