The Magic Christian

Saw The Magic Christian (thanks, Basil!) It was an extremely British comedy from the late 60s. It shares the sensibilities that shaped much of the material of Monty Python and indeed much of the 60s: a strongly anarchic disregard for respectability and for capitalism in general. The comedy is broad with an actually cruel undercurrent. This sort of satire is both biting and completely unsubtle. One of the characters, for example, is named "Laurence Faggot."

The film follows a rich man who adopts a homeless guy to be his son. They then travel to art galleries, high-end restaurants, rowing competitions, and various other hang-outs of the overly-monied. There they bribe their way into all kinds of practical jokes. A meter-maid is payed £500 to eat the ticket he wrote out for them. At the art gallery, they buy a portrait and then cut out the nose of the subject with a pair of scissors. The useage of money to tweak the nose of the monied is funny and cruel. Many of the jokes are pretty good but they all have this undercurrent of seething scorn and cruelty. The humour left me a bit nonplussed sometimes, as when they spend ten minutes or so bombing toy churches, but other times there were subtleties which I really enjoyed.

At one point they walk by a pool. The extras are all beautiful men and women, lounging around in small swim suits and tossing beach balls. There is also a bald, hairy, fat man off in the corner who is desperately trying to scrabble up on top of an inflatable shark. I thought the incongruity was pretty funny. Also I enjoyed when they call an airstrike on a pheasant (which is far less subtle, but also very anarchic and fun.) The film exhibits the early fascination with unbridled chaos that would eventually give rise to free-wheeling, good-natured, nonsense-fests like the Troma films.

The talent on display here is also quite varied: Peter Sellers (with an extremely variable accent) is the rich guy, Ringo Star is the homeless dude, and John Cleese and Graham Chapman guest-star and co-wrote (indeed, I wonder how many of the (mostly harmless) gay jokes came from Chapman.) Apparently John Lennon and Yoko Ono were peripherally attached (which further illustrates/explains the strong anti-capitalist thing.) The ending contains a brief reference to Battleship Potemkin, as a horde of men in suits rush down a flight of stairs, hurrying to fish pound-notes out of a vat of animal blood. This ending typifies the mixture of obvious satire and genuinely high-brow reference in the film. An odd movie, I'm not really sure I liked it totally but it was certainly unlike anything I've seen in a while.