I would think its inclusion on the list of official weird was inevitable.
]]>But more significantly, it’s a sincere attempt by a gifted director to film a work by somebody who was a personal friend of his, but which simply wasn’t truly filmable. You can see where the problem lies by reading the paperback of the stage-play (which is still easily obtainable because absolutely everything Spike Milligan ever wrote is). It’s about as funny as a sick baby (and does in fact geature a sick baby), Yet it ran for years. How so? Because Spike Milligan, a superb clown but a very poor conventional actor, wrote it as a framework around which he could improvise.
Which works just fine in a fairly small theatre, but not so well if you’re trying to make a movie. However, Spike’s character in the stage-play (Captain Pontius Kak), despite being the main character, was oddly incidental to the plot, because if Spike was going to change his lines every night but everyone else wasn’t, he had to be. So, given Spike’s proven inability to carry a starring role in a film, Richard Lester was able to reduce his part to a series of almost wordless cameos while retaining the central story.
The trouble is, what he ended up with was a film which, because it was written by and around one man who was barely in it, is extremely episodic and lacks a real center – almost exactly the same thing happened to “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End” (another potential LIst candidate, by the way), which should have starred Vivian Stanshall, only he was such a severe alcoholic that he couldn’t be trusted to make a major contribution to the movie.
Also, just about every scene in this movie, with the exception of some early scenes in the London Underground and a handful of others, looks suspiciously like a stage-play being performed for some unexplained reason in a quarry. Which is exactly what it was.
That being said, Richard Lester is no slouch when it comes to directing, even if his material is somewhat odd. And the cast is practically a Who’s Who of British 1970s comedy and character actors. The utter strangeness never lets up – in my opinion, one of the best jokes has to be Lord Fortnum, having learned that atomic radiation has doomed him to turn into a bedsitting room, stumbling around an utterly featureless wasteland in a desperate attempt to find a suitably upper-class district of what used to be London.
The peculiar shift of tone at the very end, as if Spike wrote the whole thing on autopilot and then caught on at the last minute that actually thermonuclear war wasn’t funny, would be very jarring if Richard Lester wasn’t smart enough to downplay it so much that you barely notice it, but all the same, this is one of the most oddly-structured movies ever. It’s interesting to note that the one time Spike Milligan was ever given complete artistic control over a movie, the result was “The Great MacGonagall”, an utter failure which was basically a poorly-filmed semi-improvised stage play with a jarring shift of tone at the end – exactly what this film would have been if Richard Lester hadn’t known what he was doing. (And since it’s an incredibly strange film featuring a scene where Peter Sellers in drag as Queen Victoria shows a soft-core porn slide-show and is married to Hitler, maybe it should be on the LIst as well, if only because of the “why did this ever get made?” factor.)
So ultimately this is an ambitious failure with a great deal of quirky charm which isn’t quite like any other film you’ll ever see. Definitely it belongs on the List! By the way, in Region 2, it was recent;y re-released in a digitally cleaned-up version, and I think you can now get it in stunning Blu-Ray. Altogether now: “God save Mrs. Ethel Shroake…”
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