FANTASIA OBSCURA: The Film That the Beatles Almost Made After ‘Help!’
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, even if it is the end of the world as we know it, you simply cannot feel fine; not proper, old chap, just won’t do, you know…
The Bed-Sitting Room (1969)
(Dist.: United Artists; Dir.: Richard Lester)
Anyone who has followed Richard Lester’s career during the 1960s knows two things in particular about his body of work: that he was willing to chuck all sense out the window whenever he felt it needed to go and that he held in disdain any organization that valued order. The ultimate “chaotic good,” Lester would display his traits for chaos and irreverence through such pictures as A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and especially in How I Won the War.
So it should not have been that much of a shock when he closed out the decade with an absurdist black comedy set three or four years after a nuclear war devastated England.
Yes, a comedy, set after a nuclear war…
Lester’s original plan to follow up How I Won the War was with the filming of Up Against It by Joe Orton, a screenplay that presages (and goes way beyond) Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! by a few years with a tale of disreputable characters going through increasingly absurd adventures, all the while critiquing/bringing down the institutions that make up civilization.
The film was envisaged as the final obligation the Beatles owed to United Artists under their film contract, one last teaming of the band with the director. During pre-production, however, Orton was murdered by his companion Kenneth Halliwell, who used a hammer to beat Orton to death. (There are still suspicions that the song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was inspired by Orton’s murder, although Paul McCartney has claimed otherwise over the years.)
Forced to go a new direction, Lester decided to adapt The Bed-Sitting Room, written by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus and first performed in Canterbury in 1962. The main plot in the absurd tale involved Lord Fortnum of Alamein, an upper class gentleman who survived the “nuclear misunderstanding” three or four years ago, a war that dragged on for two minutes and 28 seconds, including time to sign the peace treaty.
While he survived the conflict, the radiation left over was in the process of turning him into a bed-sitting room, a condition he tries to avoid by turning to his doctor, who at one point during the run of the play was named Captain Martin Bules. Captain Bules decides to let the malady run its course, so that he can use his patient as shelter for him and his pregnant girlfriend, Penelope.
The film adaptation expands out on this initial plotline by taking advantage of location shooting in English refuse dumps that were more surreal than the quarries they used to shoot Doctor Who around. We still have Lord Fontum (Ralph Richardson, who we can imagine got this gig as Lester was evoking Richardson’s work on Things to Come), who still seeks treatment from Captain Bules (Michael Hordern), but there’s a lot more going on in the screenplay adaptation by Antrobus and Charles Wood.
For one, Penelope (Rita Tushingham) is being pursued by Alan (Richard Warwick), a fellow survivor who also inhabits the strangely-still-working Circle Underground Line, but ends up married to Bules as he’s considered a better prospect by her parents (Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne), who themselves are suffering the effects of radiation and will soon turn into a parrot and a wardrobe, respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-k3QGGxt9E
In addition, we have scenes lingering on other survivors. We spend time with Shelter Man (Harry Seacombe), who claims to be a Regional Seat of Government even though he cannot govern himself; a few moments with the last Inspector and Sargent of Scotland Yard (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, respectively), who patrol from the air in a balloon tied to a wrecked car; and the National Health, reduced to one lone male nurse (Marty Feldman in his first film role) who may or may not be actively helping his charges, though his bedside manner leaves lots of questions.
The thing of the film is it starts off with a ridiculous premise and dives so hard and deep into its setting that watching the film feels like you’ve stumbled onto a private conversation between a group of people who refuse to communicate except in self-referential jokes. Unlike, say, a Monty Python sketch that pops up and ends quickly, there’s no release from the absurdity, no chance to get comfortable during the runtime of the film with the material that you get exposed to like fallout.
While each individual performer does a fine job inhabiting a world filled with deadly transmutations (no matter how silly), the overall effect of watching the cast work with each other as they run the material as hard as they can is ultimately numbing. Considering the film deals with nuclear warfare, this may have been intentional; however, unlike The War Game, Lester’s blackest comedy gives you nothing to hold onto. Again, this may have been by design, but the effect just leaves the viewer cold and unable to root for anyone; by the end the film so does its damage that one may have trouble agreeing with it on whether nuclear war is a bad thing after all.
The execs at United Artists certainly couldn’t get on board with the film, as much like an actual nuclear war itself, the people in charge did their best to delay it ever occurring. Lester delivered his print to the distributor in 1968, but it would be held up a year until it was entered in the Berlin International Film Festival; it would be another year after that before the film finally saw wide distribution.
When the film did get released, the distributors did much like the characters in the movie did: they carried on as best they could, maintained themselves in the face of disaster, and whatnot. Which, when faced with a catastrophe, may be the only option, hanging on in quiet desperation being the English way and all.
NEXT TIME: So, how do you describe the man who can take on a Jules Verne villain? Clean. Fast. Professional.
