The Man Who Liked Funerals

The man who liked funerals is one of those ultra low budget, "quota quickies" that the Brits used to make to maintain local content on a double feature with foreign films. Any number of these crop up on late night television around the English speaking world. Most were devoid of both inspiration and budget, but there are a few gems and this is one of them.

A combination of wry whimsy, occasional obvious humour and a touch of ham acting, it's a caper comedy that doesn't take itself at all seriously... and who can resist Leslie Phillips playing it straight fairly early in his long career?

In the late fifties comic vehicles for Leslie Phillips practically constituted a genre in their own right.

Released in the same year that Mario Zampi's 'Too Many Crooks' anticipated 'Loot', 'The Man Who Liked Funerals' similarly embraces the genial cynicism of Michael Pertwee's scripts for Zampi, surrounding Phillips with a gallery of ghouls, grotesques & weirdos including Jimmy Thompson as a Colonel's son who deserts from the army to become a ballet dancer before deciding that on second thoughts he's "only suited to the soft life of the soldier", a communist party apparatchik whose office wall still carries a portrait of Stalin beneath his picture of Khrushchev, Arthur Mullard as an Italian gangster with the memorable name of Joey Fiasco as well as the gracious and charming Susan Beaumont; while vouchsafing such home truths as a publisher's admission that "We can't afford to publish drivel, not unless it's someone important".

Like Terry-Thomas in 'Make Mine Mink' Philips doesn't play the usual roue but a public-spirited citizen motivated purely by altruism who scandalises his boss by putting in overtime without pay and attempting to raise the then-astronomical sum of £4,000 to finance a boys' club; to which end he practises blackmail along the lines of a far less venal version of Denis Price in 'The Naked Truth'.

Leslie Phillips is the printer for a publisher. He has two hobbies: going to funerals, and helping out at the parish boy's club. When the club loses its lease and must buy the property or relocate, Phillips decides the finance the purchase by going to funerals and telling the survivors that the late lamented had written a book very embarrassing to their interests. They invariably choose to buy back the book.... at first.

It's full of 1950s comedy stock characters: blustery generals, clueless vicars, twittery schoolma'ms, and Italian gangsters. Phillips works his confidence games facilely, because he has the means to produce proof copies. He also presents one of his butter-wouldn't-melt toffs, which operates nicely amidst the varied comedy stereotypes. In the end, of course, we expect thatall will be well and the Jill that Jack will get is a decorous and decorative Susan Beaumont. There are enough smiles on the way there to make this worth watching.

If you've read the plot summary, you know the joke. How many times can this be repeated in different situations while remaining funny? ...Well probably fewer times than this movie attempts to get away with. To be charitable I suppose there's some slight comparison with a movie like "Kind Hearts and Coronets", where a one-joke scenario is repeated many times. But unfortunately "The Man Who Liked Funerals" has neither the range of amusing characters nor the talented actors to carry off a really sustained comedy. In the end it's a mediocre but occasionally successful small-scale comedy.