DIRECTED BY: Joseph McGrath
FEATURING: Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr
PLOT: A billionaire adopts a bum, then uses his fortune to pull outrageous pranks designed to show how far people will debase themselves for money.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The spirit of 1969 lives on in this wild and wicked kitchen sink satire that owes a lot to easy access to fine Moroccan hashish. While it’s uneven and at times repetitive, when it’s at its best it’s got a reckless, swinging psychedelic sensibility that’s intoxicating.
COMMENTS: You may notice that there are five different writers listed in the credits of The Magic Christian, including director McGrath, Terry Southern (who write the original novel), star Peter Sellers, and Graham Chapman and John Cleese of Monty Python (which was just kicking off its first year on television in 1969—both actors also play small roles in the film). This may help explain why the ramshackle satire on display here has a little bit of a “too-many-cooks”/revue show feel. The story arc is flat; it’s a series of pranks/sketches that don’t build on each other. They could be reshuffled in almost any order. In the first segment, billionaire Guy Grand (Sellers) adopts a hobo hippie (Starr), but Starr has no real character; he’s only there to lend an ear so that Sellers doesn’t have to explain his bizarre behavior via monologues. The sketches are sometimes satirical, but just as often, they’re plain goofy, as when Grand takes a tank brigade with him on a pheasant hunt. It’s not clear whether we should admire Grand for exposing the hypocrisy of money-grubbing society, or revile him for exploiting people’s weaknesses for his own amusement. “Some days it’s not enough merely to teach,” he muses, “you must punish as well.” That sounds fine when he’s trolling the upper-crust, using a suitcase full of money to fix the Oxford/Cambridge rowing race, but when he abuses a hotdog vendor or bribes a lowly beat cop to eat a parking ticket, he’s acting like a bully. And when he destroys a Rembrandt, he’s a straight-up sadistic Philistine. The first hour is uneven, but things get manic in the last half hour, when Grand pitches a cruise aboard the “Magic Christian” as the event of the season for the stiff-upper-lip crowd. Once aboard, the dandies find the trip a bourgeois nightmare populated by male exotic dancers, pot-puffing ship physicians, transvestites, a galley full of slave girls, a guy running around in a monkey suit, and a vampire. The Badfinger soundtrack, featuring the Beatlesesque hit “Come and Get It” (composed by Paul McCartney), is a major asset, and cameos by Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Roman Polanski and Yul Brynner (among others) liven things up considerably. Christian arrives as a little bit of a disappointment, partially because this prodigious an assembly of talent—seriously, Terry Southern, Peter Sellers, and a third of Monty Python working together on one project?—promises more comedy goodness than any single movie could possibly deliver. But it’s still a time capsule of psychedelic gags from an age in which satirists viewed restraint and good taste as the enemy, but without making stupidity and vulgarity their allies.
Much of the cast and crew of The Magic Christian overlaps with that of 1967’s Casino Royale: director McGraff, writer Southern, and star Sellers all worked together on the shambolic 60s spy spoof. In a further similarity, where Frankenstein’s monster made an appearance in Royale, Dracula shows up in Christian.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Kengo, who suggested it’s “not really that weird a movie by late sixties/early seventies standards, with all the disjointed dreamlike narrative, broad satire and surreal imagery that seemed to be standard at the time, but has some good bits.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
I recently revisited “Magic Christian” resulting in a mixed reaction. Still, any movie that includes Laurence Harvey doing a strip tease during the Hamlet soliloquy has some kind of absurdity going for it.
The only really effective satire in the whole thing involves the Rembrandt bit. That is to say, Grand bought the piece fair and square and technically had the right to do as he wished with it, but you can’t help looking askance at any culture that put a price on what should’ve been a priceless work of art in the first place. Even then, it doesn’t cut that deeply because pretty much every famous work of art we’re familiar with was made on a commission or with the support of wealthy patrons. No matter how true to the craft an artist is, they still have to eat. Societies without a moneyed class don’t produce a lot of great art, either because the almighty State will only allow works that reflect its own power and grandeur, or because it’s a simple, agrarian system where your average member is too busy farming beans to spend much time pondering or making reflections on Man’s eternal search for meaning.
Apart from that, the movie’s “Smash Capitalism” message faceplants pretty hard. It’s tough to get all that outraged over Guy’s other pranks, since they’re largely harmless and he seems to be having a great old time with it all, making the real takeaway feel like “Capitalism is bad, except for the part where you get to do pretty much whatever you want and make problems go away by tossing money at them; that part’s totally awesome.”
Also, if you’re wondering why John Cleese seems so stiff and uncomfortable in this movie, it’s because Peter Sellers was being a diva and refused to let anyone else upstage him; Cleese was afraid that if he so much as made a stagehand crack a smile, he’d probably be fired.