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.

For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

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.

The Mouse on the Moon

I've been going through a lot of the shorter movies on my DVR, and shorter movies generally means older movies. So even though TCM ran it just a few weeks back, I decided to watch The Mouse on the Moon rather than some of the stuff that's been on my DVR for a long time because it dates from the early 1960s.

The Mouse on the Moon is a sequel to The Mouse that Roared, a movie I thought I had blogged about but apparently not. The plot of the original movie involved the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, one of those small political entities that dotted Central Europe in movies from before World War II when the writers needed a prince from a fictional place -- think the prince who resolves the plot problems in First Lady if you watched that. Anyhow, the country more or less went bankrupt and came up with a ruse to get financial aid from the West.

A few years later, the country is still as backward as ever, and still as much in need of financial aid as ever to try to modernize the country. Worse, the country's main export, its wine, is being barred from export because the stuff has a nasty habit of exploding. Well, now that it's the early 1960s instead of the late 1950s, there's a space race going on. Prime Minister Mountjoy (Ron Moody) comes up with the brilliant idea to say that it wants to enter the space race, and get financial assistance to help in this regard. He knows the Americans will give on the reasoning that it's a diplomatic coup and the country will never be successful; Grand Fenwick can then use the money to do things like install running water.

Things get more interesting when the Soviets respond by sending an actual rocket. Meanwhile, the country's top scientist, Dr. Kokintz (David Kossoff), has figured out that whlie the wine may be explosive, it also has anti-gravity properties that make it a perfect propellant for a rocket ship, as using it won't require the rocket to achieve escape velocity. So perhaps they'll be able to figure out a way to get to the moon, which would suit Kokintz just fine. It would also make Mountjoy's son Vincent (Bernard Cribbins) happy. In theory, he's supposed to be next in line for the hereditary prime ministership, but he really wants to be an astronaut.

Meanwhile, the Americans, Soviets, and British all get alarmed at the prospect that somebody else might get to the moon first, so they start trying to figure out what Grand Fenwick is really up to. Kokintz is able to get the rocket launched, but because they don't need escape velocity, it's going to take longer to get to the moon than it would take the Apollo program (well, technically Apollo hadn't been started yet) to, at least from liftoff from Earth to landing on the moon. So the US and Soviets both rush rockets into preparation to try to beat both Grand Fenwick and each other.

The problem with The Mouse on the Moon is that it feels like the writers ran out of ideas for Grand Fenwick after The Mouse That Roared. This, even though the movie is based on a book. The producers apparently had a financial hit with The Mouse That Roared, and wanting to continue that, came up with this, but like Grand Fenwick itself, not really keeping up with the times. So what we get is a lot of stuff that feels like it's past its sell-by date, and not quite as funny as it otherwise might have been.

I'll probably have to track down a copy of The Mouse that Roared and watch it, as it's been years since the last time I saw it.

The Great Air Race

It's time for another of those movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation and is going to be on again tomorrow. This time, it's Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. It's got two airings tomorrow, at 3:30 AM and 9:30 AM.

A brief opening segment that reminded me of Conquest of the Air tells us of the difficulties man had in learning how to fly. But the movie is set in 1910, which is seven years after the Wright Brothers' famous flight at Kitty Hawk, and now man can fly, although it's nowhere near as safe as it would become in more recent years.

One of those "birdmen", as the movie calls them, is British military man Richard Mays (James Fox). He's in love with Patricia Rawnsley (Sarah Miles), daughter of press baron Lord Rawnsley (Robert Morley), although Dad flatly forbids his daughter from flying considering how dangerous it is. However, Mays comes up with the idea of having an air race from London to Paris in order to show the superiority of British aviation. Lord Rawnsley realizes this would be excellent advertising for his newspaper, and agrees to sponsor just such a race.

News gets out, and people from all over the world want to join in the race, since it's got a fairly substantial prize. There's Frenchman Pierre Dubois (Jean-Pierre Cassel); Italian Count Ponticelli (Alberto Sordi); American cowboy Orvil Newton (Stewart Whitman); and an entire team commanded by Count Manfred Von Holstein (Gert Fröbe), although the Count is not supposed to be the pilot. There's also another Brit, underhanded Sir Percy (Terry-Thomas), who plans to cheat his way to victory. Just before the race is set to start, a member of the Japanese navy shows up.

Most of the characters are gentle stereotypes. As I mentioned, Orvil is a cowboy; Pierre is a lover who is part of a running joke about a woman he romanced whom he should know (several characters with different names, all played by Irina Demick); the Germans are the model of officious efficiency; and so on. It's all meant to be in reasonably good taste and reasonably suitable even for children, although they'd probably prefer the aerial stunts once the race actually gets going, which isn't until two-thirds of the way through the picture. One big sub-plot has Orvil falling for Patricia, which creates a fair deal of conflict between Orvil and Richard, although it all comes out right in the end.

The movie runs a bit long, although not as long as The Great Race, a movie from the same year which was about a car race at the beginning of motoring. Including the intermission, the print FXM ran was about 139 minutes. This means that things take a while to get going, and I don't just mean the race itself. The comedy more or less works, but there's also not as much comedy as you'd expect. Not that there's really drama; it's more that all the scenes are slow to develop. Of the two movies, however, I did prefer Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Kill or Cure

Looking through my DVR to see what was on it that's available on DVD, I was somewhat surprised to see that the British movie Kill or Cure got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archives. But that's because, like the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple mysteries, it was made by MGM in the UK and distributed by them in America. So I watched it recently to do a post on here.

Terry-Thomas plays J. Barker-Rynde, a typically questionable Terry-Thomas character who in this case is both a photographer and a private investigator. One night he gets a call from Margaret Clifford, a wealthy but presumably eccentric woman who tells him to come down to Green Glades and investigate what's going on, for which he'll receive the princely sum of £75, which was quite a bit back in the early 1960s. But one he gets there, he's supposed to wait for her to contact him.

Barker-Rynde doesn't know what he's getting himself into, mostly because he doesn't know what Green Glades is. He goes to the bar, only to find there aren't any alcoholic drinks, but only these nasty-sounding vegetable-flavored drinks. It turns out that Green Glades is a health spa, or at least the sort of spa that was predicated on taking wealthy fat people and making them weigh less by separating them from their money through a bunch of dubious exercise machines.

Barker-Rynde doesn't have any place else to stay, so when Dr. Crossley (Dennis Price) examines him and declares him less than healthy, Barker-Rynde stayes there to be seen under the auspices of Rumbelow (Eric Sykes). Not that it's pleasant, as the first of the privations involves spending much of the day in an unheated chalet when not taking the various quack cures.

Eventually, Barker does get to see Mrs. Clifford. Except that she doesn't answer when he calls, and when he turns to face her, he finds that she's really most sincerely dead! She's been poisoned with ricin. And then Mrs. Clifford's secretary Frances Roitman (Moira Redmond) also turns up poisoned, although she'll survive, just having to spend some time recuperating and confined to a wheelchair when she does have the energy to get out of bed.

There are any number of suspects, and local police inspector Hook (Lionel Jeffries) is brought in to investigate. There's also a £2,000 reward for information leading to apprehending the person who killed Mrs. Clifford, so that really gets Barker to investigate, as does Rumbelow. They're at cross purposes at first, but eventually decide to team up. As Hook, he has someone he's investigating, not realizing that it's actually Barker, who is presumably quite innocent.

Terry-Thomas was always quite good at playing characters who seem less than completely on the up-and-up, and he's not bad in Kill or Cure. But this is minor material for him, as well as for British cinema. There's only mild laughs, and while it's not a bad movie, it's certainly not a memorably good one either. Some of the vintage look at fitness crazes may be of interest, as exercise equipment has come a long way in the past 60 years. But overall, I'd certainly recommend other Terry-Thomas movies before Kill or Cure.

Bachelor Flat

So, over the weekend I watched Bachelor Flat, having taped it off of FXM. It's on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme should you want to watch it too.

Terry-Thomas plays Prof. Patterson, an paleontology professor at a college in California. All the co-eds love him simply because he's British, and they're disappointed to find out that he's getting married to fashion designer Helen Bushmill (Celeste Holm). As for Patterson, he's currently renting his fiancée's beach house while she's away in Paris. Patterson has also let a law student, Mike Pulaski (Richard Beymer), live in a trailer on the property.

Trouble comes for the good professor when a young woman, Libby (Tuesday Weld) shows up at the house. She acts as if she knows the place, and she's obviously looking for Helen. So when she discovers there's a strange man in the house, she has no idea what's going on. Now, if both of them could just have told the truth, things would have been so much easier. But no.

It turns out that Libby is actually Helen's daughter, and that Helen never bothered to tell her fiancé that she was previously married and has a teenaged daughter. Helen also never bothered to tell her daughter that Mom was going to get remarried. Now, at least Libby has one slight reason to lie, which is that she's run away from boarding school. But still.... Meanwhile, Mike has been using the good professor as a way to attract girlfriends. Apparently, they'd all rather be around the professor than around Mike, so while Libby is there, another woman, Gladys (Francesca Bellini) shows up.

It goes on like this, with nobody being honest to each other, until Helen returns home from Paris. There's also a subplot about the professor's dinosaur bone, which Mike's dachshund wants, and a possible grant to go digging for bones, which the professor hopes to do on his honeymoon.

Frankly, I didn't care much for Bachelor Flat at all. It had the feel of one of those terrible "generation gap" movies, with Terry-Thomas and Holm trying to act hip around the young ones, with everybody lying their way through everything. I've mentioned on several occasions how I dislike what I refer to as the "comedy of lies", where characters tell one lie and them compound the problem by telling bigger and bigger lies. It rarely works, and then combine it with the older stars (especially Holm) being way out of their element. Beymer also has no charisma.

Some of you may like it, as there's some nice early 60s set design, and this genre may actually appeal to some people. It just doesn't appeal to me, but judge for yourself.

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.

School for Scoundrels

Some months back, I bought a DVD of the 1960 British film School for Scoundrels. I finally got around to watching it, and since it's available on DVD what with my having bought a copy, I'm more than comfortable doing a full-length blog post on the movie.

Ian Carmichael stars as Henry Palfrey, a man who in the opening scenes of the movie as the opening credits are playing is getting off a train in Yeovil, a middle-of-nowhere town in Exeter, on the way to the southwestern counties of Cornwall and Devon if you were going that far. But Henry isn't. In Yeovil, he follows his signs to the "lifemanship" college run by one Mr. Potter (Alastair Sim). Potter teaches courses in how to be more confident and a winner in life, not unlike what we've seen in The Magnificent Dope, but these classes are on steroids compared to anything Don Ameche's character would have thought up.

First, though, we learn why Henry wants to take these "lifemanship" classes. Everybody's been beating him at life recently, starting when he met lovely April (Janette Scott) while taking the bus to work. He was going to take her out to a nice place for dinner, but his business associate deliberately made the reservation for someplace else. At the dinner reservation, however, he meets old friend Raymond (Terry-Thomas), who graciously lets Henry and April sit at his table and have dinner as a threesome. Except that Raymond has other ideas, pretty much taking Henry's girl right out from under his nose. Henry tries to buy a car to impress April, but he's too stupid even to take the car for a test drive so he ends up with a lemon. You can see why Henry would want at least some assertiveness training.

However, what he gets isn't so much assertiveness training as a way of fleecing people, socially at least if not monetarily, into making oneself appear to be the top man. Through a series of classes with humorous titles like "Gamesmanship" or "Woo-manship", Potter teaches men to be rather ungentlemanly in getting what you want, which apparently works even though I'd think everybody would see through this crap.

Eventually, having gone through the courses, Henry is deemed ready to put these ideas into practice in real life, albeit under the watchful eye of Potter. The ideas work successfully, as Henry fleeces the car dealer, his business partner, and even gets revenge on Raymond both with April and on the tennis court. But perhaps he's a little too successful, as Raymond begins to discover there might be something hinky going on....

School for Scoundrels is one of those little British movies that a lot of people will probably like. I have to admit, however, that I have rather more mixed feelings about it. The thing is, I found Potter's ideas to be so obnoxious that as I said above, anybody would see through it and they'd fail. I'd rather smack people like Potter and Henry, not root for them. (To be fair, however, Raymond is also a jerk.) Still, the movie is more than well enough made, even if not nearly as enjoyable for me as many of the other British comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s.