Adelphi Collection: Penny Points To Paradise/Let's Go Crazy [1951] [DVD]

The British Film Institute has restored these two 1951 British comedies ("Penny..." was the debut film for the Goons) and they'd done a typically admirable job. There are still passages of the print that are really badly degraded - there are - but they only emphasise just how good the restoration work has been on the rest of it. In the main I'd say that about 90% of the print is clean, it's just such a shame that the material is rather tedious.

These two films haven't dated at all well and at times are severely laboured and just not that funny. Spike Milligan is so young (still finding his anarchic feet on camera) while Harry Secombe tries hard to be hilarious as a naïve man whose won £100,000 on the football pools (God bless him) but he just ends up being hammy rather than entertaining. The chameleon character genius that is Peter Sellers (who was very vocal about never liking the film) makes the most out of a running gag about money (thinking it's a disease - title above) while Arthur Marks plays the brainy and talkative money-forger to great effect. The two likely girls looking for a moneyed man to take them away from it all are very good too - Paddy O'Neil and Vicki Page. Tony Young directed and Alan Cullimore produced.

Of course it's not all bad - the script is very witty in places - the landlady of the Brighton bed & breakfast they're all staying in tells Arthur Marks and his brainless sidekick that "You can see the sea from the window - if you use a chair - and don't lean out too far..." to which he replies - "is that so - remind me to find a chair and do that one day!" Very Marx Brothers, very funny...

"Let's Go Crazy" is slightly better and features Peter Sellers in a whole wad of disguises (including a woman) in a nightclub where everyone breaks into terrible songs every few minutes. But again, with the best will in the world, its not really as much fun as we'd like to remember it...

I can see why these black & white movies have been saved for posterity (the release is dedicated to the memory of Sellers) - I just wish I could say it was worth it. And this beggars another more obvious question - why work on menial stuff like this at all, when David Lean's catalogue remains untouched and rotting? Or how about really juicy stuff like the Ealing classics?

An interesting release from the BFI then, rather than an essential one.

Penny Points to Paradise is a very early film of what were to become the Goons. Spike Milligan is impossibly young, quiet and restrained. Harry Seacombe is the manic one, reminiscent of his effort in the later Down Among the Z Men.

Peter Sellers is almost straight by comparison. This is a terrific glimpse of possibilities to come in The Goon Show.

Let's Go Crazy is just Sellers doing some not very good voiceover to classic silent films. Quite a disappointment actually.

Good fun, fairly silly and a wonderful look at the Brighton that I grew up in. No cars, and Louis Tussaud's! Brilliant.