The Bed Sitting Room

Some years back I watched The Bed Sitting Room and didn't do a full-length post on it. It was on TCM again recently and is also on DVD and Blu-ray, so I rewatched it.

There's not much of a plot here. The setting is the UK after a hypothetical World War III in which only a few dozen people have survived (or at least, that's what they all say). The survivors wander around in a series of bizarre sketches. Among the survivors are Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson), who fears that the radiation is slowly turning him into the titular room, something which eventually does happen although it doesn't take away his voice.

The other main characters are a family with daughter Penelope (Rita Tushingham) and her parents (Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne), who have been living on the Circle Line in the London Underground since the war but eventually leave for the outside world along with Penelope's boyfriend Alan (Richard Warwick). Dad tries to find a better husband for Penelope, while Mom turns into a cupboard that winds up in the bed-sitting room.

Watching over all the characters are the authorities, traveling around in a hot-air balloon with a junker car for a gondola, as a Sergeant and an Inspector (Dudley Moore and Peter Cook). They try to keep everybody moving, on the grounds that it they're not stationary targets, it will be more difficult for the enemy to kill him.

The first time I watched The Bed Sitting Room, I didn't particularly care for it, in no small part because I didn't know going in that it was going to be an absurdist comedy. That's why I wanted to watch it a second time when I saw it on the TCM schedule, to see if my opinion had changed. To be honest, I found that it still wasn't my cup of tea. It's absurd, but not nearly as funny as one would think considering much of the cast.

Still, this one even more than many of the movies that I didn't care for is one where you should judge for yourself, because the absurdism is something that's really going to divide people's opinions. Some people will probably really like it; others will find it tedious.