Monicelli's Rabelasian romp is a brilliant change of pace: here Vittorio Gassman takes on not middle age, but the Middle Ages. Elliott Stein writes, "In 1966 Italy (this) was a totally new kind of film. Italian films about the Middle Ages had traditionally been populated by noble heroes and virtuous maidens. Monicelli's is a violent, bawdy Punch-and-Judy romp set in a raunchy year 1000, with Gassman as the courageous, quixotic, but dumb knight errant, Brancaleone, who moves through weird landscapes accompanied by a scruffy little army of nincompoops, leprous Crusaders, a crusty but cuddly old Jew, and a young man who eventually settles down and marries a bear. There is a Byzantine fashion show. There (is) the eternally divine and perverse Barbara Steele....The music is catchissimo, the dialogue a marvel of invention. A new language was created for the film, a mixture of old Italian, Goliardic verse, and 'macaronic', kitchen Latin. Gassman does wonders with speeches of ungrammatical bombast. There are moments of real emotion here-you get to love these medieval marionettes." (Village Voice) Repeated Thursday, March 27.