John Cleese, a notoriously fastidious man possessed of daunting comic gifts, has never liked the ending of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975). It “annoys me the most,” he told an audience at Indiana University at Bloomington, “… we couldn’t think of any other way” to end the film. 

For those who haven’t watched this rousing tale of medieval conquest, its culminating battle is interrupted by an anachronistic raft of policemen who, upon driving into the battlefield, strong-arm Arthur, King of the Britons, into a paddywagon. Finally, one of the bobbies puts his hand over the camera’s lens with an admonitory, “That’s enough of that now.”