FANTASIA OBSCURA: Terry Gilliam’s First (Solo) Feature is Not Monty Python But Almost…
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you just know you’re doing something right as you watch the slythy toves do gyre and gimble in the wabe…
Jabberwocky (1977)
Distributed by: Cinema 5 Distributing in US
Directed by: Terry Gilliam
Everyone makes assumptions, you know.
Take for example, the assumption that the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a smashing success with their take on King Arthur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and went right from there, straight on, to do Life of Brian. They recall the difficulty around trying to get the film made, how George Harrison put up the money for it and got out of the deal HandMade Films, and the controversy surrounding the picture when released. It’s a well told tale found in books, documentaries, and even a made-for-TV drama.
But, it’s an incomplete picture, because we do have a side trip along the way that demands our time and is worth remembering, even if none of the three sources above give it more than even a passing mention:
We open cold on a medieval poacher (Terry Jones) who is making the rounds on his snares, collecting the rabbits and foxes he’s trapped. He’s unaware that something else is looking at him, going after him as prey, until it’s too late…
We find out through narration that we are in the midst of the darkest part of the Dark Ages, when people are flooding to the safety of the seat of the kingdom inside the city’s walls, so many in fact that people are being turned away. They are looking for safety form a creature called the (what else?) Jabberwocky, whose handy work we just witnessed before the title card.
Out in the country, however, there are still a few places left untouched. One of them has a town where the cooper (Paul Curran) is a bit annoyed with his son, Dennis (Michael Palin). Dennis, unfortunately, is not much of a traditional cooper; in fact, he’s more interested in the process side of things, which makes him an efficiency expert some 1200 years too early for the profession. (He’s also, sadly, a bad one at that…)
His great ambition in life is to take over the business and marry his sweetheart, Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland, in her first feature role), a large woman with a great appetite but no stomach for Dennis. The poor fool doesn’t see she doesn’t want him, nor is he ready when his father suffers a stroke and disinherits Dennis on his deathbed.
Wanting to make his fortune to win his beloved’s attention affection, Dennis heads for the city, where he’s barred entry because he has no money or food. Well, he does have some food, a discarded potato that Griselda threw out the window unwittingly, which he believes is a token of affection from her, but his efforts to hold onto his keepsake get in the way of his using it to make the right deals to get him inside.
And why has nobody done anything about this monster forcing everyone to try to get inside the city walls? It’s not so much the capricious whims the monarch, King Bruno the Questionable (Max Wall), as it is the desires of members of the merchant guild, for whom having everyone stuck inside the city is good for business. Which is why they place subtle obstacles in the way of their king, who frankly is not that hard to trick, despite every effort by his advisor Passelewe (John Le Mesurier) to get his Royal Highness to focus a little, here.
Ultimately, Bruno comes up with a plan: He’ll have a jousting tournament, full of combat to the death, with the survivor winner being chosen to go kill the creature. Should the champion succeed, he will have half the kingdom, as well as the honor of marrying his daughter the Princess (Deborah Fallender in her first feature).
During this insanity, Dennis manages to sneak into the city, where he gets mistaken for a prince in hiding by the well-cloistered Princess and starts to pal around with a squire (Harry H. Corbett) whose master (David Prowse) ultimately wins the tourney, despite Dennis nearly bungling everything up when he proves that, no, he really isn’t much of an efficiency expert:
The insanity continues when Dennis ends up taking the squire’s place, thanks to a seduction that ends up killing the squire. Totally unprepared for the quest, he’s nonetheless getting on with it, getting blessed by the bishop (Derek Francis) and receiving royal appreciation through King Bruno’s latest squire (Neil Innes):
Despite the tepid encouragement, Dennis…
…well, of course we all know what happens, right? Safe to assume you read the poem by Lewis Carroll that appeared in Through the Looking-Glass, I hope?
What, no? Okay, we’ll wait; should take you about as long to read as the run time for this bit Gilliam animated for And Now for Something Completely Different, which makes for a good introduction to Gilliam’s work for Python and visual style, as well as a timer for you…
There, all caught up now? And if you didn’t take that minute to read this, the poem gets quoted throughout the flick. In fact, given his first solo directing gig with carte blanche as to what he wanted to do a film on, Gilliam instantly leapt at the chance to do his own take on the Carroll classic, giving the world an introduction to his sensibilities and view of the world.
And what an intro. For the first time, audiences got to see his anarchic nihilistic tendencies, in all their intentionally shabby trappings, in his humorous but dark script and set designs. His iconic visual and thematic trademarks emerge fully formed like Venus from the sea, a subject Gilliam did an animation around that gave hints as what was to come.
We also get to see a few more familiar bits minted before us, in Palin’s Dennis. His bumbling innocent, a persona he’d done a few times for the series (especially on the episode “The Cycling Tour”), becomes a trademark character shell here. From this point on, when not being a genial host for a travel show, Palin would more likely than not be this character, mostly for films from HandMade, whether in Time Bandits (twice), The Missionary, or A Private Function.
The character works here especially well, and was likely to succeed considering the cast surrounding him.
British comic actors old and new, such as Wall from the days of the Variety show and Le Mesurier and Corbett from TV, were eager to do something with Python, even if it was only a few of them, and Gilliam got some great performances out of his cast.
Mind you, this isn’t actually a Monty Python film, despite some confusion at the time and maybe some shady misrepresentation by the distributor. Despite efforts by cast and crew to set the record straight, audiences could be forgiven for assuming that they were watching a sequel or continuation of Holy Grail. If there’s any serious knock one could make against the film, is that it didn’t try and move far enough from the scope and feel of the last project and give itself its own identity; Gilliam would definitely address that going forward when it came time for subsequent projects.
Audiences who watched another Medieval romp with (a few) Pythons cracking jokes were not so much experiencing remembrances of things past, but experiencing things to come. While Jabberwocky does suggest Holy Grail, it’s really a preview of such later films as Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It establishes Gilliam as the artiste who can’t be ignored as the rest of the century unfolds; love or hate him, you can’t really discuss genre films for the last 40 years or so without him being part of the discussion.
Yet this film never really comes up when discussing this period in the Pythons’ history. The main focus keeps going back to that project that started life as Jesus Christ – Lust for Glory.
Safe to assume you’re familiar with that one, maybe…?
NEXT TIME: Down on the farm, it’s a whole different way of dying living…
