Peter Viney's Blog

The Magic Christian 
1969

 

Directed by Joseph McGrath
Screenplay by Terry Southern & Joseph McGrath
Based on The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

Music by Ken Thorne
Songs by Badfinger 
Come & Get It theme by Paul McCartney

CAST
Peter Sellers – Sir Guy Grand
Ringo Starr- Youngman Grand

No one else has a decent part, but …

Isabel Jeans- Dame Agnes Grand
Caroline Blakiston – Hon. Esther Grand
Spike Milligan – traffic warden
Richard Attenborough- Oxford coach
Graham Chapman – Oxford boat captain (uncredited)
John le Mesurier – Cambridge supporter (uncredited)
Leonard Fey – Laurence Faggot, psychiatrist
John Cleese – Sotheby’s art expert
Patrick Cargill – Sotheby’s auctioneer
Ferdy Mayne- waiter
Graham Stark – waiter
Laurence Harvey – Hamlet
Dennis Price- Winthrop
Wilfred Hyde-White- ship’s captain
Christopher Lee- ship’s vampire
Roman Polanski- solitary drinker
Raquel Welch- Priestess of the Whip
Victor Madden – hot dog vendor
Terence Alexander – a mad major
Peter Bayliss- a toff
Clive Dunn – Sommelier
Jeremy Lloyd- Lord Hampton
Fred Emney- a company director
Hatti Jacques- Ginger Horton
Yul Brynner – transvestite singer (uncredited)
Alan Whicker- self (uncredited)
jimmy Clitheroe- passenger (uncredited)
Harry Carpenter – self, commentator (uncredited)
Michael Aspel –  self, commentator (uncredited)
Michael Barratt –  self, commentator (uncredited)

The 60s retrospective series …

Released 12 December1969 in the UK, February 1970 in the USA.

This was fortuitous – it happened to be on Talking Pictures, and there are meandering threads in this series, in that like the previous review, The Family Way, we have a Paul McCartney contribution to the soundtrack. Then Ringo Starr co-stars in a part that was written originally for John Lennon.  It wasn’t on my list of films to review.

The idea of adapting Terry Southern’s 1959 novel had been bouncing around since the Dr Strangelove era, and it was that interest that got Southern onto that film.  Peter Sellers liked The Magic Christian novel so much that he bought dozens of copies and handed them out to friends. The Magic Christian film script shifted the action from America to Britain, and added the Ringo Starr role.

Joseph McGrath’s connection to Peter Sellers dated back to the Goon Show on radio and he also directed the Sellers / Orson Welles scenes of Casino Royale in 1967. He had been an assistant to Richard Lester on A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and directed the Beatles promo clips (i.e. videos) for Ticket To Ride, Help! and Day Tripper. So he was well acquainted with both Sellers and Starr.

I’ve never been a Peter Sellers fan. The Goon Show never got to me, I was just a little too young. I’ll re-quote from my review of The Party:

Sellers claimed that years of radio taught him to use accents as a prop. You could say accent is an easy route to character, a substitute for immersing himself in a role. For The Millionairess with Sophia Loren, he introduced his Indian funny voice. Not only that, they had a Top Ten hit in 1960 with Goodness Gracious Me from the film. Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series showed off his French funny voice, and Dr Strangelove saw him manage a Texan funny voice, Advanced plummy RP and a German funny voice.

Let’s add the funny working class voice from I’m Alright, Jack. This film was the funny Advanced RP voice. Except somehow, Sellers had stopped being funny. By 1969, we had realized that his accents were classist, racist (in 1969 we said ‘racialist’) and generally cruel.  He was not at a good career point, which persisted until he revisited Inspector Clouseau in the mid 70s. There was a desperation to exert ego that was coming across on the screen. Scenes were re-shot because Ringo had the funnier lines, so Sellers appropriated them. He wanted John Cleese as the art expert removed, because it was all too apparent that Cleese was funnier than him. The allegorical names, Sir Guy Grand for Sellers, and Youngman Grand for Ringo say it all. The black comedy was sledgehammer, screamingly obvious. The IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) lists quotes from most films and you can usually look and recall and say ‘That was a good line.’ Here you just remember how flat they fell in the film, and  looking at them on the screen, they’re turgid lines. It’s a turgid script with no flow, jerking from daft episodic sequence to even dafter episodic sequence.

The main attempt to pull in interest was to show a dizzying succession of well-known faces in minor roles, which was Sellers pulling in personal favours, combined with keeping the invited luminaries in parts so small they couldn’t compete with Sellers. Where they ran out of well-known faces, they added lookalikes, so that we see John and Yoko and Aristotle and Jackie Onassis boarding the cruise ship. John Cleese and Graham Chapman both appear and they had tried to script the story themselves in the past. Several famous actors are uncredited … Yul Brynner, John Le Mesurier, Graham Chapman. This might be their choice.

There is not one good female role amongst the huge cast. Only Raquel Welch is memorable as the near naked galley overseer. She has very little screen time … a minute maybe … yet she appears on most of the advertising posters and lobby cards from the film. I wonder why that might be?

I remember seeing it in the cinema (if I’d remembered in more detail, I’d never have rewatched it). We went to see it for Ringo Starr and because I liked Terry Southern’s novels. I was incredibly disappointed.

THE PLOT

Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) is a billionaire who sets out to prove that anybody will do anything for enough money, hence the theme song which is repeated several times, including as an instrumental

If you want it … here it is … come and get it
But you’d better hurry ‘cos it’s going fast.

He finds a homeless man (Ringo Starr) in the park, and legally adopts him as his son and heir as Youngman Grand. Then Ringo has to trail round with him watching his pranks to get the point. The pranks are all done with bribery.

Thus an actor (Laurence Harvey) turns the To be or not to be speech into a striptease.

To bare or not to bare … Laurence Harvey as Hamlet meets The Chippendales

He takes over a grocer’s shop and watches people grab stuff.
He supervises a meeting of the directors of Grand and Son to show them a ludicrous  new car then sacks the lot.
He goes on a grouse (or pheasant) hunt and uses anti-aircraft artillery to bring down the birds (and a helicopter)

Youngman Grand (Ringo Starr) watches the grouse shoot

There is a soiree where Ringo plays clarinet and Sellers plays harp- those who were on the set say the two spent much time discussing drumming, an interest of Sellers.

A duo- Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers

He orders caviare in a swanky restaurant and covers his face with it.

Graham Stark and Ferdy Mayne as waiters serve the caviar.

He goes to a boxing match, and when the fight starts, the boxers embrace and kiss on the canvas.

Gooning it up: Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan

He pays a parking warden (Spike Milligan) to eat a parking ticket, plastic bag and all. This scene reinforced my view that none of the Goons were funny. I enjoyed Spike Milligan’s books but never liked his TV shows where zany became just unfunny. Milligan is one of the few who makes Sellers look restrained.

Guy goes to an auction at Sotheby’s, pays wildly over the top for a school of Rembrandt painting. It’s expected to fetch £10,000. He pays £30,000 (about half a million today), then cuts out the nose with a pair of scissors. John Cleese is the horrified art expert.

Snipping the nose out of a school of Rembrandt painting

He bribes the Oxford crew to ruin the Oxford and Cambridge boat race by ramming the Cambridge boat … it was a major event in 1969.  Richard Attenborough is the coach, Graham Chapman the captain.

That is indeed Richard Attenborough as the Oxford coach

The whole country chose light blue or dark blue to support- as a child, I always supported Cambridge (light blue) little knowing that my destiny would end up so closely linked to Oxford (dark blue). Guy and Youngman are with the Cambridge supporters.

… and that is indeed John le Mesurier as a Cambridge supporter

Then he invites the rich and famous to board The Magic Christian, a new cruise ship. Christopher Lee stalks the corridors as a vampire. Blink and you’ll miss him.

All aboard The Magic Christian – watching the captain’s welcome

A transvestite sings a torch song to a lonely drinker (Roman Polanski) then removes the wig to reveal he is Yul Brynner.

Yul Brynner is hard to recognize with hair. And a dress.

A guided tour reveals that the ship is powered by a hundred or more female galley slaves, who are naked and chained five per oar. Raquel Welch has the whip and supervises. IMDB says that the actors in the scene kept getting lines wrong deliberately so as to enjoy retakes with al those naked girls.

One of the few significant female appearances

Ringo and Raquel

The ship’s captain (Wilfred Hyde-White) is attacked by a gorilla (shades of Morgan). Something about the captain reassuring the passengers in an avuncular bumbled tone reminded me of Hugh Laurie 50 years on,  in the current Sky TV series Avenue 5. Anyway, the captain warns of imminent disaster and they stumble off the ship to find it was actually a movie set in a warehouse near Tower Bridge. A sign with SMASH CAPITALISM faces them.

On the cruise ship, watching the action

Throughout the mayhem in all these scenes, Guy and Youngman are unmoved.

Guy Grand in white scatters the cash

He then fills a tank labelled FREE MONEY with slaughterhouse blood, urine and excrement and floats money on top, so that bowler-hatted businessmen jump in to retrieve it. City stockbroker income was a lot lower in 1969, obviously.

Would city gents stand in shit for pound notes?

He ends up in the park with Youngman, sleeping on the grass as when he found Youngman at the start.

OVERALL

It’s one of the worst films I’ve reviewed in the series. The black comedy is forced, sledgehammer blows of supposed allegory. They say Peter Sellers panicked when he saw the first rushes, and wanted to abandon it – but those sort of histrionics were common.  I’d been hoping my attitude would mellow with age, but I liked it even less. I guess the novelty of seeing Ringo acting had gone. Peter Sellers is abysmal. Ringo Starr is just Ringo, tagging along.

COMMENTS

The result is a series of loose comic vignettes, many penned by script polishers and soon to be key Monty Python heads Graham Chapman and John Cleese, all played out to the sound of Badfinger. Of course alarm bells should have been seriously ringing when the production reunited McGrath and Sellers who together had delivered the almost unwatchable Casino Royale in 1967 and indeed the duo continue their downward slide here, with McGrath struggling to make much sense of Southern’s Swinging 60s satire and Sellers clearly going through some kind of mid-life crisis on camera as he sleepwalks his way through proceedings like a man having a big-screen breakdown … Ringo is undeniably good as the affable loser.
Ralph McLean, Irish News 5 May 2017

SOUNDTRACK

US copy,. UK copies are Pye International

The original soundtrack album consists of:

Introduction – Ken Thorne
Come & Get It (Paul McCartney) – Badfinger
Hamlet Scene – Ken Thorne
Hunting Scene – Ken Thorne
Carry On To Tomorrow (Pete Ham / Tom Evans) – Badfinger
Lili Marlene
Flip Your Wig – Ken Thorne
Magic Christian Waltz – Ken Thorne
Come & Get It (instrumental)
Rock of Ages (Mike Gibbins/Pete Ham / Tom Evans) – Badfinger
Newsreel March Music – Ken Thorne
Mad About The Boy (Noel Coward)
Something In The Air (John Keen) – Thunderclap Newman

Then Badfinger’s three tracks appear on their album Magic Christian Music:

PETER SELLERS

The Party (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)