L'armata Brancaleone
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- For the Italian commune, see Brancaleone (RC).
Plot
The movie opens with a small Italian village being pillaged by a band of Transalpine outlaws (or mercenaries?). When the murders and rapes are over, a German knight arrives and bravely kills the bandits. However, as he is healing his wounds he is attacked by two of the surviving villagers(!) and one of the cutthroat thieves. They throw the wounded knight into a river.
The attackers try to sell the knight's armor and weapons to a Jewish merchant who finds among his belongings a letter of donation by the Holy Roman Emperor, with a missing part, giving the knight a fief in Apulia, Southern Italy. The bandit comes up with the idea to propose a partnership with a nobleman, so the group can take possession of the aforesaid fief and enjoy its riches. The knight they find is the poor and incompetent, yet well-meaning, Brancaleone da Norcia and they tell him that a noble knight handed them the parchment before he died. Brancaleone initially refuses the plan but after defeat at a jousting tournament that promised the hand of an overlord's daughter and a wealthy fief, he is too eager to take command of this "army" (L'Armata) of underdogs and lead it towards "fortune" and "glory", in what he sees as an epic journey.
As they set up towards the fief, Brancalone lives several grotesque adventures, inspired to the confused and cosmopolite world of Italy during Middle Ages; each one of them more hilarious than the previous. These include:
- a Byzantine knight, Teofilatto dei Leonzi (Gian Maria Volonté), who proposes to fake his capture by the band so they can demand and share a ransom from his father;
- a city seemingly abandoned, which they begin to pillage, until they find out that it was in fact infested by the plague;
- a fanatical mad monk who promises that who joins his army of Crusaders get "healed" from all ills, having the band follow him to a crusade in the Holy Land. When trying to convince his followers to cross a precarious bridge by leaping upon it (crying out loud that the Lord would protect them), the monk falls down into a deep gorge - this releases the band to follow their previous quest;
- the saving of a bride named Matelda (Catherine Spaak), who falls in love with Brancaleone, but is rejected by him due to his oath to take her to her groom; to Brancaleone's misfortune, she avenges herself by losing her virginity to the Byzantine knight (by then a member of the gang), only to be later rejected by her husband, which in turn avenges himself on Brancaleone.
- giving in for the plan of Teofilatto and arriving at his father's castle to demand ransom. His father refuses to pay, revealing that Teofilatto is his illegitimate child.
Brancaleone (who didn't knew about the attack on the knight) and his army are about to be hanged when the mad monk arrives out of the blue and claim them from the knight, "so they can fulfill their duty to go onto the Holy Land". Being deprived of his dreams of richness, Brancaleone-Gassman and his band agree to go along with the monk and his followers, saving themselves. Albeit sad, when he finds his untrustworthy horse, Brancaleone mounts and regains his confidence, taking the lead from the monk. The story was to be told in a follow-on film, Brancaleone alle Crociate (1970).
Evaluation and themes
The plot is structured as a series of sketches revolving about different parodies of the Middle Ages world: it is itself a parody of the classical knights' quest typical of Middle Ages tales. Age & Scarpelli devised for the characters a striking, mocking form of mixture of Italian (including its dialects) and Latin languages, which is probably the main feature of the film and one of the keys of its success. Gassman's overbearing and pompous recitation was also perfect for the role. The main musical theme of the film was also a great success.According to Monicelli, the idea for the movie was spurred by a simple scene written by Age & Scarpelli, about two mediaeval peasants talking about women. He intervened suggesting to shot a movie avoiding the stereotypes of the usual Hollywood Middle Ages movies, which instead would show "the other face" of the era: poor people, underdogs, ignorance, mud, cold, misery.
There is no such stereotype left standing: the oppressed villagers are capable of violence themselves (they are prey to the bandits, but join them to attack their saving knight); the clergy, depicted by the allucinated monk, fanatical to the extreme, always capable of explaining misfortunes by "lack of faith" of his entourage; the miserly Jewish merchant; the heroin/princess in distress, which instead of ending up with the hero asks to be deflowered by another man just to annoy him. Finally, the archetypical medieval hero, the knight, has in the clueless Brancaleone its greater parody, always jeopardized by following his chilvary code of conduct; as for his dreams of glory, when he leads an army of underdogs that are a little more than a band of coward bandits which flee from fight and manipulate him.
The presence of underdogs and humiliated people was a constant presence in Monicelli's art, but in this case they are showed mainly from a comical side. Another important theme of the film is the male friendship, which was also an important element in movies such as La grande guerra and the later Amici miei.
Costumes that made Piero Gherardi win a Silver Ribbon in 1967 often provide a near surreal effect, particularly in the wedding banquet and Byzantine castle scenes.
Trivia
- The term Armata Brancaleone is still used today in Italy to define a group of people which are badly assembled. It is in fact mentioned in several dictionaries of Italian language.
- Brancaleone is a historical name, meaning lion's paw in heraldry jargon. Brancaleone degli Andalò was an effective governor of the Middle Ages Rome.
- Even though not mentioned, this movie is probably an inspiration to Monty Python's movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
External links
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