Baron Munchausen

[Updated: May 15,1999]

Sting makes a cameo appearance as a "heroic officer" in Terry Gilliam’s hyperbolic fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989). The spirit of the Baron’s tall tales is derived from one of Frederick the Great’s actual cavalry officers, Karl Friedrich Hieronymous Munchausen (1720-97), and is translated into cinema with the same giddy inventiveness that marks such Gilliam projects as Time Bandits (1980), Brazil (1985), The Fisher King (1991) and Monty Python.

Ostensibly fighting off an attack by the Turks, Baron Munchausen (John Neville) is aided by a personal army that compensates for its lack of manpower with extraordinary physical gifts: Berthold (Monty Python’s Eric Idle) has supersonic speed, Albrecht (Winston Dennis) has preternatural strength, Adolphus (co-screenwriter Charles McKeown) has transcontinentally sharp eyesight, and Gustavus (Jack Purvis) has hurricane-force lungs. Still, young Sally Salt’s (Sarah Polley) ability to refresh the aging Baron’s youthful sense of wonder is perhaps the gang’s most invaluable asset of all.

Indeed, the real war being fought in Baron Munchausen is the battle to defend the fires of imagination, as embodied by the swashbuckling Baron and his cadre, from the dampening cold logic of the "Age of Reason," as personified by a comically joyless bureaucrat named Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce). It is Jackson who sentences our fair Sting to hang for his inability to still his beating heart, for heroism too impassioned and daring too illogical (unfortunately, the scene that shows Sting in the gallows was left on the cutting-room floor).

Columbia (UK)

PG

Color

126 minutes

Directed by: Terry Gilliam

Produced by: Thomas Schuhly (Prominent Features, Laura Film)

Written by: Terry Gilliam

Charles McKeown