Ok, this has been bugging me for some time now, and I just watched the movie again last night and it came up again. Anyway my question is:
Are there or are there not end credits to this movie? I remember the first time I saw the movie there was just music. but I could have sworn at other times I remember credits and just thought I was dreaming the whole no credits ending. Now last night I KNOW there were none. So did MP make two different credit scenes or is there something else I’m missing? I’m hoping that too much MP hasn’t gotten to my brain.
On my video of Holy Grail they replay the beginning credits at the end (you know, the “wei nott trei a hollidei in Sveden this yerr” ones). Of course, if you were watching it on TV, they might just have not shown them.
The copy I have (as well as every time I’ve ever seen it on cable or at a midnight movie) has no end credits. All the credits are at the beginning, and the movie just ends after the marauding knights are arrested.
First time I saw it, the screen went blank as the policeman smashed the camera, then stayed blank as the “intermission” music (from the “bridge of death” scene) started up. And played. And played. And then continued to play. After a while, we (the audience) got the message and went home.
Through most of Hollywood history the credits came BEFORE the movie began…the culmination of this was in the 1960s, when they had such loooong intro credits that they hired cool designers like Saul Bass (ANATOMY OF A MURDER, PSYCHO, WEST SIDE STORY, IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD) to handle the titles in an entertaining (or at least aesthetically interesting) fashion.
At the end of the movie it said “The End” and that was that.
By 1975 and THE HOLY GRAIL, this method was not so far in the past that we in the audience got freaked out when there were no end-credits.
IIRC, the reason for the abrupt ending is that the budget ran out. One of the troupe (Gilliam?) was intervied for the release of the computer version of The Holy Grail and said that the same ending would probably have been used in the movie if they hadn’t run out of money.
A friend of a friend (said FOAF being a big Monty Python fan) said the same thing. Apparently the film had big budgetary issues.
This source also claims that, during the scene at the end where the English party of knights charges the castle, all of the individuals in question were the cast and crew–apparently they just turned the cameras on (with only a skeleton crew or no one behing them) and everyone got in front of the cameras and participated in the final scene.
As might be expected, they got in trouble with the actors’ unions over these shenanigans. :eek:
