The Wrong Box

There are long lines these days at the Sack Cheri theater, for the new English comedy The Wrong Box. Hordes are plunking down their two dollars gleefully for what has come to be known as "the new Peter Sellers movie." Except, of course, that it isn't. The Sellers name is advertised loudly enough, and Sellers is in the movie, but his appearance is limited to a quick six minutes.

As Dr. Pratt, an alcoholic has-been who lives with a menagerie of cats, performs abortions, and writes fraudulent death certificates, Sellers is, as always, brilliant. Two very short scenes have been written for him (there could be no other justification for their inclusion in the story) and these are very good indeed. They are, in fact, the only two good moments in this otherwise long, dull, incredibly unfunny comedy.

The story begins with a group of twenty cherub-like English schoolboys listening to a headmaster explain the details of their tontine, a curious type of lottery wherein each of their fathers has contributed one thousand pounds to a fund whose entirety (with interest) will be awarded to whichever of the rosy cheeked lads lives longest.

In the course of the next three or four minutes we witness the demise, through the ensuing decades, of all the boys except two brothers whose determination to outlast each other provides the plot for the next two hours. The absurdity and delicious macabre blend of this premise might have made a first-rate English film. What results, however, is a superficial humorless mishmash of plotting orphan descendants, ridiculous Victorian satire, and cliche mixups.

The only two good actors in the film (aside from Sellers) are John Mills and Ralph Richardson as the brothers but they are given little enough to do. Most of the action is centered around miscast, awkward, misty-eyed Michael Caine whose guardian is one of the brothers (you may have liked him in The Ipcress File but wait till you see him now) and his courtship with an orphan whose guardian is the other surviving brother. In an eminently forgettable role, she is a caricature of supposed Victorian modesty (her cousin's hobby of collecting eggs is deemed "obscene" and she practically faints when Caine, a medical student, informs her that his great interest is the human body).

There are numerous other characters, most of them deliberate caricatures, only a few of them funny. The Salvation Army lady and the police inspector are perhaps the best. The movie concludes with a mad chase through a graveyard, everybody dancing happily over an open grave.

The Wrong Box is a deliberate fraud, with the prime example being the extra scene to get Sellers' name on the marquee. Audiences here have come to expect freshness, a fast pace, and genuine, if strange, with from the English imports, as in the Beatles' movie, The Knack, or even Morgan. But producer-director Bryan Forbes is not a Richard Lester. There was no valid reason to use the Victorian setting except to provide some lush decorative backgrounds and to hurl extremely naive lampoons at a sensibility that has already been lampooned to death.

Forbes has used visual caricature for substance, near incompetents for actors, and vaudevillian stunts for wit. And even when he does manage to produce a fairly good scene (one brother trying to do the other in, or hearses racing through a band concert, or Queen Victoria decapitating instead of knighting, for example) there is always a want of directorial style that prevents the scene from being as good as it should be.

So the audience, who after a two dollar admission feel they should laugh at something, are forced to settle for gags. The phony death certificate, mistakenly filled in for the following day, elicits, "Here today, gone tomorrow." One can only hope that the same fate befalls The Wrong Box.