Monty Python and the Holy Grail Review

The knights ride imaginary horses to the clop of coconut shells, and the comedy grows from that cheerful poverty; the money came partly from Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, directing a feature for the first time, shot mostly around Doune Castle in Scotland, which stands in for several castles, and Terry Bedford's photography gives the mud, fog and plague carts a medieval squalor that makes the absurdity funnier.

The best passages are self-contained sketches: John Cleese's Black Knight shrugging off each lost limb as a flesh wound, Michael Palin's anarcho-syndicalist peasant lecturing Graham Chapman's Arthur on the illegitimacy of swords handed out by women in ponds, Cleese again as the French taunter on the battlements, and the Knights Who Say Ni demanding a shrubbery. Chapman's straight-faced Arthur is the anchor that lets everyone else go wild, and Neil Innes's songs land every musical joke.

As a film it barely holds together. The Grail quest is a clothesline, a modern police investigation creeps in from the margins, the ending refuses to be one, and Gene Siskel complained of ten very funny moments and seventy minutes of silence. Its reputation grew anyway: Channel 4 viewers placed it sixth among the greatest comedy films in 2006, and whole scenes are still recited word for word.