The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes, 1966)

John Mills and Michael Caine in The Wrong Box

Masterman Finsbury: John Mills
Joseph Finsbury: Ralph Richardson
Michael Finsbury: Michael Caine
Morris Finsbury: Peter Cook
John Finsbury: Dudley Moore
Julia Finsbury: Nanette Newman
Peacock: Wilfrid Lawson
Dr. Pratt: Peter Sellers
Detective: Tony Hancock
Lawyer Patience: Thorley Walters
Major Martha: Cicely Courtneidge

Director: Bryan Forbes
Screenplay: Larry Gelbart, Burt Shevelove
Based on a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
Cinematography: Gerry Turpin
Set design: Ray Simm
Costume design: Julie Harris
Film editing: Alan Osbiston
Music: John Barry

The Wrong Box could have used a director like Richard Lester or Blake Edwards, one with a defter comic touch than Bryan Forbes, whose direction is a bit stodgy: The opening sequence that sets up the tontine goes on too long, and the montage of the deaths of the subscribers to the scheme is stolen from the similar sequence in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which Robert Hamer handled with a lighter, wittier staging. There's an ill-advised slow-motion scene in which Michael Caine and Nanette Newman pirouette through the house as they discover they're in love; it's meant to be a parody of slo-mo love scenes, but it falls flat. And the climactic hearse-chase is something of a muddle whose opportunity for gags is mostly wasted. But none of this matters when you have a cast like this one, capable of reducing you to helpless laughter, as those masters of comic timing Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do to me in the scene in which they resort to using the word "thing" as an all-purpose euphemism. Or when John Mills tries and repeatedly fails to kill Ralph Richardson. Or when Richardson reduces all and sundry to bored stupefaction with his fact-filled monologues. Even the prudish Victorian lovers played by Caine and Newman have wonderful moments, such as Julia's hushed admission that she finds eggs ... obscene, and Michael's eager-to-please acknowledgement that she has opened his eyes to that fact. It goes without saying that Peter Sellers's cameo as the zoned-out Dr. Pratt is one of his many classic moments, but the film is loaded with British comic actors doing their thing, among them Wilfrid Lawson's aged, desiccated butler, Tony Hancock's irascible detective, and Cicely Courtneidge's imperious Salvation Army major. The Wrong Box is a case where directorial auteurship goes out of the window in favor of skilled performers and a screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove that helps them do what they do best.