Un Beatle au paradis

Peter Sellers stars as Sir Guy Grand, a fabulously wealthy eccentric who gets to do anything and everything he wants to by liberally greasing the palms of those less fortunate (and wealthy) than himself. Lacking an heir, he adopts a homeless derelict (Ringo Starr) who becomes Youngman Grand and joins him in a series of wild and wacky misadventures. In his apparently never ending quest to prove that everyone has their price, Sir Guy and his newly adopted heir are joined by a host of other notables in cameo roles including Richard Attenborough, John Cleese, Laurence Harvey, Christopher Lee, Roman Polanski, Yul Brynner and Raquel Welch. The movie is based on a book by Terry Southern (who wrote the screenplay for another Peter Sellers classic - "Dr. Strangelove") with Monty Python alumni Graham Chapman and John Cleese lending a hand in the screenplay. This is a movie that has everything: great writers, great actors, well-known comtemporary celebrities and a rapid-fire barrage of parodies and spoofs of almost everything we hold dear, including greed, gluttony, racism and incompetency. If this movie does not make you laugh out loud (frequently) you should consider getting treatment for a severe case of humor deficiency.

One of a succession of self-regarding flops typical of Peter Sellars' choice of projects by the end of the sixties when not performing as court jester at Clarence House and Windsor Castle.

As Spike Milligan - who plays a traffic warden paid to eat his own ticket - observed, "The whole thing could have been written ABOUT Peter instead of FOR him". We are never told the source of the fabulous wealth that enables Guy Grand to humiliate those less wealthy than himself (i.e. Everybody else), but he never seems to show any inclination even towards Christian Grey's nebulous ambition to "end world hunger" rather than just have fun at the expense of others.

Yul Brynner does look astonishingly attractive in drag, however.

The Magic Christian is a wonderful piece of film making. It targets fairly & squarely all parts of the establishment and its aim is always true. The main theme of the movie (that everyone has their price) is shown again and again, no more truly than when the Peter Sellars character throws money into a vat of excrement & urine and hordes of "city gents" jump in to retrieve it! I have never seen another film quite like it and although it must be almost 30 years since last my last viewing, its memory is still crystal clear. Sellars, Spike Milligan and Ringo Starr all turn in fine performances and the soundtrack is great featuring Something in the Air and Come & Get It. Make sure you see this film; its message is even more pertinent today than when it was made.

After more than 40 years, The Magic Christian still entertains. Its style is very much of the Sixties, but its profoundly cynical message---that anything can be bought, that everyone has his price---is, if anything, more relevant now than in 1969 when the film was released. The star, of course, is Peter Sellers as the obscenely wealthy Sir Guy Grand, who manages to seem almost childlike as he spreads his bounty of cynicism throughout London.

This is not a great film, or even necessarily a good one, but even second- or third-rate Peter Sellers may be preferable to a lot of first-rate work by others. The childless Sir Guy decides one morning to acquire an heir, so he goes to the park and picks up a homeless man played by Ringo Starr, and adopts him as his son, Youngman Grand. (Ringo actually doesn't have much to do in this film except react to Sellers.) Sir Guy then enlists Youngman in escapades that, in his hands, skewer the stuffed shirts of upper-class London society and turn the most solemn occasions into a carnival of absurdist nihilism. The most extreme comes at the end of the film, where he scatters money into a huge vat of blood, urine and excrement, and then watches as bowler-hatted City of London types wade into it for the money. This scene doesn't quite work. There is an extended sequence aboard a bogus cruise ship called The Magic Christian that tends to try one's patience because it degenerates into a very Sixties psychedelic montage. One moment from this sequence, however, is worth the whole thing: Raquel Welch as the Priestess of the Whip. Dressed as a dominatrix, she never looked more luscious or voluptuous. Film aficionados will appreciate the many old-line British actors who contributed supporting or cameo roles (Spike Milligan, Lawrence Harvey, Richard Attenborough, John Le Mesurier, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Christopher Lee, and others less well known outside the UK) as well as glimpses of younger now-famous faces, especially John Cleese in a hysterically funny scene at Sotheby's. Cleese plays the terminally smarmy, unctuous, patronizing curator Mr. Dougdale, whose supercilious mien is punctured beyond repair by Sir Guy in a scene involving the defacing of a priceless painting. There is a Monty Python skit that looks like it was directly inspired by this scene. This film was shot at about the time of the first season of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and what with the appearance in the film of at least two Pythons that I could identify, there are definitely echoes of Python in it. The other Python was (an uncredited) Graham Chapman as the leader of the Oxford team during the famous Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Watch also for an uncredited Yul Brynner playing a female impersonator who does a sexy torch song. Alert listeners---especially lovers of the classic 1950s BBC radio comedy program the Goon Show---will also notice that Sellers does almost all of the off-screen voices and several voices of characters seen only in long shot, reminiscent of the films of Orson Welles; so if you suddenly think you hear Henry Crun or Major Bloodnok off-screen, it's not your imagination.

All in all, a solid five or six stars out of ten.

The pinnacle of British silliness at the movies for an entire decade: The mythical 60's. Mike Meyers could only dream of capturing this time and place with as much fun and style. British entertainment royalty by the truck load including half the Beatles, a decent chunck of Monty Python, Christopher Lee in a cape, and the late great Peter Sellers! Who could ask for more? Well there is always Roman Polanski as an innocent being picked up in a bar by a transvestite (who's identity revelation is the my favorite bit). And of course, who can forget Raquel Welch in her prime, and in a leather mini nothing with a whip. All of this in the context of the movie's namesake--The Love Boat cruise from hell. You will never again think of farm manure without recalling this movie's finale! Check it out.

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