#Alan Osbiston

[sesiondemadrugada]

The End of the Affair (Edward Dmytryk, 1955).

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John Mills and Michael Caine in The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes, 1966) Cast: John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore. Nanette Newman, Wilfrid Lawson, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Thorley Walters, Cicely Courtneidge. 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 (Michael Caine) and Julia (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 me to helpless laughter, as those masters of comic timing Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do in the scene in which they resort to using the word "thing" as an all-purpose euphemism. Or when Masterman Finsbury (John Mills) tries and repeatedly fails to kill his brother, Joseph (Ralph Richardson). Or when Joseph 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.

[sesiondemadrugada]

The End of the Affair (Edward Dmytryk, 1955).