As the opening act of this project where I will review movies I haven’t seen during my lifetime, I watched this entry from an extremely long-running British comedy film series. In doing my research before choosing this as one of the four contestants for 1964, I read reviews that claim this is the best of the series.
If this is the best of the series, I shudder to think of what the worst of the series is like.
This was simply a brutal watch. It’s slow, it’s broad, it’s tedious and it’s interminable. Even though it’s only 90 minutes, I don’t think I’ve checked the time stamp as frequently in a long time. I also don’t think I laughed once. Hell, I don’t think I had much of a reaction other than wincing, thinking that Jim Dale, playing the Costello role, was older than I thought when I saw Barnum on Broadway, and thinking to myself once or twice that Amanda Barrie, who played Cleopatra, was quite an attractive lady.
This isn’t just a case of reacting to what an earlier generation found funny. I get the humor of Danny Kaye, Hope and Crosby, the Marx Brothers, and they all predate me. And I don’t think it has anything to do with cultural differences--the films thinks square wheels and bad Roman-based puns and an inexplicable running gag about the phrase ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ and randy old men are the height of hilarity, none of which are specifically British. It just isn’t. Very. Funny.
There’s not much more I can say about this. It was just a painful experience. I can’t imagine British audiences in 1964 finding this funny--but I can imagine John Cleese, Graham Chapman and the other people who would become Monty Python watching it and thinking, ‘we can do better than that.'
I just pray that the film you guys pick for 1965 is better.
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