Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

chroma-898-579154 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.

Robert J. Maxwell Folks, it's the late 60s encapsulated. If it was being thought about by anyone in 1969, it's in here -- Vietnam, yoga, homosexuality, narcissism, complacency, and mostly greed.Peter Sellers in Guy Grand, a Londoner with so much money that he can buy anything and anyone. He fills an outdoor vat with a vile mixture of pig's blood, urine, and fecal matter, then throws handfuls of "free money" into it, inviting a horde of dapper observers to take as much as they want. They do, wading slowly into the slime with their three-piece suits, bowlers, and brollies. He corrupts the rowing teams of Oxford and Cambridge.The most outrageous episodes take place aboard the luxury liner "The Magic Christian," the passage for which costs a fortune. The genial Wilfred Hyde White is the reassuring and confident captain, who enjoys handling the helm by himself. And the funniest episode aboard "The Magic Christian" has Christopher Lee as a vampire barging onto the bridge, sucking Hyde White's blood and injecting some substance from a large syringe directly into his SKULL.There are multiple cameo parts for easily recognizable stars of the period, but none involves much effort or screen time. It's captivating to watch Yul Brynner as a transvestite -- he makes a passably good-looking woman -- sing a seductive Cole Porter song to an indifferent Roman Polanski.At times it gets a bit frantic and the episode aboard "The Magic Christian" ends in a kaleidoscope of frenzy, as if the writers felt they needed more flash and less filigree to what had come before. The same mistake was made in "Sex and the Single Girl", the 1967 "Casino Royale," and "What's New, Pussycat?" Not even writers like Terry Southern and John Cleese can solve the problem of bringing a successful farce to an even more impressive conclusion. The shot of Christopher Lee plunging the hypodermic into Hyde White's head lasts about two seconds -- not nearly long enough to be appreciated.I hate to say this, but the novel was funnier. The comic incidents were presented in the context of everyday events. That is, the mind-blowing scenes came as a surprise. Here, they're more or less piled on top of one another and the set-ups are done too casually.Terry Southern's brand of satire rarely fits comfortably on the screen, partly because the stories themselves may or may not be comic but Southern's prose style transforms them into humor. "Candy" was a funny book but failed as a movie. "The Loved One" had its moments but was knee-capped by Robert Morse's too-cute protagonist. The exception, of course, was the nearly flawless "Dr. Strangelove," adapted from an entirely serious apocalyptic novel.Let's put it this way. It's a funny movie with incidents that made me laugh out loud. If you liked Monty Python, you'll enjoy this episodic flick. And if you enjoy this movie, try reading Southern's short novel of the same name. Then try "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," the book.

aramis-112-804880 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."

t_atzmueller Subconsciously I have avoided this movie for about 20 years. One reason being, that I grew up with the Peter Sellers comedies, having watched most of them with my parents and having eventually discovered, that a lot of them don't age terribly well. The second reason was that, although Sellers has produced much, much quality work, he's at time delivered horrible performances.However, the other day I had a DVD copy from a friend-of-a-friend fall into my hands and around that same time I felt like watching something with Sir Christopher Lee – something I hadn't yet seen, mind you. The nearest and only thing in reach was that 'Magic Christian' DVD, so into the player it went.The first ten odd minutes made me sure that once again my suspicions were correct and that I was watching a Sellers movie that was both outdated and definitely in the weaker category. Inflated nonsense, pointless slapstick and random attempts at squeezing laughs out of a more innocent 1970's watcher, thought I while my index finger was nervously tapping the 'stop'-key.However, I kept on watching. And suddenly something made 'click' inside my head. I had found a gem, a diamond of a comedy and before Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr made it unto the Magic Christian, I was a believer and convinced that this film belongs right up there with Sellers greatest works.If you haven't seen Peter Sellers take his adventurous 5 course diner at a French restaurant, haven't experienced Yul Brunner singing "About the Boy" in drag to an inebriated Roman Polanski or a crowd of essential British citizens wading through a tank of urine and manure for paper money, then you haven't seen it all. And by the way: if you're a Christopher Lee and Dracula fan, you haven't seen it all either if you haven't seen Sir Christopher on board the Magic Christian.To those among the readers who have been put off from watching this by certain critiques of the time who gave the movie a finger or those who believe that the film is a random sequence of anarchic and even more random gags and sketches, please reconsider. Believe an old movie buff who says: this movie is a forgotten gem!