Anytime I write about my personal favorite of any form of art, I always make sure to preface it by saying that I recognize my tastes do not reflect that of the mainstream. I love Woody Allen, but I find Annie Hall to be one of his weaker films from the 1970′s, preferring the early satires, while my favorite is his divisive attack on fair-weather fans, Stardust Memories. Similarly, I find Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to be good, but overrated – I prefer its weirder younger brother, Magical Mystery Tour.
Having said all that, the 1970 film The Magic Christian is one of my all-time favorites, despite its poor commercial performance and the fact that it still has yet to gain any sort of beloved cult status. Adapted from a novel by American satirist Terry Southern, Peter Sellers stars as Sir Guy Grand, one of the wealthiest men in the world. For all of his character’s quirks, shown throughout the rest of the movie, he is introduced to us as a philanthropic mind, adopting a bum (played by Ringo Starr), who he names Youngman Grand.
Despite this kindhearted gesture, Grand is an eccentric billionaire with a unique sense of humor. He constantly uses his wealth to “buy” situations, that is to say he pays people off to permit strange things to occur. At a high-society performance of Hamlet, the “to be or not to be” speech is turned into a male strip routine, to the disgust of the uppity audience members. In a later scene on a train, Grand presents to Youngman a rude businessman, who Grand says has “earned millions off of mankind’s inhumanity to mankind.” After briefly annoying him, Grand has the businessman snatched away to a strobe-lit party with topless dancers, nuns, and a guy in a scuba outfit.
As the film’s first half shows, Grand’s mean streak is exacted on those who deserve it – the greedy, the elitist, and those who adhere strictly to traditions. He turns a traditional pheasant hunt with a group of elder Englishmen on its head by shooting down his targeted bird with the aid of an anti-aircraft cannon. A celebrated boat race between Oxford and Cambridge is hijacked by one of the teams resorting to dirty tactics. While Grand and his young ward observe the proceedings with a detached cool, the snobbish gentlemen around them vomit in reaction to the bad sportsmanship.
Grand is also dedicated to showing Youngman the effect money has on people in capitalistic society. In a scene at Sotheby’s auction house, a stuffy art historian (played by a young John Cleese) goes from casually dismissing Grand’s inquiries about the painting to being a pitiful yes man once Sir Guy offers thirty thousand pounds for a Rembrandt. He even agrees with Grand’s deliberately wrong assertion that Rembrandt was French.
This all builds up to the film’s title, which is a luxury liner setting sail on its maiden voyage. Hyped as “the social must of the season,” Grand and Youngman see to it that everyone else around them is routinely terrorized. Over the course of the boat’s excursion, things begin to go awry, from a fake hijacking of the boat to a police officer who plants a joint on a senior citizen. By the end of the voyage, all Hell breaks loose, with the corridors marked with slogans like “SMASH CAPITALISM” and “DOWN WITH PANTS,” while the main hall features posters of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Lenny Bruce. Again, Grand and his son casually observe the proceedings while everyone else around them panics.
The film’s coda is best left to be seen rather than described. Needless to say, Grand and his son comment on the potency of the scene and its contents, a scatological metaphor for capitalism taken to a shocking extreme. The entire scene is set to the iconic protest song “Something In The Air” by Thunderclap Newman, while the cinematography deliberately borrows from The Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa steps sequence.
Again, without describing the scene, I think it’s brilliant, but I also understand others reacting to it with sheer disgust. I can also see how and why others would think the movie is too cynical and too mean-spirited. To me, it’s funny, a bizarre series of vignettes where Grand and his son administer bad karma to those who have sown it elsewhere, while also skewering such then-sacred topics like the British class system and the dog-eat-dog world of business. The message of the film has only grown more relevant on both sides of the Atlantic, with the economic crisis rubbing salt into these already open wounds of class struggle.
For those with an anti-materialistic bent, this movie is perfect. It takes a bit of time to get acquainted with the film’s humor – the script was written by Southern and had revisions written by Sellers as well as John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who would form one third of the Monty Python comedy troupe – but for all of its intellectually stimulating content, there are still plenty of great laugh out loud moments.
