The Best House in London

One of the earliest and certainly one of the most lavish of the British sex comedies that were to proliferate over the following decade, and typical of its time in the lampooning of Victorian double standards, a period then regarded as the ultimate in repression, prudery and hypocrisy. Today's audiences, reputedly as eager to take offence as any Victorian maiden aunt will no doubt find much of the content fairly deplorable, including a white actor 'yellowed-up' as a Chinese delegate. Though you don't have to be a censorious millennial to feel uneasy at some of the material, the jokes about rape and the flippant attitude to young girls in brothels, not to mention a particularly crass piece of innuendo in a song from a little girl, especially in the light of what we now know about the likes of Jimmy Savile and co at the time. David Hemmings stars in a dual role but struggles to convince in either. Despite all this Denis Norden's script does conjure up its share of amusing moments and it is fun spotting the numerous well-known actors and celebrities of the time popping up in cameo roles.

I don't know how to add items to the other sections of this site so I will put an interesting tit-bit (!) here! I played one of the extras in Oliver (NOT one of the boys) and was amazed to see many of the locations on the back lot used here. Not only that they also used many of the same vehicles, props and I even recognised some of the horses! Given that Oliver is a family movie and this is anything but it's an interesting fact. I'm told that the Oliver set was left to slowly moulder away for many years - what a waste! Oh yes this film? Well it's not THAT bad and is a dream for those who like to count the well known bit part players. Must have spent the money saved on scenery on extras! ;-)

After his role in Antonioni's "Blow-Up" in 1966, David Hemmings was regarded, together with Michael Caine, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp, as one of the rising young male stars of the British cinema. He never, however, seemed to live up to his early promise, and "The Best House in London", made only three years later, perhaps represents an early stage in the decline of his career.

The film is a comedy about a proposal to set up a government-sponsored brothel in Victorian London and the resistance to that proposal led by Lady Josephine Pacefoot, an anti-prostitution campaigner. Hemmings plays two characters, Walter Leybourne, the instigator of the scheme, and Benjamin Oakes, an idealistic young journalist who gets involved in Lady Josephine's campaign. The physical similarity between the two men is explained when they turn out to be long-lost half-brothers; both (implausibly, given Hemmings's blond looks) are illegitimate sons of the Chinese Ambassador.

The film is some time during the reign of Queen Victoria, although it is impossible to be more precise than that. The fact that Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning are courting but not yet married would suggest that the action takes place around 1845. (They married in 1846). The presence of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, who first met in 1891, coupled with references to Jack the Ripper (1888) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), would however suggest a date nearly fifty years later. The writer Denis Norden stuffed the script with references to events such as the Opium Wars and the Indian Mutiny and there are walk-on appearances by various other Victorian celebrities, such as Dickens and Tennyson. Norden seems to have deliberately ignored the fact that, as Victoria ruled for over sixty years, many people whom we think of as "Victorians" were far from exact contemporaries of one another.

I was surprised to see reviews on this board comparing the film to Monty Python, as it seems to me to have little to do with the Pythonesque or Goonish tradition of surreal humour, despite the presence of a pre-Python John Cleese in a minor role. Rather, it derives from a quite different strand of British humour, the bawdy tradition of the "Carry On" films. This tradition was already strong in the late sixties, and was to become the dominant one in the British cinema (although fortunately not on television) during the seventies. The film has also been described as satirical, although it contains little satire worthy of the name; it is hardly cutting-edge humour to satirise the ways of a hundred years ago. As for the suggestion that Josephine Pacefoot is a satirical portrait of Dame Josephine Butler, I cannot for the life of me see why Norden might have wanted to satirise someone who had been dead for more than sixty years when the film was made and who the great majority of his audience would never have heard of.

What the film does contain is a good deal of semi-nudity and innuendo-laden humour. Most sixties sex comedies today seem about as offensive as a seaside postcard, and a lot of the material in "The Best House in London" today seems bland and harmless, if not particularly funny. Nevertheless, some scenes actually seem worse today than they probably did forty years ago. At one point we hear a suggestive song about "my pussy". Had this song been performed by an adult woman, it would today provoke nothing more than a sigh of "Oh no! Not that old joke again!" (Even in the sixties jokes playing on the fact that the same word can mean both "cat" and "vagina" must have seemed pretty corny). As, however, it is sung by a young child, it comes across today as an unpleasant, even sinister, piece of humour.

Although the film does not tell us much about the age in which it is ostensibly set, it does perhaps inadvertently tell us something about the age in which it was made. It is essentially a two-joke film. The first joke is that, behind a mask of piety and respectability, Victorian men were in fact all incredibly randy. The second joke is that Victorian women were mostly at heart prostitutes; the saintly Lady Josephine's endeavours to save women from a life of degradation are constantly thwarted by the fact that they do not want to be saved and would much prefer to continue to prostitute themselves.

The first of these jokes is perhaps based upon a half-truth; social disapproval of vice and prostitution has never, in the Victorian age or any other, prevented it from flourishing. Behind the laughter, however, one can detect the uneasiness which the advocates of sixties permissiveness felt about Victorian values; the film never tackles nineteenth-century objections to prostitution head on but evades them by suggesting that they were never anything more than a hypocritical façade. As for the second joke, that is surely rooted in some very strange and distorted attitudes towards women. The wonder is that forty years ago such attitudes were put forward as being somehow progressive. Neither joke ever succeeds in raising many laughs. 4/10

Like a great deal of British comedy of the time, The Best House In London ends up degenerating into wacky silliness toward the end. But then, when you've referenced just about every other British literary genius and comic of the last two centuries, failing to give an enthusiastic nod and bow to the Goons would be rude. And rude just will not do.

Some may consider films such as these "bad", and theoretically I guess they'd be right. But if you're even a passing fan of the British comedy tradition, this movie brings together an intelligent and funny script by the brilliant Denis Norden, and a large cast of inspired and famous British comics. Its outrageous premise offers scope for first-class humour, great inter-textual pedantry, and witty social commentary. In the tradition of the Goons, the film is a biting and staggeringly funny indictment of Victorian moralism and piety, which was as apt in the post-war decades as it is in the politically-correct eco-religious world of today.

If you object to seeing middle-class hypocrisies (not to mention none-too-innocent maidens) skewered, don't see it. Otherwise, I can heartily recommend it.

If you're a fan of British humour, you need this in your collection, alongside the Goons, the Pink Panther, Blackadder, Monty Python, Spitting Image and the collected writings of Oscar Wilde, Spike Milligan and PG Wodehouse.

Grand stuff.

This is a classic Bad British Movie. Stalwarts of British comedy acting then and later, plus George Sanders, fight manfully against one of the stupidest plots imaginable - about a government-sponsored brothel for the gentry in late 19th century London. Basically, it was an excuse to have a lot of young women prancing about in lingerie, maid's uniforms, pretty frocks, while baring the occasional boob.

The plot, such as it is, is mainly advanced by extraordinarily implausible coincidences and bizarre happenings, and it's about as silly as you can get.

It's a formula movie, and it sucks. Unfortunately, it isn't quite awful enough to be 'so bad it's good'. It's just excruciating.

However, it was written by Denis Norden, who may have no idea about plot or character, but is a fantastic quip-writer. There are scores of literary and historical jokes: one- and two-liners, many of them screamingly funny if you're familiar with the works of Wilde, Dickens, Trollope, Galsworthy, Tennyson et al, and with historical people like Emmeline Pankhurst and Dr Livingstone. Jokes as good as these are wasted on this awful film.