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, "Far less known and more interesting (than Big Deal on Madonna Street) is (Monicelli's) L'Armata Brancaleone, which in 1966 Italy 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 are...Maria Grazia Buccella, Catherine Spaak, and 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' and kitchen Latin. Gassman does wonders with speeches of ungrammatical bombast. There are moments of real emotion here-you get to love these medieval marionettes. Brancaleone is Monicelli's most personal project-a film he obviously loved doing.... The joy is contagious." (Village Voice, 6/17/86)