The Magic Christian

One day the fabulously wealthy Sir Guy Grand who is Peter Sellers with a much larger nose finds a young orphan kid in a park. On the spur of the moment he adopts young Ringo Starr, probably because Ringo has a well known honker in real life and Sellers sees something of himself in Ringo.

The idea is that Sellers has to have someone not just to leave his money to, but someone to impart his accumulated wisdom of the years which is boiled up into one single thought; that EVERYBODY has his price.

The rest of the film is a Monty Pythonesque group of skits in which Sellers tries to prove just that to Starr. They range from Laurence Harvey doing a striptease while doing Hamlet's soliloquy to a beat cop eating a parking ticket for 500 pounds. The title The Magic Christian refers to a Titanic like cruise ship that only caters to the upper crust. Sellers and Starr integrate that ship's maiden voyage in a most interesting fashion.

That the film is like Monty Python is no accident with Graham Chapman and John Cleese doing the writing. Ringo's former Beatle companero, Paul McCartney wrote The Magic Christian theme, Come and Get It which sums up the philosophy of the film.

After almost 40 years, The Magic Christian is acidly funny, but a still unsettling.

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.

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.

This comedy passed me by when it was released in 1969. I had seen CASINO ROYALE and WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? and automatically in my subconscious somehow roped this movie in with those two turkeys. I had always avoided it on purpose whenever the movie turned up on TV. The only reason I gave it a go this time was the fact that comedian Paul Merton gave it such a wonderful review on his recent "Paul Merton's Perfect Night In" show on BBC2. I am pleased I finally gave it a go, I actually laughed out loud on a number of occasions and didn't want it to end. I absolutely recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys the 1960's sub-culture. Peter Sellers plays an eccentric millionaire who adopts Ringo Starr, whom he fell in love with, but only in a 'paternal way'. Together they embark on a series of bizarre and degrading tests around London to illustrate the depths to which mankind will sink in pursuit of money: any man has his price and will do literally anything if the price is right. The movie makes less than subtle attacks on the establishment, including the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, that very British symbol of earnest endeavour and sportsmanship which is turned into a sea battle when referee Richard Attenborough accepts a bribe. The richest prize in sport, the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship, incites a riot when both protagonists actually kiss instead of punching the hell out of each other. The World Champ is played by that great character Nosher Powell, a former heavyweight boxer of the 50's. His challenger is none other than former European Champion Dick Richardson, a real tough guy who fought Ezzard Charles and Ingemar Johansson. This must have been an 'in-joke' by the film's director, having these two real-life hard cases acting as 'puffs'. "The Magic Christian" was a great surprise to me and I strongly recommend it.

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.