Classic film ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ turns 50

Jim Beckerman

NorthJersey.com USA TODAY NETWORK – NEW JERSEY

If wishes were horses, the knights of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” would ride.

But since the now-classic film, which celebrated its 50th birthday in April, was made for horse feed (about $400,000), the cast had to bang coconuts instead. The clip- clop sound effect became one of the film’s most celebrated gags.

“We had so little money,” John Cleese told The Record in 2017. “The whole reason we thought of the coconuts is that we couldn’t afford horses,” he said. “We turned it into a positive.”

Little could the Python troupe have guessed, in 1975, that this thrown-together spoof of King Arthur would become, in 2005, the basis for the $11 million Broadway musical “Spamalot” that won three Tonys.

Or that its grimy, grungy, low-rent version of the Middle Ages would set a new trend for medieval movies. “The Name of the Rose” (1986), “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005) and “Robin Hood” (2010) owe much to “Holy Grail’s” mud-spattered Camelot.

It wasn’t on purpose, Cleese said: The weather just happened to be wet.

“We were shooting in Scotland in April,” Cleese said. “My Scottish friends told me there’s only one decent month in Scotland, which is September.”

Most of all, they couldn’t have guessed that the film meant to be a sort of last hurrah for the sextet of wild comedians, whose sketch show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had been a cult hit for the BBC from 1969 to 1974, would instead be a new beginning.

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was such a success – more than a $5 million international gross, 14 times its budget – that it re-launched the Monty Python brand.

Not bad for a movie that was so lowbudget it couldn’t afford hotel rooms for its cast.

“The week before I was due to go to up to Scotland to start shooting, I was rung up by a producer who asked me if I would mind sharing a hotel room with one of the other Pythons,” Cleese recalled. “I told them no, I was a [expletive] film star. I didn’t think that was appropriate.”

Luckily, the film’s strained circumstances didn’t strain their comedy. The Monty Python humor was as weird and wonderful as ever – hampered by neither good taste nor good sense.