Mercenários de um Reino em Chamas

I suppose there are people who have the equivalent of color-blindness affecting their sense of humor. How else to explain the grouches & grinches who can't laugh at this goofy romp. Wilder & Sutherland as a pair of split-at-birth twins - Spinetti & Whitelaw & Griffith & MacGowran as support. Doesn't get much better.

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!

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.

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.

France - 1789! The king is befuddled. The queen is aroused. The duke hatches a new plan. The peasants are near revolt. And just when it looks like things are normal, here come the Corsican brothers! Or is it really them? Perhaps they are actually filthy peasant swine. Perhaps, when two sets of twins were mismatched at birth, things took a really strange turn in Europe's history. When things can't seem to get much stranger, who else would show up but 'The Man in the Iron Mask?' And just who the hell is Orson Welles supposed to be in this picture, anyway? (Oh, wait, he calls himself Orson Welles...I see, aha!).

I've long thought this to be the perfect period comedy and wondered why it didn't have universal appeal. Perhaps it's difficult for many viewers to fully embrace an old style costumed spectacle as debacle - events taking place about 200 years ago have the smell of a historical lesson and moviegoers tend to avoid classes when picking out a film. But what if a film throws out much of what we think as historical in favor of a hysterical plot playing on the age-old tensions between the poor and the rich? (the peasantry & the aristocracy). Most of the actors here are usually winking slyly during their performances - they're not really immersing themselves in the period. The exception may be Spinetti as the villainous d'Escargot; he does seem a product of his time while everyone else concentrates on making the gags and clever dialogue as rich and enjoyable as possible. But even this works in the film's favor: the villain is played kind of straight (if you don't count his very odd attempts at metaphor), stuffy and consumed by his plots and intrigue, as the others sort of roll their eyes at the absurd turns in the story.

But why is this perfection? The reason has to be Gene Wilder. Wilder had many great comedic roles in his career but this is my personal favorite. He plays two characters in this one (as does Sutherland, almost as great), an arrogant 'aristo' and a sneaky but timid peasant. Wilder's Philippe de Sisi, the high bred one, has to be seen to be believed. Born a peasant but raised as 'superior,' Philippe is prone to wild mood swings and berserk rages. He's quite insane and Wilder turns him into the craziest, most spellbinding character ever committed to celluloid. Very early in the film, the audience begins to wonder what nutty monologue or wacky stunt the unpredictable Philippe will pull in the next scene. It's probably this performance that made Mel Brooks realize Wilder would be the ideal lead actor for all his films ("Young Frankenstein," etc.).

The rest of the cast in this revolutionary comedy are top notch, as well. Sutherland, as mentioned, is terrific - his two characters were both meant to be nobility - he has that aristocratic air down pat. All the others also understood the sly, sometimes subtle farcical elements of this piece. Many of the confrontational scenes, with the eccentric turns of phrase, are instant classics - it's a shame not more film viewers are aware of them. The sets and costumes are great - much of this takes place in the palace of King Louis and everything looks quite authentic. I also don't have any problems with the ending as some others do. It just delivers on the already fantastic absurdity we've come to realize the entire film is embedded with.