Director Terry Gilliam’s multi-million-dollar epic fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was a notorious box-office bomb on its release in 1989. The Criterion Collection’s superb 4K digital restoration shows, however, that the film remains a dazzlingly spectacular celebration of the importance and power of the imagination, and as audacious in its own way as the legendary exploits told by its eponymous hero. For years, Munchausen has been better known for its famously calamitous production than its cinematic qualities, which makes it all the more deserving of rediscovery. And the claim Gilliam made when I interviewed him back in 1989 has been borne out by time: Munchausen actually is a film that improves when you watch it for a second or third time.
Terry Gilliam couldn’t help seeing the funny side of things. The Monty Python animator-turned-director’s 1988 film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, had wound up costing somewhere in the region of £45million and needed to do Star Wars-scale business at the box-office to break even. Suffice to say, it didn’t. Still, Gilliam couldn’t stop beaming as he reflected on it all. Great volcanic chuckles continually erupted as he recounted the multitude of disasters that occurred during the movie’s creation, catastrophes that made the filming of those notorious 1980s Hollywood flops Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar look like picnics.
‘We were two weeks behind schedule in the first week and it just got stranger and more bizarre. The making of the film was just like the film itself. The Baron is always almost dying and there’s a theme song, “What will become of the Baron? Surely this time there is no escape?”, which became our theme song because at every point there was another disaster: I was going to be fired, the film was being taken over… On it went, but we got through it. We set out to have an adventure and we did.’
Knickers
Incredible though it may seem, there was a real Baron Munchausen, one Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, a German cavalry officer under Frederick the Great, who became legendary in the Europe of the 1800s as a teller of fabulously exaggerated exploits. Every bit as audacious and improbable as the Baron’s tales, Gilliam’s film opens in a nameless 18th-century European city that is under siege by the army of the Ottoman Empire. There, in the midst of bombardment, we find flailing actor-manager Henry Salt (Bill Paterson) and his moth-eaten theatrical troupe attempting to stage a play featuring a number of the Baron’s tallest tales – travelling to the moon in a balloon made from ladies’ knickers, hobnobbing with Vulcan and Venus in the bowels of Mount Etna, getting swallowed by a giant sea monster… The production is halted, however, by the figure of the elderly Baron himself (wonderfully played by veteran Shakespearian actor John Neville), who insists on his own version of these true events. Somehow, his telling of them then slips and merges into another adventure in which the Baron, accompanied by Salt’s wide-eyed young daughter Sally (played by nine-year-old Sarah Polley, the future director of Away from Her, Stories We Tell and Women Talking), raises the siege of the city with the aid of his four estimable servants.
Putting all this on film was no less implausible a feat than any of the Baron’s wildest exploits. And, although Gilliam was able to laugh uproariously about it all afterwards (and still does, as his audio commentary on the Criterion release shows), something of a nightmare at the time.
‘I’d reached the point,’ he recalls, ‘ where I really thought I wasn’t going to make films again because it was so unpleasant and painful. It wasn’t dramatic, it was just this long, nagging, gnawing unpleasantness.’
‘Intelligent enough for kids and exciting enough for adults’
For Gilliam, directing a multinational, multilingual crew, both on location in northern Spain and in the studio at Cinecitta in Rome and Pinewood in the UK, was like being the overseer on the Tower of Babel. The film’s production designer (Dante Ferretti), cinematographer (Giuseppe Rotunno) and costume designer (Gabrielle Pescucci) and their teams were Italian, the sound crew German, the special effects specialists British, and the Assistant Director Spanish. Filming the crucial scene of the Baron’s escape from the city by balloon involved a race against time, the setting sun and a howling gale, as well as precarious communication via walkie-talkie with an Italian stuntman who didn’t speak any English and a Pakistani dwarf with a cleft palate.
Take after take went wrong, with the balloon flying every which way but the one intended. Then at the last possible opportunity, everything somehow came together.
‘At that moment, the clouds opened up for the first time that day, the sun hit the balloon, and off it went. It was glorious. That was the day we knew we would finish the film.’
The completed scene still looks wonderful, as indeed does the whole film. Against the odds, Gilliam succeeded in creating a positively gargantuan epic, an embarras de richesses, visually sumptuous, farcical and romantic, spectacular and intimate, teeming with invention and wit. A film that is, in his own words, ‘intelligent enough for kids and exciting enough for adults’.
The approbation of children is crucial. Like Gilliam’s earlier films Time Bandits and Brazil, Baron Munchausen gloriously celebrates the invigorating power of fantasy. Not for nothing does the film take place during the Age of Reason, in a world remorselessly organised around the principles of logical thinking and rational behaviour. Of course, such a world has no place for the Baron. ‘We must face the facts and not the folly of fantasists like you,’ he is told by the town’s mayor (and the film’s villain), the totally rational man, the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (played by Jonathan Pryce in a role diametrically opposed to his dreamer, Sam Lowry, in Gilliam’s Brazil).
In the film, the Baron’s fantasies prevail and the town is saved. But our own society, Gilliam suggests, has travelled too far down the opposing path, the way of science and logic – as is made clear in the scene in which Vulcan, God of Armaments (played by Oliver Reed as a bluff North Country industrialist), shows the Baron his latest invention – nuclear missiles.
Cartesian Slapstick
In another scene, a cameo of manic improvisational brilliance from an uncredited Robin Williams, the Baron visits the King of the Moon, who is 60-feet tall and has a detachable head. The total incompatibility of the king’s coolly rational head and earthily sensuous body makes wonderful slapstick comedy out of Cartesian dualism.
Williams’ performance, like his character, and indeed the film itself, threatens to career out of control but, like the film, never quite does so. Admittedly, Munchausen is perhaps neither as thrilling nor as funny as it could have been, but Gilliam’s maverick genius is abundantly visible. His cast is magnificent, from Neville’s twinkling Baron to Polley’s endearing Sally and a luminous 17-year-old Uma Thurman as Venus. Above all, the film is flamboyantly spectacular and some shots, such as the Baron’s craft drifting across an iridescent moonscape, simply take your breath away.
‘It’s terribly rich,’ Gilliam grins. ‘I just thought, let’s do it. Let’s not compromise, let’s go all the way and see if people can take it.
‘I think being in Rome was a great influence on the film. That very Baroque, operatic, flamboyant style. Everything is totally over the top. There’s hardly a quiet moment in the film. It’s probably too much. I hope people don’t mind getting too much for their money.
‘The great thing about the film is that it actually is better the second or third time. It’s so rich you miss half the goodies the first time. That’s my secret plan. That’s how we’ll get the money back.’
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
DIRECTOR APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by writer-director Terry Gilliam, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring Gilliam and his co-screenwriter, Charles McKeown
- Documentary on the making of the film
- New video essay by critic and filmmaker David Cairns about the history of the Baron Munchausen character
- Behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s special effects, narrated by Gilliam
- Deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam
- Storyboards for unfilmed scenes, narrated by Gilliam and McKeown
- Original marketing materials including a trailer and electronic-press-kit featurettes, as well as preview cards and advertising proposals read by Gilliam
- Miracle of Flight (1974), an animated short film by Gilliam
- Episode of The South Bank Show from 1991 on Gilliam
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic and author Michael Koresky
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