Bombed Into The Stone Age
TheAwfulDoctorOrloff from ,
29th December, 2009
This film deserves half marks because it half works. Well, nearly. OK, I have great respect for most of the people involved, so I'm being charitable. But given the amount of talent on board, it really should have been better. I think the big problem is that Richard Lester, who did some great stuff elsewhere, was too much of a Spike Milligan fan, and tried to film a reasonably faithful adaptation of a stage-play that was simply unfilmable. As far as I know, the play has never been revived in a significant way since Spike stopped doing it. That's because, as anybody who has read the book version will know, as written on the page, it's about as funny as a sick baby. And indeed, it features an attempt to derive humour from an actual sick baby. The whole thing relied on Spike, who was notoriously bad at learning his lines, coming on every night and improvising around the attempts of the rest of the cast to stick to the script. Apparently this worked far more often than not, but you really had to be there. Clearly Spike couldn't have been allowed to attempt to improvise all the way through something as structured as a feature film, therefore instead of being the star, his character (unnamed in this film, but actually called Captain Pontius Kak) is relegated to an almost wordless cameo. And, presumably in an attempt to get Spike to behave himself on camera, what he's asked to do is mostly comedy of a very simple kind - falling over in puddles and custard pies both feature. As for the rest of the cast, what amounts to a Who's Who of British comedy stars of about 40 years ago do their best, but most of them seem to be rather bewildered, and even Harry Secombe, by all accounts one of the nicest people who ever lived, comes across as oddly unpleasant because he's clearly not terribly sure what's supposed to be funny about his lines, and gives a very strange and poor performance. There are moments, such as the sight of the vastly underrated Arthur Lowe leaping off an abandoned tube-train like an axe-wielding cave-man to provide for his family by slaying a vending-machine, that give a hint of what could have been achieved by way of a Mad Max-style post-apocalypse black comedy. Alas, there aren't very many of them, and they all seem to be the result of Richard Lester allowing himself to do something genuinely cinematic, as opposed to sticking to routines that were designed to be performed by one or two people on a fairly small stage, and dismally unfunny dialogue that Spike never bothered to improve because he probably wasn't going to say it on the night anyway. Obviously, any film pointing out that the nuclear destruction of most of this planet would not be altogether desirable has its heart in the right place, but apart from this very basic point, it doesn't really have anything at all to say. The idea that atomic radiation can somehow transform human beings into animals, furniture, and buildings is too absurd to properly come off as satire on the actual effects of nuclear war, and would probably have worked better if it was just something that was happening for no reason at all, so that the comedy could have concentrated on people living in normal society who suddenly turned into houses or sheep or what have you. But instead, we get a bunch of genuinely cold and miserable actors wandering around a small quarry doing contrived silly things that mostly have very little bearing on anything. It's not quite true to say as several people have that there isn't a plot, but it's certainly vestigial at best, and (as in the play) the sudden insertion at the very end of a tiny moment of seriousness in an attempt to justify an hour and a half of unstructured nonsense feels very forced, and utterly fails to work. Especially as the sting is taken out of it about 30 seconds later. This is basically a brave attempt, done for all the right reasons, to make a film that could never have fully come off, and it's worth watching if only because it really, truly is different from anything else you'll ever see. Tell you what, though - 'Delicatessen' seems to have pinched a few ideas. And is it possible, given that Spike plays a ragged postman still trying to pointlessly deliver the mail in the wake of World War III, that Kevin Kostner was taking notes...? Though I'd rather watch this again than once more sit through 'The Postman'. MUCH rather. I know that's not exactly high praise, but fair's fair.
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