Start the Revolution Without Me (1970)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent but underrated film

A Masterpiece!

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

On their way to Paris, Duke de Sissi and his pregnant wife stop at a country doctor's home to deliver. A peasant couple is already there. Both couples have twin boys but the busy doctor gets the babies mixed up. In 1789, brothers Charles (Donald Sutherland) and Claude Coupé (Gene Wilder) are two cowardly peasant revolutionaries. Philippe (Gene Wilder) and Pierre DeSisi (Donald Sutherland) are arrogant aristocrats in Corsica. King Louis XVI is in his summer palace. His wife Marie Antoinette is interested in all the men except her husband. Duke d'Escargot is scheming in the royal court. He delivers a letter from Marie to the Desisis with a scheme to betray the King. They plan to come in disguise but their peasant twins get mistaken for them.This comedy has some good wackiness but it does get repetitive. This depends a lot on the pairing of Sutherland and Wilder. They are likable enough but they do pale in comparison. Sutherland has done better. Wilder would eventually find his comedic soulmate in Richard Pryor. It's a wacky historical comedy that has its wacky moments.

The plot is older than the ancient Greeks--twins mixed up at birth. But the stars are a scream. And the notion that Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland grew as twin brothers (one pair noble and the other a disgrace), is just one of the many bits of comedy of absurd that fill this slight but hysterical little movie.The wife of the noble version of Gene Wilder is also priceless, forever dressing up in costumes in vain efforts to satisfy his somewhat odd collection of sexual fetishes.But the real reason to see this gem is Hugh ("I thought it was a costume ball") Griffith as King Louis. He outclasses anyone within walking distance, even the great Sutherland. And absolutely effortlessly. The device that uses Orson Welles may or not work -- you have to decide. (Don't be too hard on Orson -- this was from the "We will serve no wine before its time" phase of his career.) But if you come across this on cable late some night, have a good time. It's obvious everyone who made the movie did.

Funny film features Gene Wilder in one of his very best performances. He and Donald Sutherland score as both sets of identical twins but no one can match the comedic intensity Wilder brings to the role of the pompous psycho with the dead stuffed hawk on his arm. It's a great gag and ranks with his best work -The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles- and even some of the film performances of Peter Sellers -Dr. Strangelove, his Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series. It's a good time!

Just thinking of the "bits" in this masterpiece, sends me into hysterics. The dead hawk on Gene Wilder's arm; (before or after M. Python's dead parrot bit?), the "it's a pleasure doing business with you" bit; when they open a dungeon door to release a prisoner who has been chained to a wall for twenty years, and his first words to the jailer is, "That's a nice suit. Did you just buy it?" (It's eighteenth century France). All done in low key, straight faced, English style. It looks like the only advice Bud Yorkin the director gave this great cast was, "Forget this is a comedy. Act like it's a regular Louis VXI historical presentation. It worked like a charm. The Duke d'Escargot is played by Victor Spinetti, one of my favorite comedians, who for some reason did not reach the international fame I think he deserved. I start laughing even before he says something, and you know when he does say something it will be a piece of nonsense that you'll end up believing, because he says it with such sincerity you just gotta believe the guy. And the rest of the cast.Gene Wilder, Donald Sutherland, Billie Whitelaw, Hugh Griffith, Murray Melvin. Even I could be a Fellini with these "heavy hitters".