Operation Cupid

Although the low-budget British comedy OPERATION CUPID stars three men basically acting like cockney versions of those famous American Stooges, it's three young women that matter and, unlike the guys... a loser trio who win a marriage agency in a card game... the gals are dispersed throughout...

Beginning with MYSTERIOUS ISLAND beauty BETH ROGAN as an experienced barmaid, only around when the boys meet an old rich fella who hands them the business...

And then, trying to quickly profit and split, they're forced to rely upon this film's femme fatale in the gorgeous black-haired model Norma Parnell as a sultry secretary fitfully named Lola...

Who not only shows these mugs the ropes on how to bilk a rich woman looking for a rich husband, turning out to be this trio's Moe in bulbous-nosed Charles Farrell, she winds up trying to have the client.... actually conning the con artists... murdered for the insurance...

And that lady's daughter is the cutest yet... And with Introducing credit is Pauline Shepard (who'd play a hooker in Hammer's THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL), who even sings a song she actually wrote, and, well... There are far worse ways to spend an hour than OPERATION CUPID.

Charles Farrell and his cadre of *ahem* associates win a marriage bureau in a poker game. Finding it rather unrewarding, they are confronted with millionaire widow Avice Landone. She is worried about fortune hunters, and wants to wed some one at least as rich as she. Confronted with a 5-guinea fee if they find a satisfactory husband for her, they put forward Farrell as a multi-millionaire, planning to mulct her fortune from her. Little do they realize she is broke and fortune-hunting too.

It's well populated with second-banana comic actors like Wally Patch and Harold Goodwin for a competent farce. It's no award winner, and the jokes are decently if mechanically presented by director Charles Saunders.

Three friends win big at the racetrack. While celebrating at a pub they discover their bookie has cheated them and paid them off in cut up newspapers instead of currency. Enter Mr. Cupid, a wealthy businessman who loves to gamble. The foursome play poker well into the night and Mr. Cupid loses big. With no money in his pockets it is agreed that Mr. Cupid turn over a small business to the boys. The boys are quite excited about becoming businessmen until they learn their new company, a marriage agency, is failing badly.

Fate seems to have dealt them another bad hand when in walks a wealthy widow (Advice Landone) who is looking for a rich husband. The boys quickly decide that one of them (Charles Farrell) will pretend to be rich and romance the lovely lady. However, the wealthy widow is a fraud, and just as poor as our unlucky trio. This is a low budget British comedy with little star power, but the cast works very hard. It is short and sweet at just over an hour and I did enjoy the film.

Ever since I happened upon this utterly awful film one rainy afternoon on BBC2 I've wanted to re-watch it to see if it was as bad as I'd remembered. Unfortunately I didn't know anything about it apart from one actor who was vaguely familiar. There was one particularly woeful scene where said actor, whom I now know to be called Harold Goodwin, was dancing with a bunch of girls around a piano. According to my memory, after the tune finished, he exclaimed in a Lancashire accent: "oooh int it groovy!"

So after 40 or so years I discovered that Operation Cupid was the movie, and apart from the fact that the line turns out to be "It's a real groovy tune!", it's every bit as execrable as I remembered!

There's not a single aspect about this movie that makes it worth watching, apart from that fact itself. Ridiculous, dull and unfunny plot; shocking acting replete with Dick-Van-Dyke-style cockney accents; a posh, gullible old military duffer; a wicked devious gold-digger woman; and a clumsy Norman Wisdom type leading man (without any of the charm or talent of Wisdom himself).

The "comedy" attempts are sometimes actually funny, but for entirely the wrong reasons. There's a set piece with an electric fire that I won't describe, but if you tried to write it yourself based on that premise alone you'd almost certainly make a better job of it.

Only of interest to those who seek the purest forms of terrible movie-making.

"Operation Cupid" is a simple-minded B-movie comedy that makes little effort to mask its all-round inferiority. Charlie Stevens, a hard-up Cockney wheeler-dealer, unwisely accepts a matrimonial agency as payment of a gambling debt. He discovers that the business is practically worthless, so, when Mrs Mountjoy, a wealthy widow, comes in search of a husband, he decides to pose as a South African millionaire in order to marry her himself. He is helped (or rather hindered) in this ruse by two dense side-kicks called Cecil and Mervyn. The film is padded out with scenes concerning Sylvie, Mrs Mountjoy's daughter, who dances in a leotard and sings a 'groovy' cha-cha-cha.

With its weak jokes, rudimentary plotting, and emphatically non-star cast, "Operation Cupid" could almost be a children's film - but I don't think it is. Charles Farrell in the central role comes across as a poor man's Sid James, while Harold Goodwin, as his witless helper, somehow even manages to suggest a poor man's Norman Wisdom. It's all quite inoffensive (except to viewers sensitive to insults to their intelligence). But what quirk of film-industry economics made "Operation Cupid" seem worthwhile to the people who made it?