The Best House in London

Mores were really changing in the 1960s, something that I've noted quite a few times regarding the sort of comedy that got made during the era. Some were "generation gap" comedies, as older stars tried to keep up with the changing times, often without much success. Then there were movies not set in the US, and not set in the 1960s, such as Hotel Paradiso which I blogged about a few weeks back. A movie that falls into that second class that I recently watched is The Best House in London.

The movie starts with a pre-credits scene of one Walter Leybourne (David Hemings) having a tryst in a 19th century hot-air balloon with a woman. Then after the credits, we see Josephine Pacefoot (Joanna Pettet), who happens to be Walter's cousin. She's leading protests about the social ills that have led to women becoming "fallen women", which is a euphemism for prostituted. She blames society for this phenomenon, and thinks that something should be done to rehabilitate the women.

The third main character happens to be a dual role for Hemings. Benjamin Oakes is a man of many talents, mostly in the field of promotion. He goes around finding interesting new things, and tries to promote them with photo spreads in the various newspapers in Britain. His latest discovery is an Italian nobleman who is trying to build a lighter-than-air aircraft along the lines of the zeppelin, but this being Victorian London, the real zeppelin had not yet been invented. (In fact, a running theme throughout the movie is a pastiche of things that did exist at one point or another in Victorian England, but were not all contemporaneous with each other.) Benjamin sees the protest Josephine is leading, and decides to work with her.

Meanwhile, Josephine's uncle Sir Francis (George Sanders) is a wealthy man with various land interests, not only in London and the rest of the UK, but in India as well, where he runs a poppy plantation turning the poppies into opium. He's disowned his son Walter for cowardice during the Crimean War, leaving his estate to Josephine. He's also got a mistress Babette (Dany Robin), but what he doesn't know is that Babette is also having an affair with with Walter, who is trying to get use Babette to get dad to amend his will.

Everything comes together in another way, which involves what to do with all those "fallen women". The government has decided that perhaps they should try what the French do, which is to have an "official" bordello where the authorities will more or less look the other way. Sir Francis offers one of his unused mansions to host the place, being a money-spinner for him. But when he gets called to India to deal with his opium plantation, he turns over the management of the place to Babette, which brings Walter into the picture. And of course Josephine and Benjamin don't want such a place to exist period.

The Best House in London is yet another of those movies where you can see why the people making it thought it was going to be a really clever idea. But it's of those things that really doesn't work in the execution. A lot of the jokes fall flat, and the constant string of anachronisms doesn't work either.

As always, however, you may want to watch and judge for yourself.