Lively, underrated swashbuckling spoof. Fred Freeman and Lawrence J Cohen's screenplay gives the French Revolution the runaround and casts Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland as two sets of twins - The Corsican Brothers (master swordsmen) and a couple of feckless peasants, who of course get mistaken for them. The fun lies chiefly in the by-play between Wilder and Sutherland ('I'll run him through'. `You'd be lucky to run the girl through'). But the giant ballroom scene is also a hysterical success, with a surfeit of notes, most of them hinting at assassination plots, passing bewilderingly from dancer to dancer, until Wilder receives one (from a man) saying 'Hello, handsome.' The scene ends in masterly fashion, as the comic king (Hugh Griffith), dressed as a cockerel under the mistaken impression that the ball was fancy dress, weaves his way slowly back through the revellers to the royal chamber. Though director Bud Yorkin pulls every trick in the book, gales of laughter thereafter are strictly spasmodic.

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