L'assurance Crimson

It's funny & imaginative, as everyone else has mentioned. However almost no-one else has mentioned that the film was intensely satirical when it came out - practically everything in it captured the zeitgeist in London at the start of the 80s, from the flapping sacking around office buildings being refurbished to the wholesale layoffs/business closures. Maybe irrelevant to the casual viewer but IMO it's the most political Gilliam film that I've seen. Incidentally I believe that the building used in the exterior shots is Loundes House - still standing just north of Finsbury Square in the City of London.

Terry Gilliam has proven himself as an incredible director of dream imagery. the context of his films exist in an unreality complete with sarcasm and satire. Crimson is the perfect example of Gilliam's attitude towards the structure of big business (Brazil also exists on this level). It mixes comedic violence and well-crafted sets to create a intro for The Meaning of Life. Look for Matt Frewer in the meeting room and Michael Palin outside the window.

Terry Gilliam rips apart the yuppie culture with this short that preceded Monty Python's "Meaning of Life". Focusing on some elderly employees who rebel against their bosses and turn their office building into a pirate ship, "The Crimson Permanent Assurance" is really an indictment of how greed dominated the 1980s. Yes, this kick in the balls to Reaganomics is what cinephiles get to see before watching a poor man (Michael Palin) sing about how every sperm is sacred, watching a professor (John Cleese) demonstrate sex to his students, and watching a morbidly obese man (Terry Jones) vomit all over the place. Terry Gilliam succeeds again.

A piece of trivia is that "The Crimson Permanent Assurance" is the film debut of Matt Frewer, who played Russ Sr. in "Honey I Shrunk the Kids".

This short movie was originally just one sketch in Monty Python's Meaning of Life (in the Part Middle Age, I think) and was to be done by Terry Gilliam by his famous animation style. Gilliam, however had directed his first movies by then (Jabberwocky and Time Bandits) and was somewhat bored with animation. So, thankfully he got to do this one live-action with his own actors, own budget and own will. So it became the only Python budget to go over the budget and the sketch bloated from five minutes into fifteen. So, the movie didn't fit into the center of the movie, so it was made as a "starter" to the feature movie. The Pythons themselves surprisingly do not feature all in this short. Only Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam can be seen as window cleaners and Eric Idle's voice can be heard when the pirates are singing Accountancy Shanty. This is only good, because the short makes you really confused, whether you have gone to a wrong movie. The best thing about this short is that it's so visually great. Every time I see it, I'll find something new. And the connections between accountancy and piracy are hilarious. Using filing cabinets as cannons and so on are very funny inventions. Every Gilliam fan will love it, but if you hate not only Gilliam, but do not like Python either, then avoid. 8/10

While the feature this short is presented after in succession, Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, is a very good comedy with the scattered laughs bringing some of their best moments, in sheer audacity and daring with the film-making the prize has to go to writer/director Terry Gilliam for his 'The Crimson Permanent Assurance' (in fact it did at Cannes in 83). The key to understanding it, or at least appreciating it, is knowing that it was originally meant to be shorter, much shorter, as one of the animated segways that connect the segments in the Monty Python sketches. This idea soon expanded for Gilliam, and his 'director bug' (right before his take-off to Brazil and right after his first two solo director outings) took over into this ideally cartoonish, surrealist, and perfectly anarchic comedy of will-power.

Sum up the story quick, will do- the workers at the Crimson Permanent Assurance company are old, very old, and very tired and beat down, like the ship rowers in Ben Hur. It finally breaks for their to be a revolution against the bosses, and the old men fight back. On this simple premise, Gilliam builds and builds (with extra help from cinematographer Roger Pratt, and a couple of the other Pythons as extras) until one wonders how this can even conceivably be made as entertainment. I once remember hearing Gilliam on the commentary for Holy Grail saying (sarcastically) 'the stuff in this film is so unjustifiable, its insane', and the same can definitely be said about this short film. It's big (this took up a million of the 7 or 8 million budget of Meaning of Life), its violent, its surprising, and while it maybe lacks only the sort of focused, dry British genius that was in the other members of Python, it certainly doesn't lack the daring of pushing the envelope (in this case, the Assurance 'ship' gets pushed off the world itself). Even when I wasn't laughing hard I was struck by the style of the direction, the fun in these old-school British actors, and the swashbuckling music.