The incredible adventures of the laudable knight Branca Leone

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Movie
German title The incredible adventures of the laudable knight Branca Leone
Original title L'armata Brancaleone
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1966
length 120 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Mario Monicelli
script Age & Scarpelli
Mario Monicelli
production Mario Cecchi Gori
music Carlo Rustichelli
camera Carlo Di Palma
cut Ruggero Mastroianni
occupation

The unbelievable adventures of the highly praiseworthy knight Branca Leone ( L'armata Brancaleone ) is an Italian comedy film, more precisely a Commedia all'italiana , from 1966. Vittorio Gassman plays a tragicomic knight in the lead role . The screenplay comes from the writing duo Age & Scarpelli and Mario Monicelli , who also directed. The film was very successful with the Italian audience, so that four years later it was followed by Brancaleone on a crusade to the Holy Land .

action

In medieval Italy, a barbaric horde raids a village. They murder, rape and rob, until the knight Arnolfo, known as the "Iron Hand", appears and drives them to flight. The brigands Pecoro and Taccone, who were in hiding during the raid, knock him down and attack his chain mail and other pieces of armor; the thief Mangold joins them. When Arnolfo begins to rise again, they throw him into the ditch. They bring the looted property to the dealer Abacuc, a Jew who reads from Arnolfo's parchment scroll : The owner of the document owns the town and fortress Aurocastro, their fields, vineyards and cattle as a fief . They decide to enter into a deal with a knight: he, as a nobleman, is to become the liege lord of Aurocastro and share the goods with them. Abacuc suggests the knight Brancaleone for this, and they go to see him.

Brancaleone is the descendant of a family in decline. He proves to be a knight who makes pathetic speeches and adheres to his code of honor, but does not get anything done. First he refuses the offer because he is convinced that he will win a tournament in the joust and that he will be able to marry a wealthy lady. Failed because of the stubbornness of his horse, he does agree to the deal. He appoints the journeymen to be his "army" and they move towards Aurocastro. Soon the snooty young knight Teofilatto stands in their way. A duel brings no decision, and Teofilatto agrees to stay with them as their hostage. You reach a city that seems deserted and start to pillage. Brancaleone meets a surviving widow who points out the plague in the city; they run away again. The fanatical itinerant preacher Zenone and his entourage cross their path. The zealot believes himself invincible and leads his followers to Jerusalem to liberate the Holy Land. Brancaleone and his men join the procession. You cross a bridge over an abyss that collapses before the massive Pecoro has reached the other side. Zenone railed that there was an unbeliever among the people; they subject Abacuc to a compulsory baptism . Because the pilgrims are afraid of crossing the next bridge, Zenone goes ahead, hops on it and breaks into the depths. Brancaleone and his army separate from the pilgrims and once again pursue Aurocastro as their goal. On the way they meet Matelda, who has been led by her old teacher to the noble Guccione, whom she is to marry. They have been attacked, and before the teacher dies, Brancaleone swears to bring Matelda to Guccione unharmed. He resists the advances made by Matelda, who is in love with him, does not marry Guccione at all and therefore wants to lose her virginity before arriving. Teofilatto, with whom she secretly sleeps last night, is more helpful. The troupe delivers Matelda to Guccione's and joins the wedding banquet. The husband discovers the deception, refuses to marry, is angry and has Brancaleone locked in a hanging iron cage. The next day, Brancaleone's men release the cage from its suspension and take their knight to a blacksmith. He unlocks the door and, horny and desperate himself, becomes part of Brancaleone's army. He knows to report that Matelda was taken to a monastery. Brancaleone storms over to her and asks for her hand, but she prefers to remain a nun.

On the way, the troop passes Teofilatto's hometown. This convinces Brancaleone to hand him over there for a ransom. The entire Byzantine family is gathered in the castle . While Brancaleone withdraws with Teofilatto's aunt Teodora, who is sadomasochistic, Abacuc tries to negotiate a ransom. But the father thinks Teofilatto is a failed, illegitimate son who is worthless. Brancaleone's army runs away under threat of poisoned arrows. By chance they find the lost Pecoro again - a she-bear has taken him into her cave. Before they even reach Aurocastro, Abacuc dies. The residents of Aurocastro welcome the new master with enthusiasm, who comes just in time, because Saracen pirates are advancing on the place from the sea . While Brancaleone's "army" shows no desire to go into battle, he prepares a trap for the attackers, into which he and his people fall. The victorious pirates prepare to impal the heroes, and a Christian army appears to slaughter them. The joy of Brancaleone's people is short-lived, because the army leader is Arnulfo, whom Pecoro, Taccone and Mangold believed they had killed at the beginning of the story. He's about to put the usurpers of his fortress at the stake . At the last minute, Zenone passes by and gets Brancaleone and his men free because he needs them for his crusade. The heap moves away.

About the work

In 1966 , Brancaleone was the third most popular Italian film production among moviegoers and grossed 511 million lire. She took part in the competition at the Cannes Festival in 1966 . In Italy she won three Nastro d'Argento film awards for Best Color Camera, Best Costumes, and Best Music. In 1970 there was the sequel Brancaleone on Crusade to the Holy Land , again by Mario Monicelli and with Vittorio Gassman.

The central character of the film, the knight Brancaleone (in German "Löwenpranke"), is a tragicomic figure. With his chivalrous acts he aims to strengthen his aristocratic pride. Contrary to his noble intentions, he only causes more misery; nevertheless, his sense of honor cannot be reduced. The comedy takes an antiheroic stance, parodies the usual heroes from spectacular period films. Co-author Agenore Incrocci , dubbed Age, said they wanted a story of the little people, the opposite of the strong and courageous heroes. The script has a narrative structure similar to the picaresque novel . The independence of the individual adventures made it possible to change their order later. The sequence in which the heroes visit Teofilatto's family to get a ransom followed in the script right after Brancaleone and Teofilatto met. It is placed later in the finished film. According to "Age", there were no cinematic models for Brancaleone , but literary ones: The adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel , to which the German distribution title refers. The film does not portray the Middle Ages in a romantic and mystical way, but takes a new, ironic look at it, using knight poetry , Luigi Pulci and Don Quixote . Brancaleone's yellow-painted horse is as little support for him as the horse Rosinante was for Don Quixote. The film critic Aldo Tassone was of the opinion that Monicelli shows an “absolutely realistic Middle Ages, dumbfounded, cruel and above all miserable, in contrast to the talkative and hypocritical depiction in school books, where it teems with heroic knights, virtuous virgins, flower-covered balconies, tournaments and serenades. ”The comedy also has references to society and politics in Italy at the time it was written. It addresses the transition from tradition to modernity and the disintegration of community into individualistic selfishness.

In the original version, the characters use a diction that Age & Scarpelli have completely reinvented. It is a mixture of late Roman Latin , dialects from several Italian regions and student vulgar idiom. The linguistic uniqueness contributed to the popularity of the film. The term armata Brancaleone from the original title of the film went down as a standing phrase in the Italian language and is mainly used in newspapers. It describes a thrown together group of people who proceed in a disorderly, clumsy and ineffective manner and whose endeavors are doomed to failure.

The “turbulent comedy”, judged the film-dienst in 1968, is expressed, among other things, in hurtful dialogues: “It is not anti-religious and it is not anti-Semitic [...] but it is undifferentiated and sometimes crude. What is missing is fine irony, it is replaced by coarseness. ”Stylistically, the film is unbalanced, because in the scene of Abacuc's death the comedy tends to lean towards sentimentality. But Vittorio Gassman has mastered the language required for this as well as the comedy. Gili said in his History of Italian Comedy Film (1983) that Gassman gave Brancaleone an unforgettable presence. The film is one of the most amazing works of Italian cinema of the time. The technique of juxtaposing the funny with the desperate and grotesque has hardly ever worked as well as it did here. The two Brancaleone comedies were among the most original period films ever. Garel (1987) found that the portrayal of historical epochs - both in terms of appearance and mentality, customs and behavior - is often more realistic in comedies than in "serious" films. In Italian comedies in particular, one tries to fathom the causes and consequences of social, economic, political and cultural phenomena, mostly from the point of view of the common man. Brancaleone is one of the best examples of this. According to Di Giamatteo (1995), the narrative incessantly strives for laughter. At the center of the big play would be three extraordinary actors, Gassman, Volonté and Salerno.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carlo Celli, Marga Cottino-Jones: A new guide to Italian cinema . Palgrave, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4039-7560-7 , p. 176.
  2. ^ Rémi Fournier Lanzoni: Comedy Italian style . Continuum, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-8264-1822-7 , p. 255.
  3. ↑ a b film-dienst No. 37/1968, drawn by "EE"
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g Fernaldo Di Giammatteo: Dizionario del cinema italiano . Editori Reuniti, Rome 1995, ISBN 88-359-4008-7 , p. 26.
  5. ^ A b Marcia Landy: Italian film . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, ISBN 0-521-64009-1 , p. 154
  6. ↑ a b c Agenore Incrocci in conversation with Marie-Christine Questerbert: Les scénaristes italiens . 5 Continents / Hatier, Renens 1988, ISBN 2-218-01606-0 , p. 78
  7. ↑ Agenore Incrocci in conversation with Questerbert 1988, p. 80
  8. ↑ Aldo Tassone quoted. in Jean A. Gili: La comédie italienne . Henri Veyrier, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-85199-309-7 , pp. 142-143
  9. ^ Mary P. Wood: Italian cinema . Berg, Oxford 2005, ISBN 978-1-84520-161-6 , p. 47
  10. ↑ Grande dizionario della lingua italiana moderna. Volume 1, AD. Garzanti, Milan 1998, ISBN 88-11-30023-1 ; Tullio de Mauro (Ed.): Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso . Volume 1, A-Cg. UTET, Turin 1999, ISBN 88-02-05523-8 ; Nicola Zingarelli: Lo Zingarelli. Vocabolario della lingua italiana . 12th edition. Zanichelli, Bologna 2009, ISBN 978-88-08-10121-1 ; Giacomo Devoto, Gian Carlo Oli: Il Devoto-Oli 2010: Vocabolario della lingua italiana . Le Monnier, Milan 2009, ISBN 978-88-04-59374-4
  11. ^ Jean A. Gili: La comédie italienne . Henri Veyrier, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-85199-309-7 , pp. 142-144.
  12. ↑ Alain Garel, in conversation Un cinéma comique doué de sens social? In: CinémAction. No. 42: La comédie italienne de Don Camillo à Berlusconi . Corlet, Condé-sur-Noireau 1987, p. 20.