Kenneth
Saturday 25th July 2020 1:20pm [Edited]
5,447 posts
I am shocked than Monkhouse posted about this film without mentioning Racquel Welch with her topless galley slavegirls near the end.
Quote: Hercules Grytpype Thynne @ 25th July 2020, 6:02 AM
Now, you know I wouldn't normally bother with films 1960 onwards,
I am enjoying your reviews, so I would not object were you to sit through the Confessions films and review each one.
Quote: Aaron @ 25th July 2020, 9:42 AM
Cleese did indeed contribute to the film, although I'm not sure what. It was largely based on an original book.
Terry Southern (who had a hand in scripting Dr Strangelove) wrote the book and did the final script. Cleese washes his hands of it in his autobiography:
Peter [Sellers] started by explaining that there had been several drafts of the script up to that point, and he showed us the most recent - the fourteenth draft, which contained quite the most exquisite stage directions I'd ever read: in the very first scene, an ornate clock on the mantelpiece was dwelt on in extraordinary detail. It was only when we read further, in search of dialogue, character and plot that the ghastly truth emerged: the script was just terrible. Graham and I were astounded. We yearned to ask one question: how could the writer of this material ever have been hired?
However, the screenplay's bottomless ineptitude was very liberating in that it left us with nothing to defer to, so we went back to the Southern novel and found it a talented, if lazy, mess, with a great premise: an immensely rich but principled man, Sir Guy Grand, plays large-scale practical jokes on people for the sole purpose of revealing to them, and to others, the baseness of their real motives. It may sound a bit prissy, but its mood wasn't: more satirical than didactic. Gra and I had a wonderful time inventing new pranks, including a sky-writing plane that left very rude words above the crowds at Ascot, forcing the authorities to send up another sky-writer to bowdlerise the vulgarities, resulting in a sky filled with words like 'ARSENAL', 'THE PENIS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD', 'SCUNTHORPE', 'PRICKLY' and 'MISHIT'. We came up with one other absurdly expensive idea: on the huge cruise liner which Sir Guy has hired to host and ridicule his most powerful victims, there is a very expensive restaurant where, if you want a steak, you are escorted to a huge below-decks paddock where you can choose your own cut from a large, heavily bandaged herd of steers.
Each morning we would arrive at Peter's flat at ten o'clock and give him the pages we had written the previous day, and he would say, 'Less of this' or 'More of that'. It was all remarkably relaxed, the temperature in the room rising only if Britt Ekland walked through in her dressing gown (I think even Graham enjoyed this). ...
... Meanwhile Graham and I were steaming ahead with our three film scripts. Our second draft of The Magic Christian (the film's sixteenth so far) was deemed good enough to secure financing for the enterprise; but to our disappointment Terry Southern was then invited to do the final draft, and proceeded lovingly to reinstate the mess we had first been presented with. We both hated the end result (you'd expect that, if you knew writers as well as I do). Graham wondered whether a Mr Jack Daniels should have been credited as Southern's co-writer. Even so, it was hard to resist when Peter Sellers offered me a small part opposite him in a rather good scene where Sir Guy Grand purchases a 'School of Rembrandt' portrait and then cuts out the nose of it with a knife, explaining to my character (a snotty young art dealer) that he only collects noses. I, of course, have to react with horror, and I exclaim 'Shit!' This was quite a naughty word in 1968 - so naughty, in fact, that when, some months later, my scene was shown on television to promote the movie I became, as far as I know, the first person ever to say 'shit' on British television.
