THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
Lie Hard
★★★★★
EXTRAS ★★★★ 1/2
RELEASED 30 JANUARY 1988 | 12 | Blu-ray
Director Terry Gilliam
Cast John Neville, Sarah Polley,
Eric Idle, Oliver Reed
It’s fitting that a film about a legendary fabulist should spawn its own movieland myth: Terry Gilliam’s overreaching folly, all undisciplined vision and two fingers to studio bean-counters. Heaven’s Gate with elephants, knickers and cannonballs.
Three decades on from the tabloid roasting that accompanied its troubled production – and blessed with a new 4K restoration that allows its hand-crafted spectacle to truly shine – this salute to the power of fantasy is revealed more than ever as the ex-python’s unsung masterpiece.
Yes, it’s episodic, tumbling from peril to peril, but then the original adventures of the Baron (as detailed by German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in his 1785 novel) were just as rambling.
Ranging from the Moon to the belly of a monster fish, it’s a witty, inventive ride, energised by star turns – Robin Williams, Oliver Reed, a nascent Uma Thurman – and dripping with Gilliam’s love of cinema itself as he homages everything from Georges Méliès’s fin de siècle lunar landscapes to classic
Arabian fantasias like The Thief Of Bagdad. A truly unnerving Angel of Death, all animatronic bones and hungry scythe, provides gothic seasoning. If it’s a folly, it’s a grand one.
Extras A three-part 2008 documentary (72 minutes) is electrifyingly candid; from Eric Idle saying it was “a truly horrible experience” to an accusation that the master negative was actually kidnapped, it’s a compelling examination of creative faultlines and duelling egos.
Gilliam provides an equally engaging commentary alongside co-writer Charles Mckeown, and introduces the storyboards for scenes sacrificed to the money gods (30 minutes) as well as some fairly inconsequential deleted scenes (four minutes). A set of features on the film’s marketing campaign (30 minutes) has him reading out not only dreadful attempts at taglines but audience comments from catastrophic test screenings (“It blue dead dogs!”).
Gilliam’s on hilariously snitty form, but you sense the bitterness. A behind-the-scenes look at the effects (16 minutes) is genuinely revelatory. Critic David Cairns provides a fascinating video essay on the Baron’s lineage, including tantalising glimpses of earlier productions (17 minutes).
Also included: an illuminating South Bank Show retrospective on Gilliam (47 minutes); “Miracle Of Flight”, a characteristically whimsical Gilliam animated short from 1974 (five minutes); an essay by critic Michael Koresky; original trailer and production featurette (eight minutes). Nick Setchfield
Peter O’toole and Jon Pertwee were reportedly in the frame for the role of the Baron, eventually played by John Neville.