Brancaleone alle Crociate
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Brancaleone alle Crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades) is an Italian comedy film directed by Mario Monicelli in 1970, the sequel of the famous L'armata Brancaleone.
Plot
The film starts when L'armata Brancaleone ends. Brancaleone da Norcia (again played by Vittorio Gassman) is a poor but prideful Middle Ages knight leading his bizarre army of underdogs. However, he loses in a battle all his "warriors" and therefore meets the Death's incarnation (a clear parody of Bergman's Seventh Seal). Having obtained more time to live, he form a new tattered band. When Brancaleone saves a new-born child, they set on to the Holy Sepulchre to bring him back to his father, Bohemund of Taranto, which is fighting in the Crusades. As in the first film, in his quest he lives a series of grotesque episodes, each a hilarious parody of Middle Ages stereotypes. These include: the saving of a young witch (Stefania Sandrelli) from a burn, the annexion of a leper to the band, and a meeting with Gregory VII, in which Brancaleone has to solve the dispute between the pope and the antipope Clement III. Reached Palestine, Brancaleone obtains the title of baron by the child's father. He is therefore chosen as a champion in a tournament to solve the dispute between the Christians and the Saracens in the siege of Jerusalem. The award for the winner is the former leper, who has revealed to be instead a beautiful princess, Berta. After having nearly defeated all the Moor warriors, Brancaleone is however defeated by a spell cast on him by the witch, who has fall in love with him. As his poor origins are discovered by Bohemund, he is banned from the Crusader camp. He starts therefore to wander in despair in the desert, and again the Death comes to claim her credit: but Brancaleone is saved by the witch, who gives herself in exchange.Trivia
- Brancaleone alle Crociate features the same hilarious mixture of Latin and Italian dialects which was one of the key of the success of the first movie. In this second episode, also Normans, then rulers of Sicily, are present: in an historically inaccurate but amusing way, they are showed speaking a distorted form of Sicilian dialect.
- Monicelli never confirmed the scenes with the death being a parody of the Bergman's film. In the original version the Death's voice is dubbed by the theatre actor Gigi Proietti, who also plays a character in the film.
- The figure of the stylite present in the episode with Pope Gregory VII is inspired to the Luis Buñuel's Simón del desierto (1965).
- One of characters of the film refers to having been raped in Battipaglia, in Puglia. However, this city was founded only in 1829. Other anachronisms include the presence of a motorboat in one shot, and the princess Berta's bikini-shaped tanning.
External links
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