Lovely wallpaper. It’s not the highest praise you could give to a film, but The Wrong Box is one of those British films of the 1960s that’s so fundamentally terrible that you are left scrabbling to find something good to say about it. It’s a bad picture but isn’t the frame lovely?
It’s one of those sub-Agatha Christie comic capers set in the Victorian era, where two ancient brothers are the last survivors of an elaborate tontine pact set up decades before – everyone pays in but only the last surviving member benefits from the payout – with John Mills and Ralph Richardson as Masterman and Joseph Finsbury, the two old duffers trying to outlive each other and so shower money on their respective sides of the family.
There’s not a single laugh to be had from this hoary old monstrosity relying very largely on physical comedy and directed by Bryan Forbes almost as if it were a silent comedy – there are intertitle cards here and there.
But it is charmingly played Michael Caine and Nanette Newman – he’s the son of Masterman, she’s the daughter of Joseph – cousins who turn out not to be cousins at all and so are free to fall in love when the time comes. Both Caine and Newman work like crazy to put some air into this sinking soufflé whose central conceit turns out not to be the tontine itself but a case of mistaken identiy – two boxes, each delivered to the wrong house, one containing a statue, the other the dead body of Joseph, who turns out not to be dead at all but out in the wide world boring everyone to death with his endless litany of (un)fascinating factoids.
As well as the wallpaper and Caine and Newman, the rest of the cast is great too. It’s the main attraction. Mills is massively underused but is lively and (yes) funny as Masterman, while Richardson puts on his pooterish old boy act as the distracted eccentric Joseph.
It’s in their extended families that most of the action takes place. There’s Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as Joseph’s avaricious nephews, determined their side of the family should inherit by hook or by crook. Peter Sellers as a doctor who can be relied on for nefarious medical products and procedures and Tony Hancock as a detective who arrives on the scene to investigate when murder most foul is suspected. Irene Handl, John Le Mesurier, Cicely Courtneidge, and (blink and miss them) Nichlas Parsons, Jeremy Lloyd and Valentine Dyall – there’s quality in this cast, almost all of it squandered.
It’s one of those “made for export” comedies and Michael Caine summed up what’s wrong with it in his autobiography, What’s It All About?, where he described The Wrong Box as “so British that it met with a gentle success in most places except Britain, where it was a terrible flop. I suppose this was because the film shows us exactly as the world sees us – as eccentric, charming and polite – but the British knew better that they were none of these things, and it embarrassed us.”
It is embarrassing but it does look good. Cinematographer Gerry Turpin has lit it in that bright, colourful mid-1960s way, like a Hammer Horror movie with more of the lights switched on. John Barry did the score, though it’s not one of his most memorable, and the gothically comic harpsichord gets plenty to do. It’s a sumptuously appointed film (the flock wallpaper is beautiful) and the houses where it all takes place are the finest Regency dwellings (it’s the Royal Crescent in Bath).
Good looking, well acted, full of talent and featuring a director who’s smart and knows what he’s doing. It’s got everything you could want except the script.
The Wrong Box – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
