1966 UK film The Wrong Box is perhaps the most gentle black comedy I have seen. I think we’re going to need a term for this shade of black comedy: maybe charcoal grey or just grey. What about off-white comedy?
The plot concerns the final survivors of a tontine established by their fathers when they were a large group of young boys. Apparently, a tontine is an agreement where the last remaining contestant wins the entire prize. Before this, I thought a tontine was the creature Luke Skywalker slit open in The Empire Strikes Back and crawled into so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Learn something new every day, I do.
After a rather beautiful opening credit sequence heavy with art nouveau stylings, we get a quick montage of the pact’s formation and some of the darkly humorous ways various entrants remove themselves from the competition. It is all a bit like the Python “Upper-class Twit of the Year” sketch.
Once the films starts in earnest, we meet the two remaining survivors, played by John Mills and Ralph Richardson. They are brothers, and Mills informs his son (played by Michael Caine) that he hasn’t spoken to Richardson in decades. This despite the fact they live right next door to each other.
That proximity gives Caine ample opportunity to observe the cousin next door he is crushing on hard. Nanette Newman plays that cousin in a manner that makes me think this has to be one of the apparently dozens of inspirations for Helena Bonham Carter’s character in the Wallace and Gromit film The Curse of the Ware-Rabbit.
Newman was the wife of director Bryan Forbes, himself a veteran of numerous UK productions. Through his connections in the industry, he was able to assemble a stellar cast of UK comedy greats past and present. The cast includes Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Thorley Walters and Gerald Sim. It’s like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, if it had been made in the UK, shortened to a watchable length and actually funny.
So much is laugh-out-loud funny, both in dialogue and physical comedy. I usually find comedy works best when it at the smallest scale, yet there is a train crash here that nearly had me in tears from laughing so hard. The result of two trains colliding head-on is revealed to be the engines nose-to-nose, each tilting up at a 45-degree angle.
The dialogue is so smart that I probably missed half the lines because I was still laughing over a previous one. Richardson torments one person after another with his endless regurgitation of facts. At that train crash he tells a couple he has subjected to this tired that he must take his leave. The grateful response is, “Oh, would you, sir?” When Richardson arrives at the home of his brother after many years of failing to pay a visit, he welcomes the ancient, shuffling butler with, “How long has it been?” The butler, embarrassed by how long it took to answer the door says, “I’m sorry, sir, but I came as quick as I could.” Or what about this exchange between Newman and Caine: “May I enquire to why you’re inquiring?” “My father is dying. It’s nothing serious. He has been dying for years.” And Caine again later, relaying a concept he might have misunderstood: “If one can’t join the working class, one must do all they can to deplete them.”
The Wrong Box is probably too gentle for contemporary audiences but I, as somebody who loves almost all things British from the 60’s and earlier, smiled throughout watching this. Recommended for those who think they also might enjoy such a thing.
Dir: Bryan Forbes
Starring John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Nanette Newman
Watched on Powerhouse/Indicator UK blu-ray (all region)