Everybody has a favorite Beatle, but I hope we can agree the most likable is Ringo. And while each of them went before the cameras at different times (whether separately or collectively), he seems to be the most natural. Still, I doubt he would have been in film if it wasn’t for being a Beatle first.
He is second-billed to Peter Sellers in 1969’s The Magic Christian, and he looks comfortable here, but I don’t feel he exactly holds his own against Sellers. Then again, he isn’t given much to do except be the largely silent partner in Sellers’s bizarre schemes. There are rumors Sellers was concerned about the younger actor getting more laughs than him, and so seemed to remove any humorous lines Ringo might deliver.
I suspect that also accounts for not especially funny cameos from Pythons John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who also made contributions to the script. Of the two, Cleese fares the better, if only because he gets one of the few moments I laughed out loud over and that his icy exterior as a Sotheby’s clerk shatters and mutters, “Shit”.
That happens when Sellers and Starr make an insanely high offer for a Rembrandt yet to go to auction. Cleese is shocked beyond any words when Sellers proceeds to cut out the face of the painting. I wondered what the point of that was, and why he thought he had the right to destroy that artwork. It is a weirdly random act of cruelty.
You see, Sellers is a very rich man with a quirky sense of humor. The film opens with him suddenly adopting the homeless Ringo as his son and rightful heir. Together, they engage in many practical jokes demonstrating the extent to which money can corrupt others. A couple of things I have always found consistent about practical jokes: they are never practical and they are only ever funny to the people instigating them. Oh, and I almost forgot, the people who do them are assholes.
Most of these gags are at the expense of the super-wealthy, giving parts of this a counterculture edginess. But many others are inflicted upon the common people, and that betrays that label. I don’t see the point of goading a hot dog vendor to race his cart alongside a train until it apparently overturns (at least, that’s what I assume from all the noise on the soundtrack). Or how about opening for a day a grocery with insanely low prices, watching the chaos, then closing it and putting up signs saying it is coming soon to a new location…which will never happen.
It may not appear I have addressed the plot, and yet I have. That’s because the entire film is nothing but these pranks. There’s a boxing match which they’ve rigged to have the opponents start making out in the ring. There’s the panther they enter a poodle into a dog show, where it eats the other contestants (take that, beloved dogs of others!). At one point, Sellars arranges for only himself to be served at a packed restaurant, making all the other patrons wait while he engages in such behavior as scooping a small mountain of caviar into his hands and smearing it on his face. There’s a performance of Hamlet I assume Sellers has manipulated, unless it was expected that Laurence Harvey, doing the soliloquy, would start doing a burlesque striptease. Then again, it was the late 60’s, so this may have been part of that production already.
Harvey is far from the only cameo in this. There are a great many British actors who are recognizable from what feels like a million pictures, actors like John Le Mesurie, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Attenborough, Spike Milligan. A lengthy and unfortunate set piece near the end is supposed to take place on the maiden voyage of the titular ship, and among the cameos here are Christopher Lee (as a vampire, which I’m surprised he agreed to do, as he was supposedly tired of doing Hammer films by this point), Roman Polanski, Yul Brynner (in a long performance where he mimes a song in drag) and Raquel Welch (as some sort of Viking slave driver commanding a great many topless female rowers).
The message of The Magic Christian is that money can buy anything, and that could have just as easily have been communicated in a short film. Instead, we have a plotless series of episodes in which a rich jerk torments various people. I don’t feel even the most repellant of the wealthy whom Sellers tricks are deserving of what happens, especially as I doubt any of them learn anything from the experience. These victims deserve better, and Ringo deserves a better movie.
Dir: Joseph McGrath (who also directed the loathsome The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom, so fool me twice, apparently)
Starring Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray