I realize comedy is very subjective as some folks prefer broad laughs and others opt for dark humor. That doesn’t make The Court Jester “check your brain at the door” entertainment the intrigues and wordplay demand you pay attention.I recently watched The Court Jester (1955) for perhaps the tenth time-and laughed just as much as the first time. If the last few years have shown that life, contrary to the film’s opening song, could better be, escaping into a world where it couldn’t for an hour and a half is still a valuable respite. But the unabashed sunniness of films like The Court Jester, a distinctly American variety of optimism (despite the English setting), is something missed as a mainstay of popular culture. And that’s not inherently bad genres should be able to encompass a variety of points of view. Comedy and fantasy can still be colorful and glass-half-full in outlook, but as both genres have expanded over time, there’s also been a trend towards more complicated, and more cynical, narratives. Perhaps the aspect of The Court Jester most like its era, and most appealing today, is its bright optimism. Potts, The Court Jester is worth a watch just to see what she can do with an empty-headed comic part. If you only know Lansbury through roles such as kindly Mrs. She who would be the Maid Marian figure in a true swashbuckler is instead a self-absorbed dilettante of romance who holds the threat of death over her hapless witch-counselor Griselda ( Mildred Natwick) if she can’t deliver a gallant suitor. It brings laughs to the genre without belittling or subverting it – except for the princess Gwendolyn, played by a young Angela Lansbury. The result is a hilarious succession of mistaken identities and crossed-wire schemes by heroes and villains alike.
The Court Jester is more a comedy of errors than a total parody, with many of the traditional adventure story beats played seriously but with the “wrong” protagonist cursed with bad timing. Hawkins himself isn’t stupid or incompetent, only unprepared and uninformed. His time with it isn’t made any easier through bumbling of the villains Cecil Parker’s evil king may have a comic side to him, but Basil Rathbone’s Lord Ravenhurst is the true antagonist, and every bit as cunning and ruthless as the baddies Rathbone played in straight swashbucklers. Hawkins doesn’t get caught in such a predicament because of any failure or betrayal by the hero the Black Fox is as loyal, courageous, and clever as Robin Hood. Some might even say the style’s become too ubiquitous, and that chasing after trends like this is more a detriment than a delight – but that’s for another day. Whether it’s Disney poking its own well-worn conventions of princesses and romance, Spider-Man: No Way Home winking toward that famous pointing meme, or every single time your friends and relations share some variation on a meme through social media, meta humor is all around us. In the age of the Internet, we’re all accustomed to self-referential media. The Court Jester is a send-up, and in that respect is well-suited to certain audiences of today. This didn’t hold either back from delighting audiences and garnering greater praise with successive generations.įor all its bright colors and gentle humor, though, The Wizard of Oz is a straightforward fantasy. And both films, unusually expensive for their time, failed to turn a profit on initial release. Both advertised their use of glorious Technicolor, though by 1955 this meant color services rather than the three-strip photographic process. They both had multiple cooks in the creative kitchen, in Jester’s case the writer/producer/director team of Melvin Frank and Norman Panama.
The Court Jester shares a few odd parallels with The Wizard of Oz.
0 kommentar(er)
