The Naked Truth [VHS]

Peter Sellers as Wee Sonny McGregor has to be one of the funniest and most venal characters in British films of the Ealing Period, one of his cleverest performances, switching from slapstick goonery to snide villainy in a display of his complete mastery of the craft of comedy.

In fact The Naked Truth is packed with the greatest British comedy actors playing ensemble farce to perfection. You may remember it and have hazy recollections of "Galloping Alopaecia", "Looking For A MIckey Finn" and a heavily disguised Sellers attempting to buy some explosives in an Irish pub ("Ooh my nose"). The plot is uneven, the premise far fetched - but only as much as the average Fawlty Towers. Honourable mention to Terry-Thomas, so adept at seemingly playing "himself" that his subtle artistry as an actor has long been overlooked. Peggy Mount is completely absorbing, the timing of her double act with Joan Sims a master class in character dynamics. The whole piece underpinned by the clever premise that none of the characters is particularly wholesome but none so wonderfully wicked as the suave and ever resourceful Dennis Price, who blackmails them with the threat of exposing their darkest secrets in his scandal magazine, "The Naked Truth" (a sort of LA Confidential but in a 50s British showbiz setting).

Buy the DVD, it's a classic, and you can replay the last five seconds of the Irish pub scene over and over without wearing out a VHS cassette!

This is a brilliant film. Joan Sims portrayal of a panic stricken daughter is one of her best roles. The film is very funny and with stars such as Terry Thomas, Peter Sellers, Peggy Mount, Dennis Price and Joan Sims, it is a laugh a minute. The story is about celebrities who are being blackmailed. The ending is a classic. It is a must to watch if you have never seen it before and if you have seen it before, it is a treasure to watch again and again.

First things first, the original title of this 1957 film seems actually to have been "The Naked Truth," if the standard filmographies for Peter Sellers are to be believed. Fifty years later, as I write this, the title seems a little unfortunate, considering the company this black little comedy currently shares here on Amazon and elsewhere. On the DVD itself, the title card shows not "The Naked Truth," but "Your Past is Showing." I presume that was the American title, for a movie called "The Naked Truth" was unlikely to gain much acceptance or profit in small- or even big-town America during the Eisenhower years. "Your Past is Showing" is hardly scintillating, but it's a better title, being perfectly appropriate to the story and having the advantage of removing the DVD from the present company of its booty-shaking peers.

This is one of that amazing series of relatively low-budget, witty, intelligent, often hilarious, usually black-and-white comedies that various English studios seemed to turn out at a rate of about one every couple of months throughout the 1950s and into the mid-60s. While "The Naked Truth" is hardly great, it's a perfectly respectable and sound representative of the class.

Like many fine British comedies, it has a heart of inky darkness: four individuals, initially strangers to one another, are being blackmailed by a particularly despicable character. Two of them independently hit on the notion of solving their problems by murdering the blackmailer. When their initial individual schemes fail in blackly humorous ways, they resort to the very British practice of forming a committee to carry out the murderous deed (or not, as the case may be) ... again with blackly hilarious results.

This is one of those films in which the plot is of secondary consideration, for the cast is a mini-Who's Who of mid-century comedic talent and skill. This crowd would have an audience rolling on the floor with laughter with a reading from an airline arrival and departure list: gap-toothed Terry-Thomas, ever-formidable Peggy Mount, indomitably unaware Miles Malleson, so-gorgeous-you-don't-realize-she's-smart Shirley Eaton, incomparable Joan Sims (frazzled here rather than brassy), smooth, charming, despicable Dennis Price and Peter Sellers.

This is Sellers' third major film role. He made his movie debut in 1955 in "The Lady Killers." His second film was "The Smallest Show on Earth" in 1957. All three of these films are ensemble films and in all three, Sellers was teamed with, to say the very least, performers of impressive talent: Alec Guinness in "The Ladykillers," Margaret Rutherford in "The Smallest Show on Earth" and Terry-Thomas in "The Naked Truth." In each of these films, Sellers has a memorable but subordinate part. That would all change in his Wunderjahr, 1959, when he became a one-man picture franchise with back-to-back international triumphs in "The Mouse That Roared" and "I'm All Right Jack." In the former, he played (at least) three starring roles. In the latter, he outshone the brilliant Ian Carmichael.

If memory serves me correctly, I first became aware of Sellers' new star status when the then-mighty Life Magazine devoted a full picture spread to the wonderful new, satirical comedy about labor relations, "I'm All Right Jack." (The magazine even felt obliged to explain to puzzled Americans what the title meant.) The only star that I can recall receiving an equivalent accolade was Jacques Tati in "Mr. Hulot's Holiday."

Time and the publication of tell-all memoirs place this film is a rather different light than the one in which I viewed it in 1957. I certainly see things in "The Naked Truth" (by whatever title) that I entirely missed fifty years ago. Amazon's US editorial reviewer, Adrian Edwards, touched on this, but his gaze was firmly fixed on what he perceived as gay elements in the film: the relationship between Sellers' character and his Welsh dresser (heh-heh), and perhaps an overly butch caricature of Agatha Christie. Well ... maybe.

Of more significance to me is the nature of the character played by Sellers. He's a widely-loved television personality who is massively insecure in his private life. He's a man who hops manically from persona to persona, never taking rest in any one of them, while on the hop, he concocts grandiose and unworkable schemes that only bring him pain. This, it turns out, was a coldly accurate portrait of Peter Sellers, himself, whose agonized cry to the universe was, "I don't know who I am!" Who knew?

This is a funny picture from a brilliant epoch with a superb cast. Of course it deserves five stars.