Let's Go Crazy

Peter Sellers' first movie-screen appearance was shot when Penny Points To Paradise came in with more than a week left on the studio rental. Sellers and Milligan improvised a few scene, including Sellers doing a Groucho imitation, his 'Crystal Jollibottom' character from radio. They added a few singers, dancers, and Freddy Mirfield's orchestra, had Milligan do a bit of Eccles, and edited the whole together for a bit over half an hour.

It's a variety short and little more, pitched midway between Olsen & Johnson and Ernie Kovacs. It's of some interest to fans of Sellers and Milligan - which I certainly am - but little more.

With this short film 'Let's Go Crazy' (Peter Sellers first time on screen, alongside with 'Penny Points to Paradise'), Sellers really showed from the start of his career, how funny he was when playing multiple characters, and off cause how masterminded his acting was at the same time, I'm not saying that this film is anywhere near perfect in its comedy, it just showed how capable Sellers was with creating smart and funny characters.

But if we just look away from Sellers for a moment, and look at what we else get out of this madcap of a film, and actually we get quite a lot out of 32 minutes of film. There is five songs, three orchestra numbers, one dancing number and then we get a very odd but entertaining performance by a very angry couple. To be honest I enjoyed some of the songs, just the old fifties feeling about the songs were very nostalgic, but I also think the whole film could have been much better, without all the disturbances by the orchestra and singing numbers, if we just had Sellers and Milligan playing alone, then we easily could have got an classic short film, but then again they only had three days to shoot it, so that is just me dreaming.

I just enjoyed the film for what it was, and smiled at the music performances as they came, but Peter Sellers is out of doubt the highlight of this character/music based short film, and the whole film is just a fun little pleasure to watch.

Recommended for fans of Peter Sellers!

According to IMDB, "Let's Go Crazy" was a hastily improvised movie that marks the first onscreen appearance by Peter Sellers. It seems that studio space was rented to make a movie and the movie was completed well ahead of schedule. So, in order to make the most of the space they paid for anyway, Peter Sellers and his friends quickly organized this short film. It consists of mostly of some comedy skits with Sellers playing various characters (including Groucho Marx) as well as quite a few local musical acts.

So is it any good? Well, considering how quickly it was tossed together, the movie is understandably rough. A few of the skits were very rough...such as the overly slapstick opening musical number which seemed more at place on a burlesque stage than on film. And, while I really enjoy much of Sellers' later work, his skits are VERY tough to love and come off as a bit amateurish. I did like the weird dance number with the older couple who mashed the snot out of each other...they were amazing and amusing acrobats. Overall, there's much more bad than good but the film IS well worth seeing for fans of Sellers, as it gives you insight into his early years where he was mostly an up and coming radio star...and occasional movie personality. Much more interesting as a curio than anything else.

This is an oddity - review and variety performers of variable quality interspersed with short sketches with Sellers playing various curious characters. Here he certainly shows potential and the relative restraint and lack of goony-ness allows him to demonstrate abilities which really reached their pinnacle in Dr Strangelove. Overall along with the better of the acts, quite entertaining.

One uncredited cast member (Mr Jollibottom)has a voice instantly recognisable to older British viewers. Wallace Eaton was the dismal barman in the long running radio comedy "Take it from Here", whose weekly role it was to serve a dismal pint of Mild and Bitter, and to listen, to the show's main star relate the goings on in the dreadful "Glum" household. Eaton was allowed dismal catch-phrases in the show such as "get yerself a trade". He had more of a career in the theatre than in film, appearing in "Fings ain't wot they used t'be"

Sellers and Milligan appear in this 33-minute short that is somewhat hit-or-miss but overall a very enjoyable selection of British vaudeville performers doing their routines on a cafe set left over from PENNY POINTS TO PARADISE (since the company had it rented for a week longer than it had taken to film that feature, they quickly arranged to make use of it in a short). It's sort of like a half-hour of Vitaphone shorts strung together with the thinnest of ad-libbed plot lines. Prints for both films were reconstructed to their original lengths from the original negative and surviving prints on 35mm and 16mm.