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To put it simply, this movie is outrageous. It flopped during its theater tenure because everyone was too high-strung over Vietnam and other period conflicts to actually understand this comedy. This fact is also touched on during the commentary by the director himself.

"Revolution" is in the same league as the Zucker Brothers. It's gags gain momentum as the movie unwinds, until it's whipping around during the last few scenes almost out of control, yet marvelously in control.

This is a movie that has Gene Wilder at his comic peak. He's pre-Wonka and pre-"FrankenSTEEN" here, and hasn't found temperance in his angry hysteria. I've watched this movie close to 15 times, and I can't handle myself when Wilder is galloping around with his stuffed falcon. And the gags in his marriage! "Bring the leather and the honey ... " (His character's wife looks at the camera with a look of worry).

Donald Sutherland is reserved, but he's not well known for his comedy. Yet he has excellent moments, especially in strangling adversaries on the dock with one hand! "...and I shall be the Queeeeen!" The funniest pieces here are actually the lines. Read the quotes! Oh my, a gold mine!

The plot is older than the ancient Greeks--twins mixed up at birth. But the stars are a scream. And the notion that Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland grew as twin brothers (one pair noble and the other a disgrace), is just one of the many bits of comedy of absurd that fill this slight but hysterical little movie.

The wife of the noble version of Gene Wilder is also priceless, forever dressing up in costumes in vain efforts to satisfy his somewhat odd collection of sexual fetishes.

But the real reason to see this gem is Hugh ("I thought it was a costume ball") Griffith as King Louis. He outclasses anyone within walking distance, even the great Sutherland. And absolutely effortlessly. The device that uses Orson Welles may or not work -- you have to decide. (Don't be too hard on Orson -- this was from the "We will serve no wine before its time" phase of his career.) But if you come across this on cable late some night, have a good time. It's obvious everyone who made the movie did.

At its best, this classy-looking, fast-paced spoof of the literary classic The Corsican Brothers, is brilliant, and even the stuff that doesn't quite work is still fairly entertaining. Oddly, the movie bombed in its day, and this was surely a quirk of timing. If this movie had come out a couple of years later, in the wake of Sutherland's star- making turn in MASH, it would have been a huge hit. As it was, the stars were not yet well known, and the cutesy comedy spoofs of the 60s had not quite given way to the satiric, anarchic, nihilistic Robert Altman-style comedy of the early seventies, and the wild zaniness of Mel Brooks. This one sort of straddles the gap, not quite fitting the older mold, but pre-dating the hits soon to come. As a result, audiences were not quite ready for this one, but more modern audiences should be. There is a lot of very clever historical, literary and even movie satire and spoofery going on here and everything is served up at breakneck speed, as zany comedy properly should. The historical look of the film is uniformly excellent, almost distractingly good - no anachronistic gags here, as everything is kept period accurate. Wilder and Sutherland are a brilliant team and surprisingly they never worked together again, despite being two of the most popular stars of the 70s. Enjoy this, their single teaming.

Ten years before the Zuckers made Airplane, television producer Bud Yorkin (All in The Family, Sanford and Son) got in and out of the movie business very quickly with Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), a hilarious parody of just about every movie made about the French Revolution or based on the novels of Dumas. Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland play dual roles as two pairs of mismatched twins. One pair are Corsican noblemen conspiring with Marie and the Count DiSicci to depose the king. The other pair are Parisian peasants trying to escape the fighting. Wilder and Sutherland make a great comedy team (even doing a take off on the patty-cake bit, from the Hope/Crosby Road Pictures). With an introduction by Orson Wells, Hugh Griffith and an assortment of English character actors attempting French accents (I saw this once on a double bill with Tom Jones, and many of the principles are in both films) and a great deal of location footage filmed on the grounds of Versailles including a very chaotic battle scene.

This film takes slapstick and douses it with farce at absurd proportions. It delivers laugh after laugh with no thought as to its higher purpose. Its Brechtian nature turns the fourth wall into a comedian's stage and pokes fun not only of the story, but of the conventions used to tell it. Fabulous performances by Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland are even more exciting when we think of the nuances they bring to each of their characters. Hugh Griffith turns in a charming performance as a King who is nothing more than a chicken with a crown.

This is a must see for anyone excited by classic slapstick-style comedy.