Start The Revolution Without Me
Inspired spoofery! A dazzling and sustained farce. Wilder and Sutherland perform magically.-Los Angeles Times
Produced and directed by comedy veteran Bud Yorkin, Start the Revolution Without Me broke ground for a comedy revolution. It takes the tumultuous "let them eat cake" days of the French Revolution and gives everyone a figurative pie in the face. Two sets of twins are mismatched at birth so that years later, each set will have one Gene Wilder and one Donald Sutherland. One set grows up to be aristocratic swashbucklers, the other set are peasants. In a hilarious fluke of fate, they crisscross across classes. In the years following Start the Revolution Without Me, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker team would all create madcap comedy masterpieces. A lineup like that must have had a tremendous Start.
Member Reviews
Before its time, but not before ours. - Superdave
At its best, this classy-looking, fast-paced spoof of the literary classic The Corsican Brothers, is brilliant, and even the stuff that doesn't quite work is still fairly entertaining. Oddly, the movie bombed in its day, and this was surely a quirk of timing. If this movie had come out a couple of years later, in the wake of Sutherland's star-making turn in MASH, it would have been a huge hit. As it was, the stars were not yet well known, and the cutesy comedy spoofs of the 60s had not quite given way to the satiric, anarchic, nihilistic Robert Altman-style comedy of the early seventies, and the wild zaniness of Mel Brooks. This one sort of straddles the gap, not quite fitting the older mold, but pre-dating the hits soon to come. As a result, audiences were not quite ready for this one, but more modern audiences should be. There is a lot of very clever historical, literary and even movie satire and spoofery going on here and everything is served up at breakneck speed, as zany comedy properly should. The historical look of the film is uniformly excellent, almost distractingly good - no anachronistic gags here, as everything is kept period accurate. Wilder and Sutherland are a brilliant team and surprisingly they never worked together again, despite being two of the most popular stars of the 70s. Enjoy this, their single teaming.
Member Reviews
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Before its time, but not before ours. - Superdave
At its best, this classy-looking, fast-paced spoof of the literary classic The Corsican Brothers, is brilliant, and even the stuff that doesn't quite work is still fairly entertaining. Oddly, the movie bombed in its day, and this was surely a quirk of timing. ...