Indeed, all the extras in Life of Brian were derived from the local population. Jones remembers, ‘They were all very knowing because they’d all worked for Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth, so I had these rather elderly Tunisian extras telling me, “Well, Mr Zeffirelli wouldn’t have done it like that, you know.”’
Another testing moment involving the locals was Graham Chapman’s nude scene. Famously, Chapman opens the shutters of his room stark-bollock-naked only to discover hordes of disciples waiting outside. The problem was that half of the 300 extras were women, and Muslim women to boot, whose law forbade them to see such wanton aberrations. ‘It’s absolutely forbidden for them to even think of viewing naughty bits,’ Chapman later recalled. ‘So when I flung open the shutters, half the crowd ran away screaming.’
In January 1979, a two-and-a-quarter-hour rough cut of Brian was screened in London to an invited audience and over the next few months scenes were jigged about, cut, reinstated, then cut again. Originally, the film was to have opened on three shepherds in a field nonchalantly discussing the merits of sheep, ‘...while in the background you get a star going across, you get wise men going past, you get the angel coming down,’ Terry Gilliam explains. ‘This great event is taking place while they’re facing towards camera talking about sheep.’ Very funny, but apparently not a rousing enough comedy set piece to start off the film with the requisite bang. So out it went.
Other cut scenes included Cleese dragged up as Pontius Pilate’s wife and, most significantly of all, Eric Idle’s Jewish terrorist Otto, recalled fondly by Gilliam. ‘Otto is this character fighting for a state of Israel that will last a thousand years; no riff-raff, no gypsies. He had this terrible armour and I was pleased I turned the star of David into a swastika. It was a big mistake leaving it out. I think Eric, who wrote the sketch and played the lead, was spending a lot of time in Hollywood and he suddenly thought too many Jewish friends were going to take offence at this, but I thought it was such a funny scene, it was outrageous.’
Idle, of course, recalls events a little differently. ‘I think Otto is what got the Jewish population very upset, mainly because old Gilliam had put a swastika on the star of David, which is like a red rag to a fucking bull. It was also out of place. I was responsible for pulling it out at the end and the reason was I felt the movie moved better without it because you suddenly had Otto come in at about the seventieth minute, a totally new character with totally new ideas and it was when the film is starting to wrap up and head towards the exit; it unbalanced it. If he’d been introduced in the twentieth minute, that’s fine.’
Four hundred years ago, the Pythons might well have been burnt at the stake for making Life of Brian. But this was, after all, the late twentieth century and the rather antiquated British blasphemy laws were something of an irrelevance. That was until July 1977, when Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed guardian of national morals and all-round spoil-sport, won a blasphemy libel case against Gay News for publishing a poem about a Roman centurion’s homo-erotic leanings towards the crucified Christ. It was the first successful prosecution for blasphemous libel since the 1920s and had a personal resonance within the Python camp, for Chapman had helped launch Gay News and was an ardent supporter of gay rights. The possibility of being found guilty of blasphemy over Brian was now a very real, if distant, threat, something that so enraged Cleese particularly that he publicly declared his wish to go to prison rather than yield to the Mary Whitehouse lobby. In such a climate, it was decided to open Life of Brian first in America where freedom of speech and religious choice is enshrined in the constitution. Or so it was thought.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian received its world première in New York on 17 August 1979, the same week as Apocalypse Now and The Muppet Movie. Critics cited the film’s extreme tastelessness, but neither were they blind to its obvious comic majesty. The New York Times’s description of it being ‘a nonstop orgy of assaults, not on anyone’s virtue, but on the funny bone’ was fairly typical. Newsweek loved it, too. ‘Though the pious will blanch, Pythonmaniacs should find this film a treasure trove of unborn-again humour.’
One of the few detractors was the noted New York critic David Denby who called Brian ‘a truly lousy movie. The boys try very hard to be outrageous but most of their work is dumb, repetitive and unfunny.’
The opening salvo in what became a heated and often surreal religious war of words arrived on 19 August from Rabbi Abraham Hecht, President of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, who claimed to speak for half a million Jews. Hecht denounced Brian as ‘blasphemous and sacrilegious’. Speaking in Variety, the film industry’s bible (no pun intended), he declared, ‘Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.’ Hecht went on to make public his view that Brian ‘was produced in Hell’.
Hecht’s genuine if misguided fear was that Brian would weave a corrupting spell over the impressionable minds of young cinema-goers, leaving them with a contaminated view of religion. ‘This film is so grievously insulting that we are genuinely concerned that its continued showing could result in serious violence.’ This was no idle threat on Hecht’s part; already, patrons outside some New York cinemas were being barracked by placard-waving demonstrators. ‘Repent all ye who enter this place,’ the opponents would wail, ‘you are all vile sinners. Turn away from this film.’
After Rabbi Hecht’s denunciation, outraged religious leaders queued up to vent their spleen to any hack with a microphone, in stark contrast to other more liberal churchmen who defended the film’s right to be shown. The voice of Protestant protest belonged to Robert E A Lee of the Lutheran Council, whose tirade against Brian — ‘crude and rude mockery, colossal bad taste, profane parody. A disgraceful assault on religious sensitivity’ — was broadcast over 1,000 radio stations. Not to be outdone, the Catholic film-monitoring office rated Brian ‘C’ for ‘Condemned’ and implored its flock not to visit theatres where it was playing, it being a sin to do so.
Embarrassed by the gathering storm of controversy, Warner Brothers, the US distributor of Brian, issued a statement regretting any offence that may have been caused. ‘The film is a satire,’ it read, ‘and should be viewed in this context.’ Indeed, the Australian film journal Cinema Papers suggested that Brian was saved from blasphemy by its sheer vulgarity, dismissing it as merely an expensive piece of slapstick, ‘as if the writers of the Carry On films have teamed with the design staff of Dino de Laurentiis’.
And, if anything, the protests increased. Failing in their bid to bring a prosecution against the Python movie, assorted religious groups combined to march as one upon the Warner Communications building at the Rockerfeller Center. Gilliam says of that time, ‘I thought at least getting the Catholics, Protestants and Jews all protesting against our movie was fairly ecumenical on our part. We only missed out on the Muslims. And I thought that was pretty fantastic to see, marching in the streets with placards against Brian. We had achieved something useful.’
Naturally, the protests and marches only served to heighten Brian’s media profile and so increase its box-office take. Nothing sells better than when it comes attached to the whiff of notoriety. When the shit started hitting the fan Stateside, the original plan to open Brian on 200 screens nationwide snowballed to nearer 600. ‘They have actually made me rich,’ Cleese ribbed on an American chat show. ‘I feel we should send them a crate of champagne or something.’
Generally classed as Britain’s comedy bad boys, Python were no strangers to controversy, it’s true, so perhaps their reputation preceded them. But one should remember that, in America circa 1979, they were scarcely mainstream, more of a cult. ‘When Life of Brian opened,’ Terry Jones remembers, ‘we organised a party in our New York hotel and the only people who came were us.’ Perversely, the cause célèbre Brian provoked was probably what shot Python into the US popular culture spotlight. John Cleese adds, ‘You see, the first movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, had done no business at all in America,
and Grail was only a very mild hit. We were beginning to get known and we were on television, but Brian moved us up a couple of divisions so far as notoriety was concerned.’
In September 1979, Life of Brian opened across America and trouble was quick to boil over in the southern states of the Bible Belt, where fundamentalism and reactionary politics is a way of life. Cinemas were picketed and theatre managers faced the prospect of prosecution for criminal blasphemy. Often, Brian would open only to close again due to local pressure. In at least two states, it was banned outright. In Columbia, South Carolina, Brian lasted just 24 hours before being pulled from screens, leading to counter-protests where pickets held up signs urging ‘Resurrect Brian. — Crucify Censors’. Neither was the madness restricted to the Bible Belt. In Waco, Texas, one theatre showing Brian received a bomb threat.
In Britain, the war against Life of Brian was fought a little differently. The most vociferous critics were the Nationwide Festival of Light, a watchdog association working in league with Mary Whitehouse, who opened the batting by lobbying the British Board of Film Censors to refuse Brian a certificate. They failed and it was passed uncut as an AA (the equivalent of a 15 today) after much legal advice. The then British censor James Ferman publicly defended the decision. ‘We took the view that 14-year-olds are quite capable of telling the difference between a lampoon and a serious attack upon people’s religious beliefs.’ Unperturbed, the Festival of Light, supported by the Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, began circulating anti-Brian literature and even encouraged their Christian members to pray for the film’s downfall.
With protest against the picture almost inevitable, distributors CIC moved cautiously, deciding to launch Brian in just one London cinema, waiting until after the religiously sensitive Christmas period before putting it out on general release. So Life of Brian opened exclusively at the Plaza, Lower Regent Street, on 8 November 1979 and, in spite of hymn-singing demonstrators outside, went on to break box-office records, raking in £40,000 in its first week, smashing the previous house record set by Jaws.
The film was backed by an ingenious advertising campaign in which each Python recruited either a relative or friend (Gilliam’s mum, Palin’s dentist) to present their own radio spot. By far the best was Cleese’s 80-year-old mother Muriel, who reads an appeal to listeners claiming she is 102 years old and kept in a retirement home by her son, and that unless enough people see his new film and make him richer, he will throw her into the streets where she will assuredly perish. The ad won a delighted Muriel an award for best radio entertainment commercial of 1979.
The press certainly were on Brian’s side, calling it the group’s most disciplined and consistently funny movie yet, running the whole gamut of Python humour from fourth-form gags to inspired lunacy and high satire. ‘At the risk of hellfire, I recommend it,’ wrote the Sunday People. ‘An incorrigible delight,’ raved the New Statesman. ‘You have to respect a film that can make as many enemies as Life of Brian,’ purred The Times. Perhaps the Daily Mirror summed it up the most astutely: ‘If anyone’s faith is to be shattered by an outrageously funny parody, then that faith is not worth a fig.’
The day after the London opening, John Cleese and Michael Palin famously appeared on a late-night BBC2 discussion programme hosted by Tim Rice, himself no stranger to religious controversy as the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar. Their inquisitors were Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Both harangued Brian from the outset calling it ‘a squalid little film... tenth rate’, and no amount of measured argument on Python’s part would dissuade the pious double act of their firmly held belief that Life of Brian mocked Christ. Michael Palin recalls, ‘We went on that programme and we’d done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slinging match. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it. And it was really the way they played to the audience that got me. We weren’t defeated in argument at all. John was brilliant. What they were trying to do was to sort of smirk at the audience and belittle what we’d done and that seemed so out of touch and so stupid and so mistaken. I mean, how do they think the film was made? That we go in there one night, write the script and the film’s made the next morning? They don’t realise we’d been working on it for two years, we’d studied, that we had an opinion and we had an attitude, but they wouldn’t let us have that. So it was their condescension that really got me irritated.’ Gilliam remembers having never seen Palin quite so pissed off before.
As the debate reached its conclusion, Stockwood, dressed grandly in purple cassock and pompously fondling his crucifix in a way that was devastatingly lampooned by Rowan Atkinson a week later on a Not the Nine O’clock News sketch, delivered his parting shot of, ‘You’ll get your 30 pieces of silver.’ Cleese sums up the affair best, observing dryly, ‘I always felt we won that one by behaving better than the Christians.’
It was only after the show that the Pythons learnt that both Muggeridge and Stockwood had turned up at a preview of the film late so had missed the first 15 minutes. Jones fumed, ‘So how they had the fucking cheek to sit there pontificating about “Of course, Brian is really Christ” when they’d missed the beginning. That’s actually typical, really, of people who were up in arms against it... usually they’d never seen the film.’ Chapman also felt aggrieved that most churchmen condemned Brian out of hand without watching it first. ‘But then,’ he argued at the time, ‘that’s the prerogative of a bigot, isn’t it?’
When Life of Brian opened across Britain in the new year, the battle lines altered dramatically and Python became a victim of regional censorship. ‘There was a loophole in the law,’ Palin says, ‘local authorities had power over certain cinemas through health regulations and they used this extraordinary clause to ban Monty Python because it was unhealthy. I don’t know if they thought it would spread diseases in cinemas. This was the obscure clause that they used, so it meant that local authorities could ban our film from their cinemas wherever it had been licensed. It was a very odd state of affairs, but it didn’t half help the film, as things like that do. I mean, a ban only really works if something disappears completely. It was banned in Swansea so people went to a little cinema in Porthcawl which was just about to go bankrupt and suddenly people were coming in coachloads, students coming out from Swansea.’
Life of Brian ended up being banned in Harrogate, parts of Surrey, East Devon (where councillors refused even to watch it, arguing, ‘You don’t have to see a pigsty to know that it stinks’) and Cornwall (where, after one screening, a local councillor rather overstated the case by arguing for all the participants in the film to be locked up in Broadmoor). Gilliam noted, ‘In Britain it was banned in different towns; what that meant was that people in those towns organised charabancs and went to the neighbouring town where it was showing. But in the States they banned it in the Bible Belt area and nobody went. You see, the British can’t be controlled and the Americans can... that’s what we learnt over that.’
Incredibly, Life of Brian remained banned in Swansea until 1997 when it was finally permitted to be shown in cinemas in aid of Comic Relief. Informed of the ban’s lifting, Eric Idle told the press, ‘What a shame. Is nothing sacred?’
With Brian raking in £20,000 a week in London’s West End alone, those renegade councils presented no problem financially speaking; indeed, their actions continued to keep the film in the media spotlight and helped it become the fourth most successful picture of the year in the UK, the only British-made film in an otherwise American-dominated top ten. Surely a case for some patriotic pride.
Censorship problems weren’t the sole domain of America and Britain, though. When Life of Brian went global, it was banned outright in Ireland, whose distributors didn’t even try getting the film past the Republic’s strict censorship laws. It was the same in Norway, where the country’s
Film Control Board decided unanimously that Brian was both blasphemous and against Norwegian law. Not to be outdone, Python flogged it to Sweden with the slogan: ‘The film that was so funny it was banned in Norway’.
Even in 1985, Life of Brian was still courting controversy when the Independent Broadcasting Authority ordered Channel 4, who owned the television rights, not to go ahead with any broadcast as, ‘it would undoubtedly cause offence to a large number of practising Christians’. They said nothing about those who’d already got the hang of it. The decision infuriated Channel 4’s then Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs, who later admitted that Brian was ‘the film I fought hardest for and lost every round over’. Finally shown in April 1991, Channel 4 was predictably showered with complaints, the main bulk of which it received prior to transmission.
It would be naive in the extreme to suggest that Python never anticipated some flak over Brian, but the sheer volume of the controversy did genuinely surprise all of them, Cleese included. ‘We thought a few people might be offended, but it’s the sort of offence that seems to last about 12 months and then they forget about it. Very frequently, the people who protest are the heads of organisations and they feel that they should protest in case any of their members criticise them for not doing so. It’s one of those slightly ritual dances that you go through.’
Eric Idle adds, ‘I didn’t expect that level of response because I thought we’d been quite good, we’d avoided being specifically rude to specific groups. But some people, they don’t want free speech, they don’t want people examining it because a lot of it is just rubbish. A lot of religion is good and a lot of it’s true, and a lot of it isn’t. Everybody can’t be right in religion; every one of the seven major religions can’t all be right, somebody’s got to be wrong. If you intimidate people by fear, use the word God, then you’re restricting their views, you’re saying, “We are the people who tell you what God says.” That’s obvious nonsense.’
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