The Naked Truth

Peter Sellers was TCM's Star of the Month last September. Some years back I bought a box set that had several of Sellers' early British movies, in part for I'm Alright Jack, and have done reviews on all of the movies in that set. TCM unsurprisingly ran a goodly amount of Sellers' British work as well, but included a movie that wasn't in that box set and that I hadn't heard before: Your Past Is Showing. (Note that the movie was originally titled The Naked Truth; the print TCM ran included a card from the British Board of Film Censors with that title, but with an actual title card of Your Past Is Showing.)

Back in the 1950s in the US, there were scandal sheet magazines like Confidential that raked up dirt on celebrities. Less ethical people in the business offered to spike stories in exchance for some sort of quid pro quo or cash, a practice which is effectively blackmail. In this movie, Nigel Dennis (Dennis Price) is the publisher of a magazine called The Naked Truth that prints similarly nasty gossip and who is also the sort of man who has no compunction about blackmailing the people he writes about. We then get introduced to four such people, and Dennis' attempts to blackmail each of them:

Melissa Right (Shirley Eaton of Goldfinger fame) is a model with an American boyfriend and a shady past;
Lord Mayley (Terry-Thomas) is a respected British peer with a wife (Georgina Cookson) who has the tendency to go out chasing younger women;
Flora Ransom (Peggy Mount) is a murder-mystery writer in the Agatha Christie sense with a daughter (Joan Sims) but who may have stolen the plot to one of her big-selling murder mysteries; and
Sonny Macgregor (Peter Sellers) hosts a show that seems somewhat like You Bet Your Life, only he's not really Scottish, and he also owns some apartment buildings that aren't in particularly good condition.

Dennis, having threatened each of them (and a whole host of unseen others), leaves them with the uncomfortable decision of whether to pay up or to let their secrets be revealed. Then again, there's a third option, which might be to use other means to get Dennis to lay off. Or to make him incapable of going ahead with his plans to publish that information -- even if their plans to do so are highly illegal. Flora, being a mystery writer, decides to come up with a way of killing Dennis that won't be detcted, while Macgregor, who is also a master of disguises, has his own plans to kill Dennis. Unfortunately, both of them are less competent than they think, and poor Lord Mayley, who doesn't know anything about the other two, rather haplessly walks into these schemes.

Eventually the four, having found things out, decide that they're better off teaming up to come up with a murder that nobody will be able to pin on any of them individually. Of course, this scheme doesn't quite work either, and in fact leads to a whole new set of complications.

Your Past Is Showing is the sort of British farce that a studio like Ealing was quite good at making. Here, however, with the presence of Sellers and Terry-Thomas, things get a bit more zany. However, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit, especially when it coms to Flora and her daughter; these two characters are way overplayed.

Overall, though, the positives outweigh the negatives of Your Past Is Showing, and it's definitely a movie that's worth watching, even if there are more sparkling British comedies of the era out there.

TCM Star of the Month September 2025: Peter Sellers

Careful readers of this blog (not that there are many) will note that I didn't do a post last week on the new TCM Star of the Month for September 2025. That's because, for whatever, reason, this month's Star gets four nights in prime time but TCM didn't want to program that on Wednesday or Thursday. So we finally get to the new Star of the Month tonight. That star is Peter Sellers, whose films will be on TCM tonight and each of the following three Mondays. I have one of his movies sitting on my DVR: Tom Thumb, which shows up overnight tonight (or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view) at 3:15 AM.

Technically, this isn't Sellers' movie, as he plays a supporting role, in the opening credits as one of "the villains" alongside Terry-Thomas. The real star here is Russ Tamblyn, who plays the titular role of the extremely tiny person. But we don't meet him for several minutes. Instead we meet forest dweller Jonathan (Bernard Miles), who lives a seemingly happy life out in the forest with his wife Anne, except for the fact they don't have children. One day as Jonathan is about to chop down a tree, he's stopped by the Forest Queen, who offers him three wishes in exchange for not chopping down the tree. Jonathan and his wife stupidly use up those wishes but granted a fourth, which is for the child they never had. That's where Tom comes in, mature but not grown up, or at least as grown up as he's going to be, with all of this being a perfect opportunity for special effects work, since the movie ws directed by George Pal.

Meanwhile, Woody (Alan Young) is a friend of Jonathan and Anne's as well as a performer in a traveling band. Jonathan sees the Forest Queen and falls in love with her, except that she's immortal. Or at least she is until Woody kisses her, which as you might guess is finally going to come at the beginning of the movie. Woody takes Tom to the carnival, and Tom gets transported by balloon to the top of one of the castle's towers.

On that tower are the Villains, Antony (Sellers) and Ivan (Terry-Thomas). They're trying to steal the gold that's in a locked vault in the treasury in the castle. Except that somehow, the vault has a ridiculously high ceiling with a grate at the top which just happens to be on the tower where Antony and Ivan are. They come up with an obvious lie that the naïve Tom accepts about the gold being misused as it was supposed to be for orphans. So they get him to help them steal one bag, since he's the only human who can fit through the grate. The folks in the castle do inventory and find one bag of gold coins missing, so they go out looking for it. When the one coin Ivan and Antony gave Tom is found in a bowl of porridge, Jonathan and Anne are put on trial for the theft. It's up to Tom and Woody to save the day and give us the requisite happy ending.

We know we're going to get that happy ending because for the most part the movie has had a light tone. That, and it's Hollywood. So even though it's based on a fairy tale compiled by the Grimm brothers, and many of the tales they compiled were surprisingly dark and violent, we're not getting that. What we do get is a movie that, even close to 70 years on, is going to appeal to children. They won't mind the special effects that seem primitive by today's standards, or the backlot production values. That doesn't mean that it's a bad movie or that adults will be bored by it, although it is a fairly simple story with not much going on and a running time padded by musical numbers and stop-motion photography.

Not just beatniks

I mentioned in my review of Flower Drum Song how Hollywood didn't seem to have a handle on how to portray beatniks when they were the perceived counterculture of the late 1950s. Fast-forward to the end of the following decade, and the counterculture were now hippies. The old guard of Hollywood certainly didn't know how to deal with them, either, leading to all sorts of disasters, such as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!.

Peter Sellers is the star here, playing Harold Fine, a Los Angeles lawyer who drives a Lincoln Continental and who lives a very upper-middle-class lifestyle, with the one major exception being that he's 35 and still hasn't gotten married. Oh, he's got a long-term girlfriend in the form of his secretary Joyce (Joyce Van Patten), and she's been pushing him to set a date for the wedding. But it takes getting in a fender-bender and having to drive a courtesy car -- a station wagon painted by the garage owner's hippie son who then decamped for San Francisco -- to get Harold to change his mine.

Harold has good news for his mom (Jo Van Fleet), but she springs a surprise on him first. She barges into his office talking about dying at 61 being much too young, so Harold immediately thinks Dad has died. No; it's just Mrs. Fine's butcher. (Apparently not a kosher butcher, which is weird since the Fines are Jewish and there's a joke about the butcher being Catholic.) And Mom wants Harold to go find his kid brother Herbie (David Arkin, no relation to Alan) to bring him to the funeral. Herbie has also "dropped out" to become a hippie somewhere in the Venice Beach area. Herbie introduces Harold to his girlfriend Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), and the two become friends, as Nancy doesn't seem as far out there as some of the other hippies.

One day, Nancy finds some brownie mix in Harold's apartment, and makes some edibles by putting pot into the brownies, not that they used the term edibles in the day as far as I'm aware. Harold doesn't know what's in the brownies and serves them to his parents and Joyce, who immediately begin to find everything terribly funny, although at least they don't start violently playing the piano. For Harold, however, it continues to make him think about making changes to his life.

So on the day of his wedding, while he's standing under the chuppah, Harold has a change of heart and walks out on Joyce and all the guests in attendance, and goes off to live with Nancy and the rest of the hippies. Or, to bring Nancy to him and have all of her hippie friends start crashing Harold's apartment to the point that you wonder how they can all afford to live this lifestyle and how nobody at the law firm noticed Harold's change. Especially his ex-fiancée Joyce, who after all still works as his secretary. And then after a while Harold suddenly figures out the hippie life isn't all it's cracked up to be....

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is one of those movies that was panned at the time, and I think with good reason. I suppose there's a good idea here of a man having a midlife crisis, but that kernel of an idea is simply a hook for all of Hollywood's stereotypes about countrcultures which quickly become grating and unfunny. A lot of Hollywood movies tried to take a humorous look at the rapidly shifting culture of the 1960s, something I've referred to as the "generation gap movie" for lack of a better term. Most of them wound up badly dated, and in that regard I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is no different.

Murder By Death

Quite a fair bit of Neil Simon's work has been turned into Hollywood movies, although it should be added that he wrote several screenplays directly for the screen. One of the latter, as far as I can tell, is the movie Murder by Death, which has been sitting on my DVR for several months now.

The movie starts off with an unseen hand signing the name Lionel Twain (when we eventually see Lionel, he's played by Truman Capote) to a bunch of invitations. These go out to, in order:

Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith respctively), and Pet Terrier in New York;
Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), in Catalina;
Monsieur Milo Perrier (James Coco), Brussels;
Mr. Sam Diamond (peter Falk), San Francisco; and
Miss Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Sussex, England.

Considering the names of these characters, and the title of the movie, it doesn't take much to figure out that this is going to be a spoof of the detective story/movie genre. Lionel then calls in his bulter Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guinness), who is blind, to stamp and deliver the letters. Although one of the jokes is that his stamps miss the letters, the characters all get their invitations, as the next scenes show the various characters trying to make their way to the house. Everybody comes more or less in pairs, as the Charlestons come togther; Wang comes with adopted #3 son Willie (Richard Narita); Milo has a chauffeur Marcel (James Cromwell); Diamond has his secretary Tess (Eileen Brennan); and Miss Marbles has an exceedingly elderly nurse, Miss Withers (Estelle Winwood).

They all get to the house in the thick fog, where they've ostensibly been invited for dinner cooked by a mute maid/cook (Nancy Walker). Of course, once again considering the title, we can guess that's not the real reason Twain invited everybody. Indeed, at dinner he tells them that he knows they're supposedly great detectives, but he's the greatest criminologist of them all. He's going to prove it by there being a murder committed at the house that they will be unable to solve because the mystery behind the murder is so diabolical that only a real mastermind can solve it And if any of them can, they'll win a million bucks. Yeah right.

But wouldn't you know it, the great detectives of the world eventually find a dead body, and one that certainly looks like it's been murdered. And they're in a stereotypically old dark house, so it may threaten them if they split up. Then again, it's not as if they're going to be able to solve it just sitting there together. And there's that big money for solving it.

To make things more complicated, when each of the pairs go to their bedrooms for the night, each of them finds they're also the target of a murder attempt in a way that's as stereotypical but also cinematic as the old dark house. Eventually each of them comes up with their own theory on whodunit and why, but who is right?

Murder by Death is another of those movies where it's very easy to see why everybody involved with it would want to make it. The idea of spoofing all of these literary/cinematic detectives is appealing. Add in the comic writing of Neil Simon, and there's a lot that most people are going to find hilarious.

To me, I have to admit there was a bit of an air of trying just a little too hard. Not that Murder by Death is a bad movie at all; it's more that at times the parody feels way too broad, and therefore not quite as funny as it ought to be. Still, most people are probably going to like this more than I did (and it's certainly not that I didn't like it), so it's absolutely worth watching.

Not to be confused with Any Number Can Play

A movie that I had on my old DVR but never got around to watching was the British film Only Two Can Play. I noticed that it was on Tubi, so I decided to watch it, although I have to say that it no longer seems to be on Tubi.

Peter Sellers plays John Lewis, working as a librarian in what seems to be one of those small working-class towns that dotted British movies of the period, this time in Wales. It's not much of a job, but somehow he's able to support a wife Jean (Virginia Maskell) and a kid. For some values of support, since they don't get to go out much. John has dreams of being a writer, writing some reviews for the local paper.

And then Liz Grufydd-Williams (Mai Zetterling) walks into his life. She's much more glamorous than Jean, and is married to someone with higher status, one of the local town councillors, who has some say over the library's budget and staffing. John is somewhat interested in Liz, even though he shouldn't be, and the feeling is mutual, even though they have to see each other in secret to keep from being spotted, which is the basis for quite a bit of the movie's humor.

A promotion opens up at the library, and both of the women in John's life want him to apply for the job. In Jean's case, one can assume that it means a position with both a better income and more status. For Liz, however, it's because she can use the possibility of John's getting this position to exert greater control over their relationship. If John goes for it, that may make him a kept man, which is going to cause problems for him back at home.

Meanwhile, Liz is also involved with the local amateur repertory company, putting on plays as was the sort of thing in the post-World War II era when people didn't have as many interests vying for their time as they do today. Perhaps John could be persuaded to write a better review of the play that their company is going to put on. And he doesn't even have to go see the play as Liz could help him with a synopsis and make everybody look good if need be. They could have one of their assignations while everybody else is at opening night. Unbeknownst to them, one of the cast causes a fire on opening night, forcing the cancellation of the rest of the play. Anybody who was there would know about it and there would be no need for a review....

Only Two Can Play is a rather gentler comedy than the Sellers movies that would follow, as I've always stated my view that there was a big change for Sellers starting with Dr. Stranglove, when he goes way over the top and basically nobody keeps him in check any longer. This isn't as good as some of Sellers' other early movies, particularly Two-Way Stretch and even more so I'm Alright Jack, in part because it is a bit slow. It's around 105 minutes and should have come in around 90. But if it ever shows up anywhere, it's definitely worth one watch.

After the Fox

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August was Peter Sellers, which gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I had not seen before. Among these is After the Fox, which I recently watched.

After an opening credits sequence that confirmed my suspicion that the titles were designed by Maurice Binder, we get into an establishing scene to set up the main part of the story. Among the great heists ever committed is an Egyptian bullion robbery, masterminded by a man named Okra (Akim Tamiroff). However, having robbed the bullion, there's a problem: How do they actually move it so they can get the money that it's worth? Interpol is on the case, and they know that the robber is going to need somebody to get it into Europe. The criminal who would seem to have the greatest capacity to do it is Aldo Vanucci (Peter Sellers), nicknamed "The Fox", but he's currently in prison.

Not for long, His gang breaks him out, and he goes home to his mother and his sister Gins (Britt Ekland, who was Sellers' real-life wife at the time). There, he finds out that his sister has a scandalous job -- she's an actress, horror of horrors! However, this and another event helps give Aldo an idea.

Aldo has decided to take on the job of smugling the bullion into Europe because he wants to give his sister a respectable job, yet doesn't know how to do it until he sees another actor, Tony Powell (Victor Mature). Tony is the stereotype of the American who is better known for his name than being a truly good actor, and going to Europe for the big pay check. When Tony goes out on the streets of Rome, he's mobbed by Italians who are fans of old Hollywood movies and have seen Powell's work. (The movie actually uses snippets of one of Mature's old movies, Easy Living to show Powell's old work.)

Aldo, having seen this, realizes that he can smuggle the bullion into Italy under the guise of making a movie about smuggling gold! Everybody else involved will think that they're acting out a scene from a movie, not knowing that what they're handling is real gold and not prop gold. Posing under the name of Federico Fabrizi, Aldo goes to a small seaside fishing village where the boat carrying the bullion can anchor offshore, and gets pretty much the entire population of the town to play extras in the movie. After all, they're so star-struck that they want to be in the movie. Likewise does Tony Powell, who thinks it will be great to be in something so avant-garde.

The only person who realizes the obvious is Tony's agent, Harry Granoff (Martin Balsam). You'd think that the residents of this little Italian town would have heard of a "Federico Fabrizi" if there were an actual famous director by this name and recognize that this is an impostor. But for whatever reason they go along with the con, with only Harry suspecting Fabrizi might not be real. The question then becomes whether those Italian authorities from outside the village, not involved with the fake movie, will find out what's going on and catch Aldo before he can get away with robbery.

I've long felt that from Dr. Strangelove on, a little bit of Peter Sellers goes a long, long way. That's certainly the case here. The comedy is designed to be mostly a farce, with a bit of social commentary courtesy of director Vittorio De Sica (who even appears as himself) about greed messing up "art". But Sellers has a tendency to be too forceful in his comedy to the point that for me at least, it can become grating and obnxious. Martin Balsam follows along in this line. Perhaps surprisingly, the acting honors go to Mature, parodying his own image. Like Broderick Crawford a decade later in A Little Romance, Mature looks like he's having a blast skewering the idea of the Hollywood star.

After the Fox may not be for everybody, especially if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of Peter Sellers. But if you do like Sellers' work, then I think you'll enjoy After the Fox.

Henry Orient's World

I think I've argued here before that the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Peter Sellers finally shows up as the mad doctor is the moment where his career takes a turn into becoming obnoxiously self-indulgent in his performances. That's probably a bit unfair, however, since he could still be tamed into not being overbearing even when he's the nominal star of a movie such as The World of Henry Orient.

Of course, it should be stated that while Sellers gets the title role, he's not really the lead character. That honor goes to two teenaged girls, who attend the same private school in New York. Val Boyd (Tippy Walker) is the new girl at school, getting let out early every day to see her shrink, although that's only mentioned via a third party. She quickly makes friends with "Gil", short for Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth). Val's parents are constantly busy traveling the world on business, while Gil's are divorced, and she lives with her mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and Mom's "friend" Boothy (Bibi Osterwald).

The two young ladies still like to act immature from time to time, going through Manhattan and just generally having a good time. However, Val can be a bit of a drama queen. One day, the two are in Central Park, and Val peers over a stone. She accidentally catches a glimpse of two lovers sharing a kiss. One of those is Henry Orient (Peter Sellers, as I mentioned), a temperamental concert pianist; the other is married Stella Dunworthy (Paula Prentiss), not married to Henry and worried about her husband finding out. So naturally when Henry catches Val and Gil playing peeping Tom, he's none too pleased.

It's about to get a whole lot worse for him, as he notices the two young women watching him somewhere else, leading him to believe that some brilliant mind trying to discover the affair has sent two "innocent" teenaged girls to follow him around and stalk him. Not that Val thinks of it as stalking Henry, however. She's just becoming one of those fans who is overly obsessed, but without becoming a groupie.

And like teenagers who want to think they're more grown up than they really are, Val decides to start a "secret society" with Gil dedicated to worshipping Henry Orient, allowing them to dress up and go around town basically being relatively harmless. You can, however, understand why adults might have a problem with this. And soon enough they will.

Christmas is approaching, and Val's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd (Tom Bosley and Angela Lansbury respectively) return home for the holiday. Mrs. Boyd finds Val's scrapbook on Henry Orient, and unsurprisingly she's horrified, jumping to a not unreasonable conclusion that Henry might be up to no good. While he is misbehaving, it's not with the two teenaged girls, whom he'd just as soon have be out of his life. Mrs. Boyd thinks that Gil is responsible for Val's behavior, and orders Val to break off the friendship. Everybody else, however, is much more sensible. And perhaps Mrs. Boyd's overbearing nature might have something to do with why Val is seeing a shrink.

If Peter Sellers is toned down in The World of Henry Orient, it's because the role isn't particularly big. Much more attention is given to the two teenage girls, who can be irritating at times, but in the natural way adolescents can be irritating. That having been said, I wonder just how much Val and Gill would get to traipse around lower Manhattan in real life.

Sellers isn't the only one to do well with his role. Lansbury wasn't much different in Dear Heart which came out the same year, and this is the sort of stuff she was quite good at doing. If the movie has a problem, however, it's with the script, which is just too slight. This is another of those movies that really should have run around 90 minutes instead of the 106-minute run time it has.

If you want to see establishing shots of New York as it was in a more innocent time, there's some nice photography here. And if you want some competent and professional actors, you'll definitely get that. If you want something more memorable than watching it and going on to the next movie, however, you'll have to watch something else.

Lolita

Shelley Winters' turn as TCM's Star of the Month continues tonight at 8:00 PM with Lolita.

Lolita is one of those movies that starts off at the end. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) shows up at the house of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). Quilty is a dissolute man, at least from the looks of his house, with a table tennis table in the main room covered with all sorts of junk, and a generally slovenly look to the whole place. But Humbert is really there to shoot Quilty!

Flash back four years. Humbert Humbert is a British professor of French literature who has gotten a job at one of those small liberal arts colleges that dot Hollywood movies, this one being somewhere in Ohio. But Humbert decides he's going to spend the summer before he has to go out to Ohio working on a book, so he shows up in the town of Ramsdale, NH, looking for a place to rent a room for the summer. The one he gets is in a house owned by Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters).

Haze is a widow with a teenaged daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon), who has the nickname Lolita. Lolita is beginning to learn about boys, and don't you think she doesn't know the power that she has over them, what with her good looks and their hormones. She even pursues Humbert, who finds himself falling prey to her charms. But Charlotte is also in need of a man, not that she's going to be as direct about it as her daughter.

One night at a dance ostensibly for the teens, Charlotte and Humbert meet Clare Quilty, a screenwriter also in Ramsdale for the summer. Humbert keeps finding that he wants to be alone with Lolita, but this is obviously not morally acceptable, so he comes up with the next best solution, which is to start up a relationshp with Charlotte as a ruse to be able to be near Lolita. Charlotte, being in need of a man and not realizing what Humbert is up to, agrees to marry Humbert.

But then she reads Humbert's diary and learns the truth, which causes her to go nuts and run out in the rain, where she gets run down by a car and killed. Lolita is off at summer camp at the time, so she doesn't know what happened. And Humbert is too stupid to tell her the truth for several days after picking Lolita up from the summer camp!

On the way back from summer camp, they run into Quilty at a hotel, Humbert not recognizing him from that dance back in Ramsdale. But Quilty certainly recognizes Humbert and Lolita, and starts plotting a way into Lolita's life, as we see when he shows up at the Humbert house in disguise claiming to be a high school psychiatrist! He's also written a play just to get Lolita cast in it and near him. Humbert tries to get away, while Quilty keeps following.

I had two big problems with Lolita. One was with the characters. None of the four main characters was particularly likeable. Humbert lies for no good reason; Lolita is nastily manipulative; Charlotte is a shrill clingy harpy; and Peter Sellers is in post-Strangelove obnoxious mode even though this one was made a year before Dr. Strangelove. The other big problem is with the director, Stanley Kubrick, who decided that the best way to handle the material is to have it drag on for over two and a half hours. It's way too slow, I think.

Interestingly, the one thing I didn't have much of a problem with is the whole idea of a much older guy with a stepdaughter who may or may not be of legal age. That idea is handled reasonably well, in part because the Production Code hadn't been completely dismantled yet (even though the movie was made in England, Kubrick was obviously going to have to conform to the Code to get the movie shown in America). So everything is handled in a somewhat more circumspect manner than it would have been half a dozen years later.

There's also a 1990s version of Lolita, which I haven't seen, so be careful if you're looking for a DVD.

Heavens Above!

Some time back, I bought a five-film Peter Sellers box set. I've blogged about all of the movies in it, except for Heavens Above!, so over the weekend I watched that final film in the set.

The scene is Orbiston Parva, a company town that has made its living from the Despard family factory for who knows how long, although it seems like several generations at least. The factory produced "Tranquilax", one of those phony pep pills that probably didn't work any better than a placebo. Anyhow, the local Church of England church is currently without a minister, so the next level up in the Church hierarchy arranges to get a new minister. The Rev. John Smallwood is known the the guy doing the appointment, so he has his secretaries get in touch with Smallwood since they have his contact information on file.

Unfortunately, it turns out that there are two John Smallwoods in the file. The one they wanted was a middle-of-the-road minister who would be thoroughly inoffensive. The one they call up (played by Peter Sellers) works as a prison chaplain. It's a noble enough calling, but one that's going to color a man's view on Christianity, and one can only wonder what that's going to mean for a hidebound town like Orbiston Parva.

In fact, we soon find that the Rev. Smallwood they get takes his Christianity rather seriously, believing in the value of good works. When he gets to town he finds that there's a family, the Smiths, squatting on a plot of land next to the factory that the Tranquilax people intend to use for their expansion plans. The Despards have gotten a legal order to evict the Smiths, who are going to be put into council housing with apparently some of the children going into foster care. When Rev. Smallwood discovers this, he decides to let the Smiths live in the vicarage, since it's got a lot of space thanks to the Despards, and he doesn't need much. What he doesn't realize is that the Smiths are a bunch of grifters.

Meanwhile, Smallwood gets Mrs. Despard (Isabel Jeans) more interested in charity, to the point that she starts a charitable venture with her farmland that threatens to put all the other local producers out of business! Smallwood, for his part, is horrified to learn that Tranquilax is advertising itself as the "three-in-one restorative", since to him the only three-in-one is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He starts campaigning against Tranquilax and this, combined with Despard's selling her shares for the charity project, threatens to put the company out of business.

I found myself having rather mixed views on Heavens Above! as I watched. Pretty much everybody gets skewered here, from the Church to the aristocratic types in the form of the Despards, to the underclass, as the Smiths are pretty ruthlessly portrayed as scamming layabouts. But the movie also has a lot of problems. It shouldn't have taken very long to discover that there were in fact two John Smallwoods (the other one is played by Ian Carmichael in one scene), which would have led everybody to be able to figure out what to do. As it stands in the movie, the powers that be come up with a solution that frankly makes no sense. Heavens Above! also veers too much from a gentle comedy to manic, and not to good effect.

Three of the five movies in the box set are quite good, however, so I can certainly recommend the box set as a whole, with Heavens Above! as a sort of extra. Amazon also says the movie is currently available on its streaming service.

Carlton-Browne of the F.O.

One of the films in the Peter Sellers box set I picked up a year ago that was completely new to me is Carlton-Browne of the F.O., also known as Man in a Cocked Hat.

Gaillardia is a fictional island which, in the movie, was discovered in 1720 by a crew of British sailors who ran aground there. The place became a British colony, although it was ultimately granted self-government around 1920. But it's such a minor place that the British representative there never left, and everybody back in London basically forgot about the place. Until now, that is, as the old representative Davidson (Miles Malleson) sends a report back to London that some people in a Soviet cultural exchange are clearly not the dancers they claim to be. But why are they there?

That's what the Foreign Office wants to find out. Eventually they discover that Gaillardia comes under the auspices of the Department of Miscellaneous territories, which has been the purview of the Carlton-Brownes. Second-generation man Cadogan de Vere Carlton-Browne (Terry-Thomas) gets sent to Gaillardia to get at the truth which, as it turns, out, it very complicated. The country has been split in two with the king of the south having recently been killed and replaced by his twentysomething son Loris (Ian Bannen), while Grand Duke Alexis (John Le Mesurier), Loris' uncle has been running the north, hoping to install Princess Ilyena (Luciana Paoluzzi), presumably a cousin of Loris'.

Carlton-Brown being played by Terry-Thomas should be a sign that Britain has an incompetent representative. And what he doesn't realize is that the new King is actually a pretty savvy cookie despite having been brought up away from Gaillardia and having studied at Oxford. It turns out that those Soviet impostors were mining engineers, and where the British simply want to make certain they keep anybody else from getting at whatever the mining engineers want, Loris is intent on getting a good deal for his impoverished people. Matters get thoroughly complicated when it turns out that what everybody is mining is a cobalt isotope that's important in nuclear weapons.

And then there are the domestic affairs of Gaillardia. Loris and Ilyena met on the plane from London to Gaillardia, although both of them were flying under an assumed name so neither knows that the other is a royal, and they fall in love each thinking the other is a commoner, although Ilyena learns about Loris' true identity early on. It seems like the obvious solution would be for Loris and Ilyena to get married and rule together. But it'll take time for the movie to get there, if that's even the outcome.

Interestingly, even though this movie appears on a Peter Sellers box set, you'll notice I haven't mentioned his character yet. He plays the Prime Minister, a thoroughly corrupt man who is only out to get as much as he can for him and his extended familiy. He gets second billing, but it's not the biggest role.

I've said before that I find Peter Sellers' later work (from about Strangelove on) to go over the top to the point of obnoxious tedium. As with The Painted Veil yesterday, however, while Carlton-Browne of the F.O. disappoints, it's not because of Sellers. Instead, it's because the movie is all over the place and doesn't really do any one thing memorably well. The comedy is strained and the whole premise about nobody knowing about Gaillardia is nonsense. Carlton-Browne would have been drummed out of his job during World War II, too, most likely. The movie only runs 90 minutes, but it felt like more of a slog than that.

Carlton-Browne of the F.O. is in a boxed set with some other really good films. Although Amazon implies you can only get it through resellers now which would imply it's out of print, you can still get it at the TCM Shop. The other films make it worth the while, and some people will probably like Carlton-Browne of the F.O. more than I did.

Two Way Stretch

I was thinking of what to blog about today, and decided I'd look through my DVDs for something I haven't blogged about before, ultimately deciding on Two Way Stretch, off the same Peter Sellers box set as The Smallest Show on Earth, which I blogged about seven weeks ago.

Sellers plays Dodger Lane, whom we see at the beginning in a relatively cushy prison cell along with cellmates Price (Bernard Cribbins) and Knight (David Lodge). Part of the reason why it's so cushy is because the head of the guards, Jenkins, is a pushover who has an eternally optimistic view of the prisoners and their capability for rehabilitation. To that end, he's aided by the warden, called the Governor in British English (Maurice Denham). The Governor is even bringing in a welfare group to show them how good the prisoners are, unaware that they're taking severe advantage of him.

And then the Governor has a visitor for Lane: Stevens, Lane's vicar from his old parish (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Except that, from the way Lane responds to seeing the vicar, it's clear that the vicar and Lane have some problems in their relationship. Indeed, the vicar isn't a vicar at all, but a fellow criminal in the same gang as Lane, Price, and Knight. And Stevens was the only one with an alibi for the last heist, which is why he's a free man and they're in prison. But he's got a brilliant idea. Some sultan is coming to pick up his diamonds that he stores for safekeeping in the UK, and Stevens and the gang are going to steal the diamonds during transport. There's only one catch: Lane and his cellmates need to break out of prison for the heist, and then smuggle their way back into prison, so that they have an airtight alibi. (The prisoners are scheduled to be released on completion of their sentence soon, but after the transport that will result in the heist.)

With the Governor and Jenkins, getting out will be easy. So of course there's going to be a snag, which is that Jenkins is past retirement age, but has stayed on mostly because there's nobody to replace him. Only now, there is somebody to replace him, and Jenkins will soon be leaving. He's going to be replaced by Crout (Lionel Jeffries), who is an over-the-top martinet and brooks no nonsense from the prisoners in his charge. Getting out under Jenkins' watch would have been a breeze, but under Crout's watch? That's a problem.

There's nothing earth-shattering, ground-breaking, or even of any great significance, in Two Way Stretch. All it is is a jolly good ride. The movie was made in the pre-Strangelove stage of Sellers' career, when his characers weren't the irritating things you want to smack and which make some of the later movies nearly unwatchable. And he's got a wonderful supporting cast of British character actors, to the point that this is almost more of an ensemble cast than a Sellers vehicle. The gags almost uniformly work and don't insult the viewer's intelligence, even if there's relatively little new here. I particularly enjoyed the one involving distracting the guard supervising prison visits.

As I said back in March, the Peter Sellers box set is being sold at a fairly moderate price on Amazon. For that price, the films are more than worth it.

The Smallest Show on Earth

I bought another batch of DVDs recently, among which was a five-DVD box set of early Peter Sellers comedies. Among the movies is The Smallest Show on Earth.

Sellers wasn't the star yet; that honor goes to Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. They play Matt and Jean Spenser, a young married couple trying to climb the ladder to get to the good life. One day, they get a letter from a solicitor informing them that Matt's greatuncle Simon died and left them his entire estate. Matt insists that he never even had a greatuncle Matt. A call to the solicitor in the industrial city of Sloughborough suggests that they ought to go there and deal with the matter in person.

On the phone they were informed that Simon owned a cinema, and when they get to Sloughborough they find that there's only one cinema in town, the Grand, one of those grand old picture palaces. Obviously, they're worth something now. And then they get to the solicitor's office, and find that greatuncle Simon owned a much smaller cinema that closed down when he died. The solicitor (Leslie Phillips) takes them to the cinema, at which point they begin to wish they hadn't had a greatuncle Simon. The cinema, the Bijou, is in a parlous state, next to an elevated rail line, and you wonder how it was ever able to turn a profit.

And then there are the cinema's three workers: box-office cashier Mrs. Fazackalee (Margaret Rutherford); dipsomanic projectionist Quill (Peter Sellers); and probably suffering from the early stages of dementia, janitor Old Tom (Bernard Miles). None of them would be fun to work with, but they were the only ones who could keep the place running. So the obvious solution is to sell the theater, since it's got to be on a valuable piece of central city land. And indeed the owner of the other theater, Mr. Hardcastle (Francis De Wolff), needing the land for a car-park, had offered the elder Spenser £5,000 for the theater, which was a pretty nice sum back in the late fifties. But with Simon dead, Hardcastle is only offering a tenth that.

So the solicitor comes up with a wacky idea: make Hardcastle think that the Spensers want to reopen the cinema, and he'll have to relent and sell for the original price. Note that they don't actually have to open the cinema, just make Hardcastle believe that's what their doing. Apparently the Spensers must not have had a job back where they had originally lived, since they're able to start putting in the elbow grease necessary to put on the illusion of reopening the Bijou. But things go wrong when Hardcastle learns of the dupe, which forces the Spensers actually to open the Bijou and make it a going concern.

The Smallest Show on Earth turns out to be a pretty good movie, but I have to admit I found it took a long time (and it's only an 80-minute movie) to get there. Other than the Spensers, the characters tend to have irritating personality traits that make you want to smack them rather than be sympathetic to them. But once the Bijou opens things pick up. There's a lot of opportunity for humor, and if you've sen Singin' in the Rain, specifically the premiere of the new talkie, you'll recognize a lot of the sight gags here. This was before Peter Sellers became famous enough to be the star of the movies he was in, so his personality doesn't overpower the movie. He's quite understated here and it works well. The three "old" Bijou employees also get one scene where, after the cinema is closed for the evening, they run it the way it was run back in the old days, showing a silent movie with Fazackalee playing the piano. It's actually a bit touching.

The TCM Shop is selling the Peter Sellers box set on sale from an original list price of $40; I got it off Amazon for an even lower price than the TCM sale price. The sale price isn't bad for a five-disc set, and The Smallest Show on Earth is certainly well worth the watch.