Too Much Fun To Lose Your Head

"Louis?" scoffs Marie Antoinette. "He has the brains of a chicken." In the metaphoric excess of cinema courtiers, the Duke d'Escargot reminds her: "The brains of a chicken coupled with the claws of two eagles may hatch the eggs of our destruction."

The dialogue of Start the Revolution Without Me oscillates between satire of late Chateaubriand and early Coward. Such deliberate flatulence and obvious double-entendres make for bright, brittle repartee but also a total lack of focus. The film first spoofs Fairbanks-Flynn epics. Then it attempts to satirize Byzantine court intrigue and ends in boudoir farce. In his overzealous attempt to create rococo madness, Producer-Director Bud Yorkin ignores comic economy. Orson Welles' opening narration is gratuitous, and his appearance at the end creates an anticlimax that almost guillotines the movie.

Perfumed Fringes. Still, this is one French Revolution that is too much fun for anyone to lose his head over critical objections. The film's condemned premise is that the revolution could have been averted. The Duke de Sisi of Corsica and a bumptious farmer have their respective sets of twin boys mixed up by. a harried doctor. One unmatched pair (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland) become the murderous, exquisitely aberrant "Corsican Brothers," existing on the perfumed fringes of the aristocracy. The other two (also Wilder and Sutherland) grow up to be swinish revolutionary hangers-on.

The Duke d'Escargot (played with prinking precision by Victor Spinetti) persuades the Corsican Brothers to help him overthrow Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith). As the Corsicans approach Paris in disguise, their boat is attacked by the revolutionaries. In the fray the peasant brothers filch their counterparts' violin case containing their noble credentials. After that, le deluge.

Incipient Insanity. What keeps this centrifugal production from flying apart is extravagantly funny performances by Wilder, Griffith and--especially--Sutherland. Wilder's frenetic talents are perfectly pitched to the neurasthenic Philippe de Sisi. Griffith wears his patented oblique stare of incipient insanity as the feckless, fatuous Louis. Sutherland is both immensely vital and painstakingly subtle. His lumbering lout is a Gallic version of Steinbeck's Lennie. Yet with a tiny moue he transforms the sow's-ear peasant into a silken, purse-lipped aristocrat. Alternately bumbling and mincing, Sutherland irreverently manages to impale both egalite and elegance.

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