The Bed Sitting Room

Plot synopsis:
The film is set in London on the third or fourth anniversary of a nuclear war which lasted two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, including signing the peace treaty. Three (or possibly four) years after the nuclear holocaust, the survivors wander amidst the debris. Penelope is 17 months pregnant and lives with her lover, Alan, and her parents in a tube train on the (still functioning) Circle line.
Other survivors include Captain Bules Martin, who holds a "Defeat of England" medal, as he was unable to save Buckingham Palace from disintegration during the war. Lord Fortnum (Richardson) is fearful that he will mutate into the "bed sitting room" of the title. Mate is a fireguard, except that there is nothing left to burn. Shelter Man is a Regional Seat of Government who survived the war in a fallout shelter and spends his days looking at old films (without a projector) and reminiscing about the time he shot his wife and his mother as they pleaded with him to let them in his shelter. Similarly, the "National Health Service" is the name of a male nurse, although overwhelmed by the extent of the war. Finally, there are two policemen (Cook and Moore), who hover overhead in the shell of a Morris Minor Panda car that has been made into a makeshift balloon, and shout "keep moving" at any survivors they see to offset the 'danger' of them becoming a 'target' in the unlikely event of another outbreak of hostilities.
Lord Fortnum travels to 29 Cul de Sac Place and actually does become a bed-sitting room. Penelope's mother is provided with a death certificate, after which she turns into a wardrobe. Penelope is forced to marry Martin because of his "bright future", despite her love for Alan. Her father is initially selected to become Prime Minister due to "his inside leg measurements," but unfortunately, he mutates into a parrot and is eaten due to the starvation conditions that prevail.
Penelope finally gives birth, but her monstrous mutant progeny dies. It emerges that Martin is impotent, so he yields marriage consummation to Alan. Penelope has a second child, which is normal, and there is an indication of hope for the future of the country amidst the devastation when it transpires that a team of surgeons have developed a cure for the mutations involving full-body transplant. Finally, a military band pays homage to Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone, the late Queen's former charwoman, and closest in succession to the throne.

Tags: comedy, avant garde, cult, absurd, psychedelic, satire

Review:
This is a visually stunning, funny, brilliant, and extravagantly weird film that should best be compared to El Topo, Barbarella, Playtime, and the Cremaster series.
It's the kind of movie made with a big studio budget and free artistic reign; a combination that existed in other late 60s and early 70s bombs that have become cult classics.Imagine if Monty Python did a lot of LSD, spent a million dollars on art direction, and then made a nuclear-apocalypse satire.
(The great Manny Farber was uncharacteristically cruel, cruel.) He may seem in some lights like the Austin Powers of auteurs, but time has been kind both to his formal gifts (as magnificent as Nicolas Roeg's--or David Fincher's) and to the complicated, unsentimental, but hard-beating heart at the center of his movies.
This little-seen classic, a sort of British-seaside ENDGAME, gets my vote as the most thrillingly beautiful end-of-the-world movie ever.Coauthored by the "Goon Show" genius Spike Milligan, this post-apocalypse omnibus of sketches suggests John Osborne's Archie Rice rewriting an absurdist play by Gombrowicz.
Tweedy lord Ralph Richardson post-atomically mutates into a bed sitting room while sixtyish, uncombed Michael Hordern uses the state of general unrest to get into bed with Rita Tushingham.
(Her pregnancy arouses Hordern--until she gives birth, after seventeen months, to what is either a bird or a large pile of felt.) And above it all, Peter Cook flies on a hot-air balloon as a sexy cockney sadist--the post-nuclear Prime Minister to be, the first-draft choice of the Clockwork Orange Party.A plot summary does no justice to Lester's and the DP David Watkin's images, which challenge the Vesuvian frescos of FELLINI SATYRICON for sheer overwhelmage.
It's incredibly inventive, if not particularly funny, and also quite depressing - but it has to be, dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war.There are some excellent performances from a cast which seems to contain most of the outstanding British comedy talent of the last thirty years (Marty Feldman is particularly fine) and some pointed satire about the British "stiff upper lip", but it's the surreal visuals which stand out, including the remains of a motorway with hundreds of cars half-buried in mud, and an escalator emerging into a landscape almost entirely composed of broken crockery.A flawed masterpiece..
Among the other survivors are Ralph Richardson (O Lucky Man!) as Lord Fortnum of Alamein, who isn't looking forward to his impending mutation into a bed sitting room.
Every mainstay of British middle and upper class culture has been made absurd - some of the characters are busy mutating into absurd objects - a bed sitting room, a wardrobe, a parrot.
With it's completely surreal narrative and winning photography, The bed Sitting room hits me now for a number of reasons, the first of which, is that despite looking strangely contemporary, all it's main leads (Except the young uns) are dead.
Marty Feldman, Micheal Horden, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan and Sir Ralph, are all pushing up the daisies.
It is criminal that this bona fide classic never really made it past the main gates, while lesser films took the glory.Made by Richard lester (A hard Days Night, Superman 2 & 3) in 1969, just before Monty Python hit pay dirt, it tells the story of Brits after the bomb, working class through to upper, it encapsulates the British eccentricities perfectly.
As the film was based on a play (By Spike Milligan and John Antrobus) I wonder how it looked in a theatre.There you have it, a classic film in every way if you like that sort of thing.
The classic British humor in this prepared me to enjoy other comedy such as Monty Python.
I saw it in 1969 and will never forget it.The cast was a fine cross section of the best Pommie comedy actors of the period.The sight of Marty Feldman in a nurses uniform with Crossed Bandoliers of syringes was surpassed only by Harry Secombes ode to the Pin Up.Would love to get it on Video - Does anyone know how we can get it onto CD, Video, whatever..
Ralph Richardson, MIcheal HOrdern, Dudley Moore and Peter cooke were incredibly funny, but Mona Washburne as Mother had us laughing mostly, such as when nurse marty Feldman informed her she had died while she was still very much alive.
Originally a play by Spike Milligan, I have a feeling that on paper the movie would seem hilarious and though a couple of scenes translate well (the tube train that keeps running even though no one needs it and the wedding) most of the skits fall flat.
Now don't assume that I just don't like British comedy--many of my favorite films and shows over the years are from the UK.
There must be some-one out there with some idea how fans of this classic can get to see it.Whenever I read a message concerning this movie it seems to come from an area in that persons mind reserved for The Bed Sitting Room.
All the sets are ruins, but they are amazing ruins, cathedrals submerged in water, escalates to nowhere...a bed-sitting room in the middle of the desert.At some point in the past England lost WW3, the shortest and most nuclear of wars, which has left Englands surviving population of about 20 or so completely, if not near completely insane.
Those that are not insane, like Dudley more in his balloon powered police car, forbidding people from any kind of re-construction (less the attacks be re-provoked), well these other people are suffering bizarre mutations..mostly into furniture.After a Lord transforms, slowly and hilariously into a full on bed sitting room, others begin mutating, into Cabinents and parrots.The life of a pregnant girl and her family who have been living on the subway (riding in perpetual circles), who decide to go back to the surface world, coincides with the story of our Lord the bed sitting room, which represents a real problem...not only is the man an object, hes the first new building, and sign of civilization in years.
When he asks a doctor what he should do about it, "My advice, charge 20 quid rent, be mindful of drafts".Hijinks ensue, and though bleak at times (a few shades light of a dead baby joke), Richard Lester's madcap "The Bed Sitting Room", is one of those odd, clever, allegorical comedies, that's just too smart for it's own good.
For people who like Monty Python, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or Steven Soderbergs "Schizopolis", of whom Richard Lester is the driving influence, this is the only post-ASPCA-slapstick comedy you need to watch..
i happened upon this film being shown on the BBC, as it always seems to do with really good movies, late, late, late one night quite a few years ago.
the portion of the film i saw had me in stitches,(Marty Feldman's Nursey would have been ecstatic), all the cream of the newly emerging alternative comedy scene seemed to be taking part and set me on a, until now, fruitless quest to track down a trace of this classic through the years.
The Bed Sitting Room is a crazy and fun end of the world satire!.
Adapted from a play by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan, the film is mostly filled with the same type of punch-drunk, tail-chasing blackout sketches which permeated Lester's 1967 WWII satire, "How I Won the War".
This is not a silly film, it's not a stupid absurd comedy, it's not just black humor in it, there is something much more that Richard Lester succeeded.
The very few reviewers that give Bed Sitting Room with a low vote admit they didn't 'get' it, but their five votes have dragged down the film's cumulative total.
I rang a couple of my friends, both keen Milliganians, and lovers of British comedy in general to come and watch it.Credits list the cast in order of height, as a "dig" at some of the people involved in financing the movie wanting to have tight artistic control (including height of the actors.) Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards, Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern, Marty Feldman and Arthur Lowe are but a few of this constellation.I saw this 1969 movie in 1972 or thereabouts in Sydney, 4 weekends running.It's based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, and I've been to several live performances in the interim, as well as having a copy of the stageplay, so I'm thoroughly familiar with it.The film is directed by Richard Lester who has such films as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "Hard Day's Night" to his credit.The opening is rather disorienting, showing a smoke-dimmed sun, flowing lava, stretches of deserted landscape and a close up of the burning face of a child's dolly.Through the miracle of the BBC, ie a newsreader whose job is to travel to the various locations and read the last available news bulletin via an empty television set we start to uncover the story.
Again, after nearly 40 years, I found myself being sucked into the upside-down, inside-outness of this story, accepting that it's perfectly okay to ride up on an escalator that ends in mid-air and be dumped down a hole in the ground.The characters eventually meet at Lord Fortnum, who is now situated at 29 Cul-de-Sac Place, and a rather tacky looking bedsitter he is, sitting forlornly in what remains of Paddington, when he hoped to be in Belgravia, where the rents are higher.
Watching one of the characters thrashing around in thigh deep glutinous mud trying to get a drink brought to mind an article on a science program on ABC TV a couple of weeks ago which showed 2 people taking samples of the mud from the bed of the dying Murray-Darling rivers system, but having to wear protective gear such as gloves, goggles and rubber overalls, because the mud was nearly as acidic as battery acid, thanks to the plundering of the water by irrigating farmers further upstream.A very good movie, and whilst I warned both my companions that it was very black, they laughed heartily throughout, but they both agreed that it was surreal but funny.Special features on the DVD consists of 3 interviews (1967) with Richard Lester, Peter Cook and Spike Milligan.
Mischief is afoot from the very start of this very British apocalypse: "Cast in order of height" declares the credits of The Bed Sitting Room, as smaller performers like Rita Tushingham and Dudley Moore, and taller ones like Peter Cook and Ralph Richardson turn mad, or into furniture through atomic mutation, in a London turned Neolithic through technology.
However, as Pink Floyd once sighed, "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" and, as always, small island ritual, tradition and stiff-upper lips must yet prevail, even after World War III.Amid such bombed-out devastation (in reality, a disused quarry in Surrey), one man powers the national grid by pedalling furiously on a bicycle dynamo; Frank Thornton's BBC man, formal and proper in exactly half a tuxedo, declaims yesterday's news through a shell of a television set (and closes with a rendition of the revised national anthem "God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393a High Street Leytonstone"); and Arthur Lowe's family man rides endlessly round the Circle Line with his wife and 18-month pregnant daughter, subsisting on chocolate bars purloined from tube station vending machines.Elsewhere, Marty Feldman's cross-dressing Nurse Arthur roams the desolate terrain, personally delivering death certificates to the living: "I thought I was alive, but here it is in black and white" exclaims Mother (Mona Washbourne).
"Guess this'll mean a by-election," he observes, gnawing on a wing.Although, as conversions go, Lord Fortnum of Alamein (Ralph Richardson) achieves the most startling of all: he turns into a bed sitting room.
Hovering above them all, in a clapped-out Volkswagen tethered to a hot air balloon, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's bowler-hatted policemen bark through megaphones at the straggling survivors to "keep moving - you're safer that way"."How long is this sh*t going to go on for?" a United Artists executive barked at director Richard Lester during a company screening.
Loosed from the comparatively reigned-in parameters of a half-hour's 'Goon Show', Milligan's manic (depressive) wit exhausts and repels as often as it delights, until it eventually burns itself out.As 'The New Yorker's' Pauline Kael wrote about an earlier Lester film The Knack, but her argument can also be applied here, "If there are enough gags, perhaps the audience, panting to keep after them, will not worry about why they don't go anywhere." In other words, 'Too many jokes, Mozart.' Neither is the film helped by the presence of Sir Harry Donald Secombe CBE, the human equivalent of a housefly repeatedly dive-bombing a window pane.The film's original tagline 'We've got a bomb on our hands' may have proved horribly prescient, but The Bed Sitting Room remains a haunting, dazzlingly inventive original, sporting more ideas, half-birthed or otherwise, than most movies of whatever genre, during its every minute of screen time.
A link-chain between The Goons and Monty Python, it is The Bed Sitting Room's fate to be remembered more as midwife, a Baptist to successive prophets of comedy, than as star in its own right.
In The Bed Sitting Room, Arthur Lowe elects himself Prime Minister one morning, simply because he measures his inside leg and finds he's "very well equipped...
But for some reason Lester & co thought that injecting a series of crummy farce-gags into a futuristic, i.e. unusual, setting would somehow make them funny when they otherwise wouldn't be.
There is no such thing as a "wasted cast" ( aside from the fact that actors aren't sneakers that can be wasted away through overuse) because if the material is weak and/or the direction is sloppy then a good cast will at least provide some reason to watch the film where there otherwise might be none at all.The idea of having Mao Tse-Tung as one of the sole 24 (no, not 20, as the movie claims) survivors in Britain is actually a rather good one, real comedic potential there.
Perhaps Lester & co forgot the old adage: less is more.But if you're one of those people who found Peter Bogdanovich's "Nickelodeon" to be side-splittingly hilarious, or "The Great Race" made you laugh so hard you had to pee in your pants, or "Noises Off" made you fall off your bed, then by all means tuck in.
If this doesn't tell you how odd this film is, nothing will.I laughed so hard while watching this movie, I thought I was going to wet myself..
Whilst looking around online, I found film reviewer Kim Newman praise a BFI "Flipside" edition of a rarely mentioned Richard Lester creation,which led to me viewing from the bed sitting room.View on the film:Dusting down the film,the BFI present an excellent transfer, with a real attention to detail in keeping the various tints with the various grains they were each given during production.
Adapting Spike Milligan and John Antrobus's stage play, the adaptation by Antrobus and Charles Wood throws Goon Show word-play curve-balls at the end of the world,with hilarious mutters in an attempt to avoid saying the word "nuke" and the survivors desperately trying to give a normality to their dire situation.Breaking from the stage origins, the writers smartly use the dark humour to bring a real sense of danger to the main family travelling across the destroyed landscape-facing a mad nurse handing out death certificates,and The Tube continuing to rumble along the silent stations.
Dipping into surreal fantasy, Lester splinters the film with melting tints that colourfully create an otherworldly atmosphere that knocks down the walls of the bed sitting room..
But the great people behind the 'Flipside' series from the BFI have managed to unearth this minor treasure from Lester's 'swinging 60's' days, and The Bed Sitting Room is a great little vision, full of off-the-wall humour, depressing/uplifting satire, and one of the finest collections of British comedians ever seen on screen.After the shortest war in history (lasting just 2 hours and 28 seconds) has left the Earth a desolate wasteland, a small group of eccentrics from various social status's wander the country, terrified about their pending mutation.
Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson) is concerned the nuclear radiation will cause him to mutate into the bed sitting room of the title (which he later does).
Father (Arthur Lowe) tries to maintain his traditional family life while living on the tube along with his wife Mother (Mona Washbourne) and his 17-month pregnant daughter Penelope (Rita Tushingham).
Mother is handed her own death certificate, and after she mutates into a wardrobe, Father forces Penelope into marrying Bules Martin (Michael Hordern), a man Father believes to have a 'brighter future', despite Penelope's love for Allan (Richard Warwick), the father of her child.It seems that The Bed Sitting Room is more about Britain than anything resembling an anti-war message.
It's this kind of absurdist humour that makes The Bed Sitting Room so rich in comedy, both laugh-out-loud and outright bizarre, very similar to the work of Monty Python that came the same year.
This is mainly thanks to the performances of the stellar line-up that includes - as well as the aforementioned actors - Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Harry Secombe, and the great Marty Feldman.
Granted THE BED SITTING ROOM does take place in a post-apocalypse England with a cast of absolute lunatics, but somehow it's all very fun.
Director Richard Lester assembles a who's who of great British comics working in the late 1960s and allows them to run rampant.
Ralph Richardson has the title role (you'll have to see it to believe it) and Marty Feldman, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Roy Kinnear have featured roles.
Best of all is the crazy family headed by Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne, who live on a never ending Metro train afraid to come out into the nuclear wasteland.
One of Lester's best films.