Start the Revolution Without Me is so odd for its era. Just think about how it starts. Orson Welles walks into frame, looks you dead in the eye, and explains that the entire French Revolution could have been avoided. Then he tells you that men of integrity, and of considerable resources, have made a film on the subject. Then, with the sourest possible timing, he adds that it’s a color film, which he is not in.
That’s the first sixty seconds of Start the Revolution Without Me, and if that lands for you, congratulations, the next ninety minutes are going to be a very good time. Warner Archive has brought this 1970 cult comedy to Blu-ray from a fresh 4K scan of the original camera negative, and after all the heavy catalog titles I’ve been working through lately, I’ll admit it was a genuine relief to spend an evening with a movie whose only ambition is to make you laugh at Gene Wilder having a nervous breakdown in a powdered wig.
If you’ve never heard of this one, you’re in good company. It flopped. Then it found its people, slowly, over decades, the way the best cult comedies do. Let me tell you why it’s worth your time.
Table of Contents
Four men, two actors, one very confused revolution
The setup is beautifully stupid, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
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France, 1789. (The film will remind you it’s 1789. Constantly. It becomes a running joke, and then it becomes a great running joke.) Two sets of identical twins are born on the same night, and a flustered doctor mixes them up. One pair grows up as the Corsican Brothers, arrogant aristocratic swashbucklers with a legendary reputation. The other pair grows up as filthy, cowardly peasants. And here’s the trick: each pair consists of one Gene Wilder and one Donald Sutherland.
So Wilder plays an aristocrat and a peasant. Sutherland plays an aristocrat and a peasant. On the eve of the Revolution, a case of mistaken identity shoves the wrong brothers into the wrong lives, and the whole thing collapses into farce at Versailles, with the King befuddled, the Queen scheming, a villainous duke plotting, and four increasingly panicked men trying to survive a historical epoch they’re catastrophically unqualified for.
It’s a parody of the swashbuckler, top to bottom. The specific targets are Alexandre Dumas (the Corsican Brothers of the title, with a Man in the Iron Mask gag thrown in for good measure) and Charles Dickens by way of A Tale of Two Cities, but really it’s taking aim at every velvet-and-rapier costume picture Hollywood ever made. If you’ve seen the classic version of the material, like Warner Archive’s own disc of The Three Musketeers, you’ll catch the jokes coming from a mile off, and that’s part of the fun. If you haven’t, don’t worry. The film is perfectly happy to just be silly at you.
Gene Wilder, right before he became GENE WILDER
Here’s the reason film people treasure this movie, and the reason you should watch it even if period comedy isn’t usually your thing.
In 1970, Gene Wilder was not yet the icon. He’d been Oscar-nominated for The Producers a couple of years earlier and people knew he was funny, but Willy Wonka was still a year away and the Mel Brooks run that made him immortal, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, was four years out. He was a known quantity who hadn’t detonated yet.
And then he does this.
Wilder’s aristocrat, Philippe, is one of the most unhinged comic performances of the era. The man is a lunatic. He carries a stuffed falcon around. He flies into berserk rages over nothing and then snaps back into imperious calm like a switch got thrown. He has an entire domestic subplot built around a wife who keeps trying, and failing, to accommodate his baroque romantic requirements. It’s the exact Wilder register that Brooks would later weaponize, that eerie stillness that erupts without warning into screaming, and here it is fully formed, running wild in a picture almost nobody saw.
Watching it now, you can practically see the future arriving. If you’ve ever wondered what made Mel Brooks look at Gene Wilder and think there’s my leading man, the answer is on this disc.
Donald Sutherland, secretly a great comedian
The other half of the equation is just as fascinating, and it’s the thing people forget.
Donald Sutherland was having an absolutely enormous year in 1970. He was in MASH. He was in Kelly’s Heroes. He was about to make Klute. He was becoming one of the defining faces of the New Hollywood, that laconic, slightly dangerous presence that would follow him for the next fifty years. And in the middle of all that, he made a broad period farce and played two roles in it.
He’s terrific. That’s the surprise. Sutherland underplays where Wilder detonates, and the contrast is the engine of the whole movie. His peasant is a magnificent coward, all shifty self-preservation. His aristocrat is icily, hilariously certain of his own superiority. He and Wilder even work up a patty-cake routine that’s a direct nod to the old Hope and Crosby road pictures, which is exactly the kind of gag that tells you these two knew precisely what film they were making.
Sutherland never really did enough comedy. That’s the takeaway here. Two of the great screen presences of their generation, four roles between them, one movie, and they’re both clearly having the time of their lives.
Orson Welles is in this, gloriously
I’ve saved the best for its own section, because the Welles material is what people remember.
Orson Welles narrates the picture as himself. Not as a character. As Orson Welles, grandly, pompously, in full late-career voiceover mode, treating this ridiculous farce with the gravity of a documentary about the fall of empires. He keeps interrupting to remind you of the year. He editorializes. He is magnificently above the material, and the film knows it, and that tension is the joke.
And then there’s the ending, which I won’t spoil beyond saying that the movie eventually decides it has had quite enough of its narrator, and the characters do something about it. It’s the kind of fourth-wall demolition that Mel Brooks would ride to glory a few years later, and it’s genuinely startling to see it deployed this confidently in 1970.
The men who made it, and where they went next
Here’s my favorite piece of trivia in the whole package.
Start the Revolution Without Me was produced and directed by Bud Yorkin, with Norman Lear as executive producer. If those names ring a faint bell but you can’t place them, let me help: within a year of this movie, Yorkin and Lear would create All in the Family, and then Sanford and Son, and then Maude, and then Good Times, and in doing so they’d blow up American television and rebuild it in their own image.
So this scrappy French Revolution farce is what these two were doing immediately before they became the most important men in television comedy. You can feel it, too. The film has that Yorkin and Lear instinct for class warfare played as comedy, the rich behaving abominably, the poor scrambling and scheming, everybody equally ridiculous. Swap the powdered wigs for a Queens row house and you’re not that far from Archie Bunker’s living room.
The screenplay comes from Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen, the score is by John Addison (who’d already won an Oscar for Tom Jones, and who brings exactly the right mock-heroic bounce), and Jean Tournier shot it on location in France, with real Versailles grandeur behind all the nonsense. That’s the secret weapon, actually. The production is legitimately handsome. The costumes and sets play it completely straight, which makes the idiocy in front of them ten times funnier.
The supporting bench is stacked
Surrounding our four leads is a murderer’s row of British character actors, all doing outrageous French accents and all clearly delighted about it.
Hugh Griffith plays King Louis XVI, and he walks away with every scene he’s in. Griffith was an Oscar winner (for Ben-Hur), and he plays the King as a magnificently oblivious buffoon who cannot understand why everyone is so upset. Billie Whitelaw, a serious dramatic actress best known for her work with Samuel Beckett, turns up as a deeply scheming Marie Antoinette and looks like she’s having more fun than she’s had in years. Victor Spinetti, familiar from the Beatles films, is the villainous Duke d’Escargot, a name that should tell you everything about this movie’s relationship with subtlety. Jack MacGowran, another Beckett veteran, rounds things out.
The full cast list on IMDb is a treat to browse. It’s an unusually classy bench for a movie this proudly dumb, and that gap is where a lot of the comedy lives.
Why it flopped, and why it lasted
Let’s be honest about the reception, because it’s part of the story. Start the Revolution Without Me did not work in 1970. It didn’t find an audience, it lost money, and it drifted off into television purgatory.
I have a theory about why. It arrived early. This is a spoof movie made before spoof movies were a genre people knew how to buy tickets for. Mel Brooks wouldn’t make Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein until 1974. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was five years out. Airplane! was a decade away. In 1970, a straight-faced period farce that constantly winked at the camera didn’t have a slot in anybody’s head, and audiences who saw a lavish French Revolution costume picture in the ads had no idea they were being sold a cartoon.
Which is exactly why it plays so much better now. We’ve spent fifty years being trained on this comedic language. The anachronistic narrator, the fourth-wall breaks, the deadpan absurdity dropped into a lavish period setting, all of it is completely legible to a modern viewer. The movie didn’t get better. We caught up to it.
Is it a perfect film? No, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. It’s uneven. Some of the gags land with a thud, the pacing sags in the middle stretch, and the sheer commitment to silliness means it never builds much beyond the premise. But when it’s on, which is often, it’s genuinely, breathlessly funny, and Wilder’s performance alone is worth the price of admission.
The disc: how it looks
Good news here.
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray comes from a new 2026 1080p master taken from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, which is the best possible source, and it’s a serious step up from the burn-on-demand DVD-R that has been the only way to legitimately own this since 2011.
My usual honesty applies: I’m writing ahead of a full disc-in-hand screening, so read these notes as informed expectation rather than a shot-by-shot verdict. But this is exactly the kind of title that stands to benefit most from a proper negative scan. It’s a lavish color production, shot on location in France with real palaces, elaborate costumes, and rich period production design, and all of that detail has been sitting there waiting for a transfer that could actually resolve it. What a fresh 4K pass should give you is natural film grain left intact, accurate and vibrant period color in all that silk and gold leaf, and fine detail in the fabrics and the architecture that the old standard-def disc simply couldn’t deliver. Warner Archive’s recent track record scanning negatives from this era is strong enough to earn the optimism, and I’ll firm up the particulars once I’ve run it end to end.
The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio on a BD-50.
The disc: how it sounds
Audio is the original mono, delivered as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. That’s the right call, and it’s what this movie needs, because Start the Revolution Without Me is a dialogue comedy first and foremost. The gags are verbal. The puns are relentless. Welles’s narration has to land with perfect clarity or the whole conceit falls apart. What you want from a lossless mono track here is crisp, clean, intelligible speech with enough room for John Addison’s mock-swashbuckler score to swagger underneath, and that’s precisely what good elements should give you. English SDH subtitles are included, which is the Warner Archive standard and genuinely useful on a film where half the jokes are buried in fast, accented dialogue.
What’s in the case
I want to give Warner Archive real credit here, because somebody was paying attention.
| Start the Revolution Without Me (Warner Archive Collection) | |
|---|---|
| Master | New 2026 1080p HD, 4K scan of the original camera negative |
| Aspect Ratio | 1.85:1 |
| Audio | DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono |
| Subtitles | English SDH |
| Disc | BD-50 |
| Runtime | 90 minutes |
| MSRP | $24.98 |
The extras are the original theatrical trailer plus two classic Warner Bros. cartoons, and the cartoon selection is not random. Not even slightly.
The first is The Scarlet Pumpernickel, the Chuck Jones classic in which Daffy Duck pitches himself as a swashbuckling hero and the whole thing spirals into chaos. It is, in other words, a swashbuckler parody, paired with a swashbuckler parody. The second is Napoleon Bunny-Part, the Friz Freleng short that drops Bugs Bunny into French history opposite Napoleon himself. So you get French history and swashbuckler spoofery, in animated form, bracketing a feature that is precisely both of those things.
That’s curation. Somebody at Warner Archive sat down and thought about which shorts belonged with this movie, and the result turns the disc into a proper themed program rather than a feature with some filler bolted on. It’s a small thing and it delights me.
One honest caveat for the double-dippers. The earlier DVD release carried an audio commentary with Bud Yorkin, Gene Wilder, and Donald Sutherland, and it does not appear on the announced feature list for this Blu-ray. If that’s accurate, and you own the old disc, hang onto it. Losing the voices of Wilder and Sutherland on a film they clearly loved is the one genuine disappointment in an otherwise lovely package, and it’s a shame, because a commentary from those three is exactly the kind of thing that can’t be recorded anymore.
Should you buy it?
Yes, and let me split it two ways.
If you’re a collector, this is straightforward. The film has never looked remotely this good, the leap from that old DVD-R to a 4K negative scan is exactly why you buy Warner Archive discs, and the cartoon pairing is a genuine treat. The only asterisk is that commentary question, so check your shelf before you toss the old one.
If you’re new to this and just want to know whether it’s worth ninety minutes of your evening, here’s my pitch. This is the movie where you get to watch Gene Wilder discover exactly what Gene Wilder was going to be, with Donald Sutherland matching him beat for beat, while Orson Welles rolls his eyes at both of them from somewhere above the proceedings. It’s silly, it’s warm, it’s beautifully mounted, and it’s the missing link between the old Hollywood costume epic and the spoof comedies that would take over the decade. You don’t need to know a thing about the French Revolution. You don’t need to have read Dumas. You just need to be in the mood to laugh at some very talented people behaving like idiots in extremely expensive wigs.
Find Start the Revolution Without Me at MovieZyng
Start the Revolution Without Me is available now on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, and you can grab it at MovieZyng, the label’s dedicated storefront, which, as I’ve covered in my Warner Archive sale guides, is run by the same folks who actually manufacture these discs.
It’s 1789. It’s a color film. Welles isn’t in it, or so he’d have you believe. Go find out for yourself.
