Color, 1969, 101 mins. / Directed by Joseph McGrath / Starring Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr / Artisan (US R1 NTSC) / DD2.0
Artisan's DVD looks several notches sharper than their earlier laserdisc edition, though print damage is still in evidence during the opening sequence. The film was shot (very) open matte with plenty of extra headroom and soft matted between 1.66:1 and 1.85:1, depending on the territory in which it played. The transfer plays fine composed at 1.78:1 or so on anamorphic displays, but the compositions aren't really affected much one way or the other. Colors are vivid and stable. Unfortunately the sound is far more problematic; the packaging indicates a Dolby surround mix, though as with past versions it still sounds like poorly recorded mono. The original shoddy mix is largely to blame, with lots of clumsy ADR work in evidence and the music recording at wildly varying levels, but it's a shame something couldn't have been done to bring it closer to normal theatrical standards. The disc includes closed captioning and no extras.
The late 1960s were fertile territory for the late satirist Terry Southern, whose novels The Magic Christian and Candy were adapted within a year of each other. Both adaptations sheared away some of Southern's more acidic tendencies in favor of all-star, plotless comedy skits
strung together by slender storylines, though the end results are as different as night and day. While Candy strives to be a mod, continental exercise in pop sci-fi erotica, this outing instead feels like a celebrity edition of Monty Python's Flying Circus gone completely off the rails (which makes sense, as Pythonites John Cleese and Graham Chapman both co-wrote and appeared onscreen), coupled with good old English slapstick (courtesy of Peter Sellers) and a catchy pop soundtrack courtesy of Badfinger, an ill-fated band designed to cash in on the popularity of the Beatles. Fortunately their theme song, "Come and Get It" (written by the unmistakable hand of Paul McCartney), is one of the catchiest ever written and kicks the film off in high style, even if the following events don't always live up to it.
While strolling through the park, eccentric millionaire Sir Guy Grand (Sellers) strikes up a friendship with an amiable bum, Youngman (Ringo Starr), whom Guy adopts as his own son. Together they decide to test the limits of human greed by offering money to an increasingly bizarre assortment of characters who debase themselves completely for a little green. After attending a striptease version of Hamlet with Laurence Harvey and displaying most un-English bad manners at restaurants and auctions, the father and son wreak pandemonium aboard the maiden voyage of the Magic Christian, a vessel populated by topless slavegirls (ordered by "Priestess of the Whip" Raquel Welch), a stampeding vampire (Christopher Lee), and a scary chanteuse (Yul Brynner in drag) hitting on a jittery Roman Polanski. Back on land, humanity is put to one final, scatalogical test of avarice courtesy of a giant vat of... well, you'll have to see for yourself. Amazingly, this entire final sequence was usually trimmed from U.S. television showings and some theatrical screenings, but it's preserved here on the uncut DVD in all its perverse glory.
This sort of hit and miss celebrity goofiness had already been devoured into the mainstream thanks to the surreal likes of Casino Royale (which shares this film's director, Joseph McGrath), though one could probably trace the tradition as far back as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Here the humor goes beyond sheer silliness and into the purely tasteless, most effectively in a sick dog show skit that bears the unmistakable imprint of Cleese and Chapman. Character actor spotters will also have a field day thanks to the likes of Jess Franco regular and Kind Hearts and Coronets star Dennis Price (in a very funny boardroom bit), Spike Milligan, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and The Fearless Vampire Killers' Ferdy Mayne, to name but a few. Just don't expect it all to make any sense at the end.
