L'armata Brancaleone is an Italian comedy movie released in 1966, written by the famous duo Age & Scarpelli and directed by Mario Monicelli. It features Vittorio Gassman in the main role. It was entered into the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. The term Armata Brancaleone is still used today in Italian to define a group of badly assembled and useless people. Brancaleone is an actual historical name, meaning the paw of lions in heraldry jargon. Brancaleone degli Andalò was a governor of Rome in the Middle Ages. The movie opens with a small Italian village being stormed by a band of... Hungarian pillagers. When the murders and rapes are over, a German knight arrives and bravely kills the bandits. However, as he is healing his wounds he is attacked by two of the surviving villagers and one of the thieves. They throw the wounded knight into a river. The attackers try to sell the knight's armor and weapons to a miserly Jewish merchant who finds among his belongings a letter of donation by the Holy Roman Emperor, granting the knight the fief of Aurocastro, an Apulian town.
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| Release date: | 1966 |
| Directed by: | Mario Monicelli |
| Runtime: | 120 Minutes |
| Producer: | Mario Cecchi Gori |
| Music by: | Carlo Rustichelli |
| Screenplay by: | Agenore Incrocci, Mario Monicelli, Furio Scarpelli |
| Genre: | Adventure, Comedy |