The Magic Christian (1970)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Perfectly adorable

Better Late Then Never

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

A glorious satire of greed and hypocrisy. This olla podrida concocted by Peter Sellers, Terry Southern, and Joseph McGrath yields turns by Laurence Harvey, Raquel Welch, Yul Brynner, Christopher Lee, Ringo Starr, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Hattie Jacques, Queen Elizabeth II, capped by Spike Milligan's closing line: "Sod the regulations. You can kip here any night you like. Good night, gents." Cameos by John Le Mesurier, David Lodge, Jeremy Lloyd, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Roman Polanski, Graham Stark, Richard Attenborough, Ferdy Mayne, and of course, King Kong.

Unusual movie full of British stars which makes it all the more watchable, you name them they are in it! Of particular interest is a un-credited Jimmy Clitheroe later in life but none the less in it along with Christopher Lee, Fred Emney and many more.The film is a tale of how people can be bought with some interesting performances and perhaps something of a experimental film in many ways.Ringo is his typical self and Peter Sellers pretty much steals the screen most of the time drawing us into his performance.The film was based on the original novel by Terry Southern and I just about remember the film coming out back then with Ringo chatting about the public thinking he was 'a mop-top' which struck me as funny back then.Much location filming for this movie which also included Chobham Common amongst other locations.This is now on Blu-Ray and is a superb scan from a good 35mm film print and worth having a look at just to see the host of great old star names.

Rich actor Peter Sellers and ultra-rich Beatle Ringo Starr star in a movie about the corrosive effects of money. They play a rich father and son who go around bribing people to do dumb things, to prove that everyone has their price.Just as with the much better movie, "Bowfinger," where mega-stars Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy show how hard it is to make it in Hollywood, it's at first a bit difficult to see over the sheer weight of hypocrisy of an anti-money flick headlining the (in real life) money-grubbing Sellers and a member of the Beatles, who by 1969 had been rolling in the stuff.Once one gets over that, one can enjoy the sheer awfulness of the movie. Well, it's not so much a movie as a series of vignettes where famous actors (mostly familiar faces in insular England) show up to make fools of themselves. Laurence Harvey performs a strip-tease Hamlet. Sellers' old "Goon Show" buddy Spike Milligan eats a parking ticket.The vignettes purport to show to what extremes people will go for money. It's all scripted, of course, so they did not really bribe Laurence Harvey or a traffic warden. It's just Terry Southern and his writing partners (including bits by future Pythons John Cleese and Graham Chapman) As they make their point early on, the rest of the movie is, as a carpenter friend of mine would say, "pounding wood." That is, the nail is driven in all the way and the job is done, but they keep hammering holes in the woodwork all around it.The sheer smarminess of it all makes the movie worth watching, in the way some people rubberneck at road accidents to see if there are any dead bodies. But for normal people, unless you are really a hard-core Sellers fan, it's difficult sitting through this psychedelic 1960s period piece. All the neat new tricks they tried with colors and cinematography that were "mod" and "far out" in that (thankfully) bygone age are now look cheap, tawdry and distracting. It's like looking at yourself in your high school yearbook and wondering what you were thinking with that hair and those clothes.Nevertheless, Sellers acts his little heart out (while Ringo looks like he's doing his part for extra credit). Some of the stars do superlative little turns. John Cleese earns a few honest laughs as a man with a Rembrandt Sellers' character wants to buy -- but only its nose, not the rest of it. In an auction, Sellers hams it up but Patrick Cargill is hilarious as the straight-laced auctioneer.By the time THE MAGIC Christian (an odd name for a cruise ship) leaves port, the movie has deteriorated to flashes of nonsense, livened by moments of sublime lunacy (for instance, the always watchable Rachel Welch doing her fifteen seconds in the ship's engine room -- which is powered by topless women pulling oars.) Basically, "The Magic Christian" takes 92 minutes to reiterate what the Bible said in ten words, "the love of money is the root of all evil." Here, no one really does evil (though Christopher Lee's inexplicable vampire/steward may be up to no good). Nearly all that's done is merely stupid. Some of it still earns a few chuckles, but most of it has that dread aura of something that "seemed like a good idea at the time."

Limited "cult following" status to the contrary, I'm not surprised at the 5.9 rating by the 1,500 odd voters accustomed to the current marginal (and copy cat) plots, limbic manipulations, clichéd special effects and derivative nature of post-millennial film-making. This, after all, is a Monty Pythonesque rendition of a Terry Southern novel (see "Candy," "Barbarella," "Easy Rider," "The Loved One" and "Dr. Strangelove…"). (Would those who beat their brains senseless by pounding on their PDAs and X Boxes know the truth if it bit them in the nose? Please.)Southern saw the culture for what it is… and has been since the Old Kingdom on the Nile five thousand years ago. "Money talks." Most of us want to believe we care about AIDS in Central Africa, the starving in Dafur, the oppressed in Lybia, the fate of the Tibetans, the fate of the over-populated, under-educated, over-heated, radiation-poisoned =planet=. But what we really care about is comfort, and what it takes to purchase however much of it we believe to be our due. Born in Alvarado, Texas, and strained through the sifter of military experience in World War II, Southern was no "hippie." He was far more down with Marquand, Richler, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Sartre and Camus than the histrionic, wanna-be-hip, but discipline-bereft and chemically crop-sprayed pseudo-intellectuals of the late '60s and early '70s. If you're into psychology, think Bateson, Baumrind, Berne, Ellis, Fairbairn, Henry, Jackson, Karpman, Klein, Laing, Miller, Schaef and Sullivan rather than Bradshaw, Dyer, Forward, Harris, McGraw and Schlesinger, for example. If you're into music lyrics, think Lennon, Morissette, Olazabal and Townshend rather than Hayward, Jagger, Lynne and Tyler. That there are people in the world who can buy the behavior of virtually anyone, including those who =appear= to be "powerful," may continue to make many folks squirm. We'd like to believe in truth, justice, freedom and the Easter Bunny. That Vegas doesn't fix major sports events, that doctors know best, and the Supreme Court doesn't steal elections. But… money talks. In "TMC," that particular message is packaged a bit heavy-handedly at moments, but the piece can be as beguiling – and actually meaningful – as the similarly rompy "Rocky Horror Picture Show," "The Meaning of Life," "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles," and "Network," if one knows how to pry their mind open for 92 minutes in some (ahem) appropriate way.