Anglophiles would do well to make frequent stops at the Seattle Art Museum over the next two months.
As You Like It, SAM’s latest film series, starts this evening, with nine choice examples of British cinema from the 1930s to the ‘60s. There’s a strong emphasis on comedy, with all of the films charting, in some way, the evolution of British humor on film. If you’ve ever enjoyed anything from Ricky Gervais’s drily awkward wit to Monty Python’s Dadaist slapstick, you need look no further to see those seeds being sown.
Tonight’s opening feature, 1937’s Storm in a Teacup, plays like a dry run for several decades of gently-eccentric, character-driven English comedies. London reporter Rex Harrison finds himself assigned to an uneventful beat in a quiet Scottish village. When a humble ice cream vendor can’t afford her dog’s license fee, the pooch is scheduled for execution by the town’s arrogant provost, and Harrison fights for the dog’s life in print. The chemistry between Harrison and a luminous Vivien Leigh (just two years away from mega-stardom in Gone With the Wind) gooses this distinctively British take on a Capra-style comedy nicely, and there’s a great scene involving a pack of dogs and a highfalutin’ dinner party that’s equal parts “Awwww,” and “WTF?” .
Elsewhere, the series shines a welcome light on some legendary British talents who’ve receded some from stateside appreciation in recent years. If your knowledge of Sir Alec Guinness begins and ends with Obi-Wan Kenobi, As You Like It offers a well-rounded view of the actor’s considerable comedic gifts. He’s a doddering but deceptively sharp cleric/amateur detective in an engaging duel of wits with master thief Peter Finch in 1954’s Father Brown/The Detective (screening April 3). Entertaining as he is in a cassock, however, it’s hard to top Guinness’s crafty turn in Carol Reed’s terrific Our Man in Havana, in which his avuncular vacuum cleaner salesman becomes a surprisingly effective secret agent. Mix in Ernie Kovacs as a Cuban secret police chief, Noel Coward as Guinness’s deadpan boss, and a Graham Greene screenplay brimming with sharp wit, and this May 1 screening looks like a must-see from this corner.
While Guinness utilized subtlety in his comic work, one of the era’s other top cinema funnymen—Peter Sellers—could leap farther over over-the-top than anybody, given the inclination. Sellers’ knack for silly accents and his willingness to transform himself physically made him a TV and radio star across the pond before he broke in films in the late 1950s (The Goon Show was widely touted as the prototype for Monty Python’s shenanigans). His dizzying versatility gets plenty of mileage in The Mouse That Roared, a broad but hysterical 1959 satire about a postage-stamp-sized European country declaring war on the United States. Sellers captures officious stuffiness, proprietary meekness, and gloriously absurd drag in his triple roles as the Prime Minister, Grand Marshall, and the Duchess of Grand Fenwick, respectively. It screens May 15.
Only Two Can Play, a little-seen comedy screening on May 22, isn’t quite as guffaw-laden as Mouse, but it gives Sellers a chance to create one of his most nuanced characters (a henpecked, libidinous librarian). Finally, the 1966 comedy The Wrong Box throws Sellers’ genial, venal doctor into a dark, playful farce about two elderly brothers (John Mills and Ralph Richardson), each hoping to outlive the other and claim a sizable lottery. There’s a veritable all-star cast filigreeing the movie, including a young Michael Caine, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook (screening June 12).
Three other features that cross-pollinate comedy with more overt strains of drama and romance round out the line-up: Billy Liar, in which Tom Courtenay’s title character finds reality and fantasy colliding uncomfortably as free-spirited young urbanite Julie Christie turns his head (May 29); Summertime, David Lean’s lush 1955 rom-com starring Katharine Hepburn as a spinster secretary finding love in Italy (April 10); and Georgy Girl, Lynn Redgrave’s winsome star turn as an awkward schoolteacher blossoming into her own (June 5).
Subscriptions to the series run $63 for SAM/Northwest Film Forum/SIFF members, $68 for non-members (get them here, old chap). A few limited individual tickets will be available at the door for $8 apiece, cash or check only. And alas no, they won’t be accepting British Pounds Sterling.
