You Must Be Joking!

Quite a lot of old movies don't live up to their animated credits. Not this one, even though they were the work of Bob Godfrey.

In 1968 Andrew Sarris rated Winner higher - among The 'Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers' - in 'American Cinema' than Stanley Kramer ('Miscellany'). At the time Sarris seemed not to have seen (and probably never bothered to catch up with) this low budget but very funny imitation of 'It's a Mad Mad Mad World' from a mildly satirical script by the author of 'I'm All Right Jack'. It was also Michael Winner's last film in black & white, in those very far off days when even he couldn't help making a decent film.

Energetically shot entirely on location (94 in all) in and around a very wintry looking London and then frenziedly cut together (NERD NOTE: Winner's used of hard-edged wipes probably seemed very 'nouvelle vague' at the time but were actually a common feature of quota quickies thirty years earlier). It depicts a world in which audiences would have known the significance of plaster flying ducks and Trechikoff's 'Green Woman', now as impossible to revisit as the planet Jupiter itself. Shot by '2001's director of photography and featuring a Who's Who of British supporting actors past and future, most of them on good form, with Bernard Cribbins the victim of a hilarious running gag; English actor Lionel Jeffries playing a mad Scotsman would however probably offend today's politically correct sensibilities.

(In smaller parts, James Robertson Justice looks incongruous as a supercilious librarian who makes no attempt to keep his voice down; while the ubiquitous Marianne Stone looks even more striking than usual forging signatures in a collar & tie.)