For Love and Gold

An Italian medieval comedy. Brancaleone is a man who has declared himself a knight. He has a horse, a piece of armour and a document; the document says a piece of land belongs to him. The document is stolen. He sets out. He gathers a few people around him: a beggar, a thief, a fugitive, all hungry and all hoping for something. From there the film is a journey. Plague, bandits, monks, Byzantines, a wedding and a siege; the episodes are loosely joined. The most striking thing about it is the language. The film does not use real medieval Italian; instead an invented tongue was built out of Latin, dialects and made-up words, and the whole film is spoken in it. The second idea is the look. The costumes and locations are deliberately filthy, falling apart and comic; a choice set against the clean surfaces of period films. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but hunger: Brancaleone makes grand speeches constantly and what the group actually wants is a meal. Vittorio Gassman plays Brancaleone and the part counts among his best-known work. Catherine Spaak, Folco Lulli and Gian Maria Volonté are in the cast. Mario Monicelli directed. A sequel followed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Italian comedy and unusual period films. Who it is not for: anyone watching with subtitles; the language is invented and some of the jokes are lost in translation.