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| Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan in The Magic Christian |
Cast: Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Isobel Jeans, Caroline Blakiston, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Attenborough, Leonard Frey, Laurence Harvey, Christopher Lee, Spike Milligan, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Yul Brynner. Screenplay: Terry Southern, Joseph McGrath, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Sellers, based on a novel by Southern. Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: Kevin Connor. Music: Ken Thorne.
There are some funny people doing funny things in The Magic Christian: John Cleese as a Sotheby's employee aghast when the billionaire played by Peter Sellers mutilates a painting thought to be a Rembrandt; Spike Milligan as a traffic warden bribed into eating the ticket he's given the billionaire for parking in a loading zone; and Sellers himself trying out an unpredictable variety of accents. There are also some inspired moments: Laurence Harvey playing Hamlet and doing a striptease during the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and an unbilled Yul Brynner in drag, singing "Mad About the Boy." But this scattershot, anything-for-a-gag movie has too many gags that don't land, including some dodgy gay jokes like a swishy character named Laurence Faggot -- pronounced fa-GOH. It's a sledgehammer satire on the familiar premise that people will do anything for money, and it often lands flat on its own banality.