THE AGONY AND THE AGONY

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY (1965)
dir: Carol Reed

THE AGONY AND THE AGONY
#103, June 1966
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

One of the few MAD parodies of a movie I hadn't heard of before and didn't have access to for comparison. In this case, it's okay, because it's one of the few parodies they did which was not a scene-by-scene satire of the movie but an update.

The original is based on a novel of the story of Michaelangelo (Charlton Heston) how he was reluctant to do the famous mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The updated version is about an artist named Michael Angelo being commissioned to do a mural for an Italian restaurant.

In the new version, instead of pope, Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison) is a prize fighter and restaurateur. Instead of being inspired by nature, Michael's inspired by a hero sandwich.

They leave out how Raphael was also considered as an artist, the war within the church, and battle scenes.

Not sure how much they alluded to Michelangelo's homosexuality in the movie, though there's plenty of that in this, especially when confiding in Contessina Antonia Romola de' Medici (Diane Cilento) . But being 1965 and in a magazine mostly read by kids, they use code words like “interior decorator”, “Fire Island”, and “mince around”. Also being of the time, it's regularly used as a punchline.

Another group not spared is Italian-Americans, though their making up much of the staff of MAD offers them a shield to make fun of themselves. There were a lot of jokes in MAD about Italian names and the Mafia that weren't exactly offensive but I'd still get my ass kicked if I made them on my own.

This was made before there were genre movies, when a big budget movie usually meant it was more than two hours long and either a historical epic or adaptation of a Broadway musical. Before “adult” was synonymous with “porn”, movies like the former were generally what adults were supposed to see and MAD was a portal into the adult world.

Sometimes in something at least fifty years old, I don't know all the likenesses and need to ask the hive mind but I'm saved work here since it's pointed out for us.

But Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown were Italian? Who knew?