The Wrong Box (1966)

Very well executed

Truly Dreadful Film

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

"Stepford Wives" director Bryan Forbes' "The Wrong Box," adapted by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne, qualifies as a supremely silly Victorian comedy of errors about an unusual lottery. Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Mills, Ralph Richardson, and Peter Sellers, as well as a host of other familiar English character actors grace this amusing bit of nonsense. Rare is the film that can teach us new words, but "The Wrong Box" does. Specifically, we learn at the outset about the word tontine, and tontine means a lottery. A group of twenty relatives has contributed one-thousand pounds individually to a family lottery, but only the last surviving member of the family will inherit this fortune which has risen to the sum of a hundred-thousand pounds. After an opening scene when a cantankerous judge announces the tontine and its process, "The Wrong Box" presents a number of vignettes of people dying under humorous and not so humorous circumstances, until only two men remain. Masterman Finsbury (John Mills) and Joseph Finsbury (Ralph Richardson) are in their seventies. Masterman wants his clueless son Michael Finsbury (Michael Caine of "Play Dirty") to obtain the fortune so that he won't be crushed under an avalanche of bills. Michael is training to be a doctor. Masterman is a scheming, conniving imbecile, while his brother Joseph is a pedantic, equally oblivious man with has little concern for the tontine. That is not true of Joseph's two scheming sons Morris (Peter Cook) and John (Dudley Moore) who are just as treacherous as Masterman. At the same time, Michael has fallen hopelessly in love with his cousin Julia. Peter Sellers steals the show as a physician gone to seed. Wilfrid Lawson is a hoot as Masterman's braying butler Peacock. This featherweight fluff is entertaining from fade-in to fade-out.The plot goes in absurd circles as each struggles to outsmart the other. The major complication that occurs and is referenced in the title is head-on train wreck. Morris and John are taking Joseph to London when the train on which they are riding collides with another train, and Joseph is separated from his sons. At one point during the train ride, Joseph sneaks away from his sons to indulge in his nicotine habit and joins another man in a carriage. Morris and John track Joseph down to the new carriage, but they don't do anything initially until John spots Joseph scrambling along the aisle. As it turns out, Joseph forgot his deerstalker's cap and long coat and left in the compartment while he nicked out to smoke. Meantime, the other occupant, a fugitive from justice known as "Bournemouth Strangler" (Tutte Lemkow of "Red Sonja") appropriates Joseph's hat and coat. During the imaginatively stage train wreck, the Strangler dies, and Morris and John discover his body. Their cursory inspection fails to take in the fact that it is not their father but the fugitive. Nevertheless, the frantic brothers decide to bury their father in the forest to keep anybody from learning about his demise. Furthermore, they set out to find a doctor who can furnish them with a death certificate that they can post-date in the event that Masterman dies. Meantime, Joseph visits Masterman, and Masterman tries futilely to kill his brother. Morris and John ship the strangler's body in a box, but they send it to the wrong address. Hilarity ensures! Forbes' black comedy resembles Stevenson's book in several instances. First, it maintains that premise about the tontine and the feud between the two Finsbury brothers and the antics of their relatives in trying to win the money. The book contained a train wreck and so does the film, but Stevenson was not content with the initial characters and added several others. For example, Julia and Michael do not become romantically engaged. Michael is a lawyer instead of a doctor who is learning to cut up people. Mind you, the movie qualifies as far funnier than the novel and its structure is easier to follow. The performances are good, but Ralph Richardson steals the show every time that he shows up and launches into a lecture about some obscure thing or another before he wears out his welcome with whoever has the misfortune to prompt him onto one of his pretentious lectures. Actually, I think that Stevenson would have enjoyed this cinematic adaptation of his work. Fans of the composer John Barry will appreciate his serene orchestral score.

If you like comedies where adults behave like children, "The Wrong Box" (based loosely on a yarn co-written by TREASURE ISLAND's Robert Louis Stevenson) is at the top of that genre's heap.British stage and screen stalwarts John Mills and Ralph Richardson play warring brothers named Finsbury, the final members of a tontine (for the purposes of this movie, a "game" where the last survivor snags all the loot). Young Michael Caine is Mills' grandson, in love with Richardson's ward Julia (Nanette Newman). Comics Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are Richardson's rapscallion nephews, desperate to keep the old man ticking until he cops the lolly (when they think he's won, they refer to him in the past tense). Wilfred Lawson, alcoholic actor who famously never forgot a line no matter how much he imbibed, is Mills' doddering butler. For various reasons, they each want their side to win (Lawson's butler, for instance, hasn't been paid in seven years).But when a body in a barrel (the wrong box) rolls up to the Mills/Finsbury residence in error, characters already in a heightened sense of excitement rush about frantically trying to hide, recover, or identify it. Peter Sellers is the "venal" Doctor Pratt. Inundated with cats, the pixilated doctor dispenses death certificates (and poisons) for a fee. Tony Hancock, practically unknown in America but a long-time favorite comic in England, pulls out all his well-worn stops in his last-gasp movie as the Inspector who tries valiantly to tie up the loose ends of a case where nearly all the suspects have the same surname. Choreographer/dancer/actor Tutte Lemkow turns in one of his best menacing performances in a small but pivotal role as a minor-league Jack the Ripper.Other members of the tontine, who meet suitably (and sometimes hilariously) gruesome ends, include a roll call of rising British talent (Jeremy Lloyd, James Villiers, Graham Stark, Nicholas Parsons) and veterans (Valentine Dyall, radio's "Man in Black").Amusing vignettes are also essayed by John Junkin (as an engine driver), Thorley Walters (as a fey lawyer) and Cicely Courtneidge (leader of a Salvation Army wanna-be band which wears an S on their collars almost like the old German national socialist police force; I suppose that's the filmmakers' statement against charity).The romp is full of twists like a good mystery, but the mystery (such as it is; the viewer is always in command of the facts) is merely a skeleton on which to hang the actors' humorous escapades. The final scene is thrilling, seeing so much talent gathered together in a cemetery (Mills, Richardson, Caine, Cook, Moore, Newman, Lawson, Walters--and Irene Handl, who jumps in at the eleventh hour. And Hancock has pride of place, strutting before them while desperately trying to work out which Finsbury is which.If you prefer humor served up dark but not bitter by the best in the business, roll a sip of this over your palate.

This movie has a very personal significance for me.I saw it on a double date in my senior year in high school. We all thought it screamingly funny, and so it is. (Though this was in Laguna Beach, California.) It is a crying shame that so few people have even heard about it.Not that it's perfect. Though Larry Gelbart (before his later "Tootsie" career) and then-partner Bert Shevelove had written the also hysterical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," the movie version of which had also floored us, "The Wrong Box" kind of poops out at the end, despite a few good lines ("This is Julia Finsbury, shortly to become...Julia Finsbury"). And John Barry, whose work on the Bond films is non-pareil--despite the beautiful, but in retrospect inappropriate main theme--supplied music generally too genteel--especially for the Pink-Pantherish slapstick at the end.But in high school, my first drama monologues were those of Peter Cook (who back then I slightly resembled) from "Beyond the Fringe." (Which I can still do, word for word, to this day. I didn't realize what a prick he was until I saw the BBC TV movie, "Not Only But Also.") Nevertheless, and regardless of their personal relationship, Pete and Dud were brilliant comedians. And "The Wrong Box" shows them off to the best of their comedic abilities. (As does the original "Bedazzled," of a few years later.)PLUS, you've got Peter Sellers doing one of his most bizarre eccentrics, Ralph Richardson as probably the funniest bore ever to appear in a movie, Tony Hancock at his apoplectic best, and gorgeous photography (if you can ignore the TV antennae).In all, a genuine unsung British comedic masterpiece that deserves much wider recognition.

This is the kind of comedy that entertains with twists and turns in the plot. One crazy event leads to another, all caused by mix-ups, assumptions and misunderstandings. That said, it is well written and quite funny in a 1960's British way, with plenty of satire to go along with the zany happenings of the story. Michael Caine, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook are all good, and Peter Sellers is fantastic in a small role. But ultimately the film comes down to a cleverly crafted plot that was derived from an old novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne.The movie is clean enough to watch with your family, though the young kids will miss much of the humor, and some of the comedy comes from the fact that characters pretend to care about the deaths of older family members, when in fact they don't.