The Crimson Permanent Assurance

Plot

The elderly British employees of the Permanent Assurance Company, a staid London firm recently taken over by the Very Big Corporation of America (VBCA), rebel against their much younger corporate masters after one of them is wrongfully sacked. They lock the surviving supervisors in the safe as hostages and force their boss to walk a makeshift plank out a window. The employees then commandeer their Edwardian office building, which suddenly weighs anchor, uses its scaffolding and tarpaulins as sails, and is turned into a pirate ship.

The stone building moves as if it were a ship, leaving the City of London to sail to another financial centre. They attack the VBCA's skyscraper using wooden filing cabinets transformed into carronades and swords fashioned from the blades of a ceiling fan. Swinging on ropes into the board room, they engage the executives in hand-to-hand combat and eventually vanquish them after a long battle. The clerks celebrate while singing a heroic sea shanty as they sail the "wide accountan-sea" in search of further adventures, but unceremoniously fall off the edge of the world due to their belief about the shape of the world being "disastrously wrong".

The short re-emerges in the middle of The Meaning of Life after the donor scene, when a modern boardroom debate about the meaning of life is interrupted by an executive noticing the office building pirate ship. The battle begins again but is halted by a falling skyscraper crushing the Permanent Assurance Company building, accompanied by a voice-over apologizing for the "unwarranted attack by the supporting feature".

Production

The Crimson Permanent Assurance was first imagined as a six-minute animated segment for Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, set to close Part V. Terry Gilliam persuaded the other Pythons to let him shoot it with live actors instead. He decided the piece had a rhythm, length, and camera style that clashed with the main film, so it became a separate short shown before the feature. This mirrored a British cinema tradition of playing an unrelated short before the main attraction, a custom that had evolved from the earlier practice of screening a full B movie. By the mid-1970s, these shorts were often low-quality public information films or travelogues. The Pythons had already made a spoof travelogue, Away from It All, narrated by John Cleese, which preceded Life of Brian in Britain.