Just awful. Supposed to be a satire about greed, I guess. Billionaire Peter Sellers adopts homeless Ringo Starr and, something. A series of random gags. They bribe people and make them do "funny" things or get reactions from them. They buy a painting at auction for thirty thousand pounds then cut out the nose with a pair of scissors. At the auction, people bid in what were supposed to be funny ways.
Let's see. They hunt quail using anti-aircraft guns. They open a small grocery store, have a grand opening sale, everything so cheap that shoppers quickly clear the place out and the place shuts down. Peter Sellers buys a hotdog from a vendor out the window of a passenger train. He pays with a five pound note. The vendor says he can't make change for it and runs alongside the train as it moves out trying to get a smaller bill. I don't know what the point of that was since the guy was the opposite of greedy.
Laurence Harvey appears on stage as Hamlet and starts doing a strip tease in the middle of his soliloquy.
Includes documentary footage of a Vietnamese man being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer. I'm sure they thought that would get a big laugh, although, in fairness, Woody Allen used the same image in Stardust Memories.
On an ocean liner called The Magic Christian, passengers watch a movie about a transracial head transplant. Yul Brenner appears as a female impersonator, Christopher Lee as a waiter who turns out to be a vampire. A man in a gorilla suit attacks the captain.
Not one funny thing. But I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and was shocked that a few critics liked it.
I remember seeing short bits of this thing on TV in the '70's. I was a kid. My older brother laughed mirthlessly at it. Maybe it was because he liked Ringo, or maybe he was trying to show he understood the joke even if it wasn't funny. I thought I was too unsophisticated to see the humor.
With John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Roman Polanski's in the credits but I didn't spot him. I probably stopped paying much attention by then.
Free on Zoneify, Classico, Momentu and Movieland.Tv. You have to pay to see it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.
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