Oh, I’m well aware. I got in an argument with one of them in the cinema as the credits rolled. 
The musical remake of Little Shop of Horror. Though I didn’t learn that it was a cop-out from the stage musical version until many years later. (And I can’t say that I I liked the original filmed ending better than the theatrical cut.)
When the Pythons watched History of the World Part I, do you think they were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?
NO ONE etc.
How did The Omega Man end?
And how did Smith compare with Heston?
I think the ending of Holy Grail is absolutely brilliant. It was set up perfectly and is a logical result of a series of scenes throughout the film.
Blazing Saddles OTOH, is clearly Brooks not knowing how to end the movie and throwing out non-seqiturs to hide the fact. It’s the obvious cop-out and comes out of nowhere.
It’s true that Python prepared for the ending by interspersing scenes of the Modern Day events throughout.
I don’t see that as setting up the ending as a logical outgrowth of the story, though. It was just provident of them.
(Also, it happened AFTER the Mel Brooks use of the device.)
Monty Python’s style of humor didn’t really lend itself to good punchlines. A lot pf their sketches were funny because of a build up of tension and absurdity that reinforced one another, and just kept building. There’s no way to end the Dead Parrot Sketch that wouldn’t be a let down.
How should Holy Grail have ended? Either they find the Grail, or they don’t, but neither would have been as funny as watching them look for it. Then ending they used was absurd and brought the quest to an end. A cop out may have been the best we could hope for.
They were frequently in violation of the Getting Out of Sketches Without Using a Proper Punchline Act…
I’d argue almost exactly the opposite. Grail is the cop-out, where they couldn’t figure out how to end it, so decided not to bother. Which tracks with how they wrote their sketches: keep the bit going until it runs out of steam then arbitrarily swap to an entirely new bit. Except the film ends, so there’s no bit to switch to.
Blazing Saddles 4th wall break comes out of left field, but it doesn’t abandon the story. The central conflict is resolved, the plot has a conclusion, the movie has an ending.
Plus, the Hollywood sequence in BS has multiple good subjokes (“They cut me after the bunker scene,” “They hit Buddy!”, etc.) while Grail just has the brick joke of, “Oh, this is the actual ending?” and leaves it at that.
No, Mel Brooks was just using the same technique as W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, who often ended their movies with a chase scene (e.g., The Bank Dick, The Big Store) because they had no other idea how to end it. Nothing about the ending of Blazing Saddles was a logical outgrowth of anything that happened before; it’s Brooks just giving up and throwing in the kitchen sink of gags.
The Pythons knew enough to set up the ending as the payoff of a clear subplot of the movie. Brooks did nothing to indicate that the film was anything but a western parody until he needed an ending; Python knew to break the illusion early on and use that for a payoff. It was based in story logic; Brooks’s ending was not.
Yes, and that’s exactly why the Holy Grail ending is superior. It’s similar to Andy Kaufman and deliberately breaks the rules and expectations of the audience. It adds an extra dimension to the humor. Brooks is giving what people expect. Grail subverts it.
Absolutely. I love almost all the rest of Holy Grail, but the ending…Gaah.
Look up “cop-out” in the dictionary and you’ll see it there.
Ironically, when Python did come up with a finale in Life of Brian it was one of the best movie endings ever.
Except the police subplot was never a part of the story in the first place. None of the scenes with the murdered TV host or the police investigation tied into the plot in any way from the start. It was a series of absurdist inserts cumulating to a big callback in lieu of any sort of resolution.
Big time disagree. It’s a huge flaw in the movie - it doesn’t read as a creative choice at all, it reads as a cop-out. Sticking the third act in a comedy is always a tricky business, and there’s a certain amusing brazenness in not even trying, but it doesn’t hold up at all, and it lessens the film on subsequent viewings, because you know that any investment you make in the plot (such as it is) is wasted because the plot is ultimately meaningless. None of these characters ever actually mattered, they were just there as vehicles for jokes. “Don’t invest, just laugh,” is the film’s message, and while that’s certainly a justifiable stance for a comedy, it’s infinitely more interesting when a film can be both funny and narratively satisfying, and Blazing Saddles largely succeeds at this. Holy Grail doesn’t even try, and is reduced as a result.
Brooks may have ripped them off. On their Flying Circus series The Pythons were well known for “Dropping the Cow” when a bit had run its course. Doing it in their first movie was true to form for them.
It sounds like you wanted it to be less Monty Pythonesque, and I can’t get behind that at all. Criticizing it because it doesn’t follow traditional narrative structure or have a coherent plot is like criticizing it for having unrealistic special effects. That’s not what it was even trying to do. What it was trying to do was (1) be funny and (2) subvert expectations, and the movie accomplishes both of those gloriously.
I’ve heard that the abruptness of the ending (or lack-of-ending) is because they ran out of money, and I do wonder what they might have come up with if they had had a bigger budget. But, anyone who’s watched their show should know that non-endings are totally on brand.
Exactly the movie I came in to mention.
Yeah, like I said:
That worked great in a half-hour sketch format, where you’re not spending more than three or four minutes with any character, and there’s no connective tissue between sketches beyond an occasional absurdist segue. In a feature film, with a defined set of characters and an over-arching plot, it simply doesn’t work.
The Pythons themselves seem to have realized this, and wrote an actual ending for Life of Brian. Hell, even Meaning of Life, which was, “What if the TV show, but movie?” actually had a coherent thematic throughline that Grail lacks.
Dodgeball was the same way. The original cut of the film ended when White Goodman hits Vince Vaughn’s character in the tournament. It tested poorly, so they added the “Sudden Death” sequence.