This was the prevailing atmosphere when Eric Idle was approached by O\u2019Brien about headlining Nuns on the Run <\/em>(released thirty years ago today), prompting Idle to quip, \u201cI made the first HandMade film, now I can make the last.\u201d Written and directed by Jonathan Lynn, an old mate of Idle\u2019s, Nuns<\/em> paired him with Robbie Coltrane (subbing for Palin, who was Lynn\u2019s first choice) as Brian Hope and Charlie McManus, two genial, low-level gangsters who want out of their firm since the new ownership is more keen on guns and killing than they are. (To illustrate this, Lynn shows their boss watching a scene from The Long Good Friday<\/em> when he calls Brian and Charlie on the carpet.) To complicate matters, they double-cross two of their associates while stealing a million pounds from Hong Kong\u2019s Triad gang, putting them on the wrong side of the police, the Triads, and their own firm. On top of that, Brian has fallen in love with a myopic waitress named Faith (Camille Coduri) whose life is endangered by their association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, yes. And when their getaway car runs out of petrol outside a convent attached to a teacher\u2019s college, Brian and Charlie have to pose as nuns \u2013 the hastily named Sister Euphemia of the Five Wounds and Sister Inviolata of the Immaculate Conception \u2013 until they\u2019re able to make off with the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf we\u2019re good nuns, God will see us through,\u201d Charlie says, but since he\u2019s the one with a working knowledge of Catholic doctrine, naturally it falls to Brian to teach a theology class about the finer points of the holy trinity, which he finds utterly baffling. \u201cIf it made sense, it wouldn\u2019t have to be a religion, would it?\u201d Charlie asks, which is fairly benign compared to the skewering believers got in Life of Brian<\/em>. Then again, the Pythons\u2019 target was organized religion in general, while Nuns<\/em> merely uses Catholicism as a backdrop for farce. Other parallels between the films include cross-dressing (the women in fake beards at the stoning in Brian<\/em>), mistaken identity (Brian Cohen for the messiah; Brian and Charlie for nuns, Brian for a priest), and blind faith. The latter is made literal by the fact that Faith can\u2019t see a thing without her glasses, which harkens back to the blind man who\u2019s swept along with the crowd that starts following Brian and claims \u201cthe master\u201d healed him. \u201cI was blind and now I can see!\u201d he cries before falling into a hole, which is immediately declared a miracle. In comparison, the ribbing religion gets from Nuns<\/em> is mild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it went into wide release in the US on March 30, 1990, Nuns on the Run<\/em> did solid business, racking up close to $11 million at the box office. But it received a battering from some critics, with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert leading the charge on their syndicated TV show, and Ebert calling it \u201cinexplicable\u201d and declaring \u201cvery little of the material is intrinsically funny\u201d in his one-star Sun-Times review<\/a>. The final straw, though, came when they continued to pummel the film on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee<\/em>. In retaliation, American distributor Twentieth Century Fox banned the pair<\/a> from future screenings, an edict lifted a short time later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/nuns2.jpg\")
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