The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Thomas Schühly; directed by Terry Gilliam; screenplay by Charles McKeown and Terry Gilliam; cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno; edited by Peter Hollywood; production design by Dante Ferretti; music by Michael Kamen; starring John Neville, Eric Idle, Sarah Polley, Oliver Reed, Charles McKeown, Winston Dennis, Jack Purvis, Valentina Cortese, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Paterson, Peter Jeffrey, Uma Thurman, Alison Steadman, Ray Cooper, Robin Williams, and Sting. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, color, 126 min., 1988. A Criterion Collection release.

Baron Munchausen survived and thrived against all odds, and the same goes for Terry Gilliam’s extravaganza The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which faced enormous hurdles during production, was barely released by its studio when finished, and reached only a tiny fraction of the global audience that would have loved it if given a fair chance. These hurdles notwithstanding, the 1988 movie received mostly enthusiastic reviews and four Academy Award nominations, and its stock has been rising ever since. Its latest incarnation is the Criterion Collection’s new 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition, which recycles a couple of extras from the company’s 2008 release—an audio commentary by Gilliam and co-screenwriter Charles McKeown, a making-of documentary by film historian Constantine Nasr—and adds short videos about the special effects, the storyboards, the marketing campaign, and sundry other matters. I doubt if the Baron will ever be showcased more splendiferously.

The exotic locales, outlandish voyages, and impossible feats seen in Gilliam’s romp were inspired by The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a 1785 bestseller by the German author Rudolf Erich Raspe, a neighbor of the actual Hieronymous Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, a noted raconteur who tried to sue Raspe for attributing the book’s authorship to him. Raspe was an interesting figure in his own right, counting mineralogy, philosophy, swindling, and fraud among his fields of expertise, but the Munchausen book (which I find energetic but monotonous) is his one enduring accomplishment, thanks partly to an expanded version published by a German writer in 1786. Gilliam borrows much of his basic material from Raspe while adding ideas and inventions of his own. His abiding theme has always been the majesty of imagination, and here it’s present from the opening scene, which shows a theater company performing a play about the already well-known Baron, filling the stage with flamboyant exploits even though the Ottoman Turkish army is preparing an invasion at the city gates. Danger looms, but Munchausen (John Neville) has more immediate things on his mind, interrupting the show to protest that the troupe is getting his adventures all wrong. 

Soon he’s spinning his own story, telling how he and his gifted friends—a man (McKeown) who can see for miles, another (Eric Idle) who can outrun the wind, a third (Winston Dennis) with astonishing strength, and a fourth (Jack Purvis) with superhuman lungs—once beat the Turkish Sultan (Peter Jeffrey) in a high-stakes wager. This is the same Sultan now threatening to destroy the city, and his ferocious troops bombard the theater while Munchausen is rattling on. He is mortally wounded, but the theater manager’s little daughter, Sally Salt (Sarah Polley), miraculously revives him, whereupon he sets out to save the city from its foes. This involves escaping in a balloon, visiting the King of the Moon (Robin Williams, billed as Ray D. Tutto for contractual reasons) and his Queen (Valentina Cortese), plunging into the volcano that houses the Roman god Vulcan (Oliver Reed) and his gorgeous wife Venus (Uma Thurman), and temporarily inhabiting the belly of a sea creature. His chief enemies are the Sultan, the vicious municipal politician Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce), and none other than the Angel of Death, who tries to snatch the Baron several times along the way. The finale is tragic (the Baron meets his doom) and also triumphant (the Baron has been narrating his death, not experiencing it) and also ambiguous (the Baron waves farewell from a distant hilltop, then vanishes into thin air). Such is the many-sided nature of Munchausen’s dreamworld.

Although it started as literature, this crazy tale positively pants for stage and screen treatment. According to a Criterion video essay by David Cairns, the first dramatic adaptation of Raspe’s book was a pantomime, Baron Munchausen; or, Harlequin’s Travels, staged by London’s fabled Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1795; early film versions include Émile Cohl’s animated Monsieur de Crac (1910) and Georges Méliès’s The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen (1911), one of that pioneer’s last (and least popular) efforts. Gilliam is one of the few contemporary auteurs strongly influenced by Méliès, and his constant flow of cinematic tricks, usually done with physical means rather than blue-screen technology, can be seen as an ongoing homage to his long-ago predecessor; referring to the carefully assembled Angel of Death model that flaps into the story several times, Gilliam says in the commentary that an animated figure “would probably be neater, more concise, more beautiful possibly, but not as real.” He also admired the great illustrators, especially George Cruikshank and longtime favorite Gustave Doré, who have illuminated editions of Raspe’s volume. And he evidently knew the best previous Munchausen movies: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, aka Baron Prášil, a 1962 release by the Czech wizard Karel Zeman that blends animation and live action to gently delirious effect, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a sumptuous UFA fantasy made by Josef von Báky to mark the studio’s twenty-fifth anniversary and show off the resources of the Nazi culture industry. (You can forget Walter Lang’s 1933 Meet the Baron, which tosses Jimmy Durante and the Three Stooges into the mix; planned adaptations by animators Ray Harryhausen and George Dunning never got made.) Cairns accurately observes that the proud artificiality of Gilliam’s film recalls Méliès and Zeman, while its expansive scale and colorful look could be von Báky’s offspring.

Successful though he was against the Sultan, the snaky Jackson, and the Angel of Death, even the intrepid Munchausen might have been defeated by the Hollywood system that assailed this production in all sorts of ways. Its travails are recounted at length in Andrew Yule’s 1991 book Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga and in short form in the most harrowing chapter of Sarah Polley’s 2022 memoir Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, where the gifted writer–director–performer describes the ordeal of playing Sally, the Baron’s young companion, when she was eight years old, working for interminably long hours, terrified by special-effect explosions, soaked in cold-water tanks, dangled from airborne lifts, and almost being trampled by a panicky horse. “Though he was magical and brilliant and made images and stories that will live for a long, long time,” she writes of Gilliam, “it’s hard to calculate whether they were worth the price of the hell that so many went through over the years to help him make them.” Speaking as someone who worked with Gilliam for years in the Monty Python gang, Idle says in Nasr’s documentary that his old friend had become a “sadistic, insane” director who put him through “a truly horrible experience…probably one of the most unpleasant experiences” of his life. “Even to recall it is a bit of a nightmare,” Idle adds. He’s probably exaggerating, but still.

The project’s chaos had multiple causes, some attributable to Gilliam, some not. Shooting took place in a shifting array of Italian and Spanish locations plus soundstages at Cinecittà in Rome and Pinewood in England, and unexpected venue changes caused frequent confusion, as did conflicts among producers and upheavals arising from David Puttnam’s departure and Dawn Steel’s arrival at Columbia’s top executive office. The budget estimates kept fluctuating wildly—initially slated for $23.5 million, the picture came in at a little more than $46 million—and shots and scenes were modified or scuttled as expenses rose. A vivid example is the moon sequence, which was supposed to include a rich assortment of fully built three-dimensional structures; when there turned out to be no money for this, Gilliam enlarged the designer’s drawings, colored them with felt-tip pens, mounted them on plywood, and created changing perspectives by moving them along little rails. Gilliam ended up liking this better than the original idea, saying in the audio commentary that it offers a “nice little intermission” from the richness and clutter of the overall picture.

His crew was led by such top-of-the-line talents as cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Michael Kamen, but working at Cinecittà brought problems, since Gilliam didn’t speak Italian, and his relations with Rotunno grew prickly, partly because of different views of how a movie set should operate. Yule’s book quotes Rotunno complaining that Gilliam had too many ideas, too little “focus,” and “problems with communications…not caused by language.” From the other side, Gilliam waxes theological in Nasr’s documentary, saying Rotunno had a “Roman Catholic” attitude, regarding the director as God and the cinematographer as Pope, whereas Gilliam held the “Protestant” notion that everyone on the set should have direct access to the deity, i.e., him. The on-screen results give little hint of all this disagreement, but it’s understandable that Gilliam began to see the Angel of Death as a sort of presiding spirit. “Death was always present in this film,” he says in the documentary. “It was a strange feeling that we were dealing with life and death, that every moment we were living on the edge. Could we survive? Could the Baron survive? That’s what the story was about and it was in a sense the story of the making of the film.” Heavy thoughts about a largely lighthearted movie.

The political dimensions of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are implicit rather than outspoken, but they are very much present. Gilliam sees the officious Vulcan as the nightmare counterpart of a Victorian industrialist; Jackson is an archetypally slimy politician; and the Sultan is both a quintessential sybarite (with regrettable traces of Orientalist caricature, as Michael Koresky notes in his Criterion essay) and a ruthless militarist who couldn’t care less about the lives lost in his violent escapades. In today’s world, moreover, the Baron’s most famous character trait—his egomaniacal penchant for lying through his shameless teeth—has painful correspondences with the growing cast of liars, dissemblers, and prevaricators in our own sociopolitical power centers. In a mythical eighteenth-century aristocrat, brazen fabulation can be cute. In the real world it can be terrifying, and if Gilliam doesn’t stress such parallels, it’s partly because the Eighties were (somewhat) less politically fraught than the present era, but mostly because Gilliam sees imagination as the most powerful of all weapons against pernicious ideologies. His forceful belief in fantasies and fabrications can seem naïve or narcissistic—he has built his whole career on making stuff up—but for him Munchausen embodies that belief in its purest form, and the Baron’s transcendence over logic, reason, and rationality is a triumph he is eager to celebrate.

Columbia pretty much dumped The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, making only 117 prints at a time when, Gilliam tells Nasr, an art film would have had 400 of them; he told me some years later that its cost overruns and box-office failure stamped him him as an “out of control…troublemaker” even though his prior record had been solid. The last laugh belongs to Gilliam, though, since the picture’s popularity has soared as high as the Baron’s moon-bound balloon, and many consider it a lofty peak in the Trilogy of Imagination that commenced with the timeless Time Bandits in 1981 and continued with the brilliant Brazil in 1985. I prefer those earlier films, but I’ve had a fine time with the flawlessly rendered print and hours of extras in the new Criterion release. For all its problems, this outrageous, courageous venture shows Gilliam’s creative spirit at his most ambitiously Baronesque.

David Sterritt is film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

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