Start The Revolution Without Me (1970) It's usual now for film critics and bloggers to speak of the 1970's with wistful, fond nostalgia......
Oh those long gone glory days of the 'New Hollywood' young generation of filmmakers turning cinema upside down with exciting, groundbreaking movies.....
And the fading, crumbling movie studios, awash in red ink and willing to try anything to lure audiences back into theaters, even if it meant opening the kingdom gates to those hungry ambitious young directors......
Great and wonderful films came out of that era.......but so did the usual assembly line junk.
Like this wheezing, embarrassing pathetic costume farce.....a gasping stab at the kind of bawdy, slapstick, gag-stuffed romps that Mel Brooks would dominate for the rest of the decade.
"Start The Revolution Without Me", a labored spoof of Alexandre Dumas's "The Corsican Brothers", came from the long time producing directing team of Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin. For the double set of twin brothers, they lined up a powerhouse comedic duo......Gene Wilder, fresh from "The Producers" and Donald Sutherland, fresh from "M.A.S.H."
From the first frame onward, with a sedated, modern-day Orson Welles providing an introductory narration, the film reeks of desperation and flop sweat. It's like an endless, unfunny Saturday Night Live skit that makes not a single audience member laugh.
After Welles disappears, the 1789 costume crap commences.....with Wilder-Sutherland playing the set of noble aristocrats and fearful peasants caught up in the imminent French Revolution. For reasons never explained (not that I care enough to wonder), Wilder plays the aristo bro as a raving hysteric on the edge of a violent breakdown. He screams. A lot. Which director Yorkin, I assume, thought would send audiences into orgasms of giggles.
Nope. Not even close.
At Versaille, the two sets of brothers get caught up in the nefarious crossplots, betrayals and murderous schemes of King Louis (Hugh Griffith) Marie Antoinette (Billie Whitelaw) and the oily Count De Escargot (Victor Spinetti).....cause naming a snotty Count as a snail is a laff riot, right?
Lots of swordplay, running around and falling down erupt all over the place......not a bit of it even remotely funny, with the exception of a running gag involving The Man In The Iron Mask.
For any horny red blooded males who stumble into watching this, relief comes in the appearance of that pouty international babydoll Ewa Aulin (of Buck Henry's strange multi-national epic satire "Candy") Another girl shows up as the gf of one of the peasant brothers, but in another bizarre, unexplained running gag, she literally spends the entire film either tortured, slapped around or stripped. Another knee-slappin' idea from the Lear-Yorkin brain trust.
A large scale slapstick insurrection furnishes the climax, which does include the film's one and only great sight gag for the Man In the Iron Mask. But then the film abruptly grinds this sequence to a halt, then goes back to modern day.......where Orson Welles plunges into a river and Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland, now in secret agent suits and ties, kill each other. Honest. Really. Not making this up.......
Comedy completists may consider wasting 90 minutes of their lives gaping at the movie like a slow drive past a horrendous traffic accident. For everybody else, Zero Stars (0).
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