About the WonderCafe Advent Calendar.

 

Probably one of the oddest entries to this Advent Calendar and certainly one of the oddest films ever made.…

 

 

Let me be totally up front about this: The 1969 film The Magic Christian has nothing to do whatsoever with Christmas. It’s not even set during the holidays. Why put this on our Advent Calendar then? Well, let me make a few other caveats first.

 

First of all, I think it’s safe to say many of you won’t even like this film. It’s…opaque to put it politely. Bloody nonsense is I’m sure how some of you might phrase. Total crap also might chart in some quarters. At the same time many might say it’s absolutely brilliant. It may even be all of the above.

 

Peter Sellers plays billionaire Sir Guy Grand. He comes across a man, Youngman (Ringo Starr) sleeping in the park and, on a whim adopts him. They then go from place to place where very strange and very disturbing things happen in their wake. A performance of Hamlet featuring Lawrence Harvey turns the “to be or not to be” soliloquy into a striptease act. A panther disguised as a giant poodle is set loose at the Cruft’s Dog Show. A boxing match ends when both fighters make out in the middle of the ring (the play-by-play announcer comments, “The crowd seems sickened by the sight of no blood!”). An auction conducted by the deadpan Patrick Cargill becomes a free-for-all to bid on a tacky painting of a dog you’d find in a steak house.

 

See:

 

It’s totally bewildering. Eventually we’re let in on what’s going on (something revealed on the first page of Terry Southern’s novel): Sir Guy knows that everyone has their price and he goes around pranking the establishment on that basis.

 

When The Simpsons used this film as the basis for the episode where Homer becomes Burns’ prank monkey, it’s clear it is the rich prankster Burns who is ultimately in the wrong. In The Magic Christian, the opposite is the case. Sir Guy and Youngman go around making sure people will debase themselves, their art or their social standing for the right price and the mugs who go along with it get what they deserve. As Sir Guy says to Youngman, “Sometimes it's not enough merely to teach. One has to punish as well.” Or as the song by Badfinger played throughout sings “If you want it, here it is come and get it / But you better hurry ‘cause it’s going fast”

 

For Sir Guy, because everything and everyone can be bought, nothing is of value. One of the funniest scenes in the film is when Sir Guy and Youngman go to an art dealer (played by a then-unknown John Cleese) and buy a paining from him, or rather the nose from one: having purchased the school of Rembrandt, they slice the nose out of it. And why not? They paid for it.

 

See:

 

It only gets weirder and more excessive, if that is humanly possible. Sir Guy bribes Oxford to ram the Cambridge boat in the annual boat race on the Thames. He goes to a restaurant, has himself strapped in and gorges himself in front of the patrons. The film’s elaborate climax takes the rich and famous and puts them on what they believe to be a giant luxury liner. Only it’s Sir Guy’s coup-de-grace to the great and the good as they are progressively humiliated. Yul Brenner sings “Mad About the Boy” in drag. The ship appears to be invaded by a terrorists and a mad gorilla.” Christopher Lee terrorizes passengers as Dracula. And the boat turns out to be an elaborate stage set in a warehouse. The film concludes with Sir Guy and Youngman putting money in a vat of excrement, blood and urine and inviting the onlooking City bankers to come and get the “free money”. They oblige willingly while the Thunderclap Newman song “There’s Something In The Air” plays.

 

It’s like watching an orgy of heavy-handed blackly comic satire. It’s Oliver Stone decades before his time.

 

It’s probably not for everyone. Which brings me to why I’ve included it here. Earlier this decade, City-TV in Toronto used to take their post-midnight movies on Christmas Eve and turn them into the greatest counter-programming ever. They showed Yentl one year and another they showed The Magic Christian. The demented genius who thought of that idea deserved an award. Because in this season of commercial excess there’s nothing like an extreme example of cynical anti-consumer satire to provide a good reality check. Plus it has music by Badfinger.