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DVD

Title:The Magic Christian
Publisher:  Universal
Country:Europe
Format:DVD
Date:2006
Region Code:Region 2
Classification:15
Barcode:505082423686
Cat#:824 236 8
Genre:Comedy
Rating:5.5  Rate
Collection:  I Own It     I Want It 
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Notes

White DVD case

The Magic Christian
Released1969
DirectorJoseph McGrath
Selected CastRingo Starr as Youngman Grand
 Peter Sellers as Sir Guy Grand
 Yul Brynner as Transvestite Cabaret Singer
 Hattie Jacques as Ginger Horton
(Information from Cinema World)


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Comments and Reviews
 
Quad5point1
22nd Sep 2019
 Rated 10/10
Extract of online review from HERE
If you are not familiar with the film or its source material, The Magic Christian is essentially a “High concept” movie – it follows the exploits of an eccentric multimillionaire, Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), who takes a homeless young man (Ringo Starr) under his wing, and together the pair set about concocting a series of increasingly elaborate pranks and challenges in order to demonstrate that “everyone has their price”, having much fun at the expense of officious traffic wardens, arts snobs, privileged upper class twits, bigots, and the terminally trendy. Along the way, they use cash bribes to sabotage the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, that epitome of elitism and fair play, take a well-aimed shot at the world of advertising and boardroom yes-men, and we are presented with a memorable scene of the lovely Hattie Jacques discussing sex crimes and Nazi war atrocities, which I’m fairly sure never happened in Sykes.

Its’ mischief-making theme, with its frequent overturning of class and social sensibilities and surreal detours, has a lot in common with Cook and Moore’s Bedazzled (not least the pulchritudinous presence of Welch) and feels more like a series of comedy sketches than a movie with a long-form narrative. Its sketchiness is no surprise when one takes into account the influence of its star, Peter Sellers, a man for whom the adjective ‘difficult’ may have been invented; it’s well-documented in Python biographies that the Python sketch ‘The Mouse Problem’ was originally written for this film, but rejected by Sellers because, according to popular anecdote, his milkman didn’t find it funny.

It was Sellers who brought in Cleese and Chapman to assist with scripting The Magic Christian, after his endless, impetuous tinkering had seen the film go through, in John Cleese’s words, “thirteen drafts by the time it got to us… Graham and I managed to put the script into shape in three or four weeks” before further interventions by McGrath (“A very nice man who had no idea about comedy structure”) saw the film “end up as a series of celebrity walk-ons.”
For his part, Ringo Starr is basically playing the version of himself that had been honed in numerous TV interviews and newsreels, not to mention the two Beatles movies, as a laconic, dreamy layabout prone to droll asides and non-sequiturs. It’s the kind of unaffected performance you only get from non-actors with natural charisma who are at ease in front of the camera (his dumb-show when demonstrating facial exercises [“Silent scream… Tiny mouth”] before an increasingly apoplectic Spike Milligan is worth the entrance price alone).

If you are a Python-head, The Magic Christian is also noteworthy as a small stepping stone between their pre-Python TV work for BBC, Rediffusion and Thames, and the Flying Circus. Cleese and Chapman both appear in the two self-written scenes that survived Sellers and Southern’s interventions, the former as a Sotheby’s employee aghast as Ringo vandalises a Dutch master, the latter looking ruggedly handsome as an oarsman for the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, but the film is strewn throughout with the kind of scenarios that became recognisable tropes in Python’s first BBC1 series when it aired later in 1969, most of them retained from Southern’s original novel: Eccentric behaviour in restaurants and art galleries, an upper-class hunting outing that soon gets wildly out of hand, a boardroom meeting full of fawning toadies constantly on the backfoot as they attempt to make the right noises in response to a mogul’s flights of fancy, and a brace of gags playing on drag and homoeroticism (It’s worth bearing in mind that such gags may seem reactionary now, but were transgressive in 1969 – it’s called progress). Another proto-Python element is the casting of broadcasters (in this case, Michael Aspel, Alan Whicker, Harry Carpenter) appearing as themselves, in the same way Python would later employ Reginald Bosanquet, Richard Baker and David Hamilton. Keen-eyed connoseiurs of queer cinema will also appreciate a cameo from Leonard Frey, aka Harold from ground-breaking gay drama The Boys In The Band.

Fabulous Films’ DVD release of The Magic Christian is, to all intents and purposes, a clone of the decade-old Universal mid-price DVD (right down to the packaging and menu screen), and as such offers no tantalising extras, not even an original trailer. The Magic Christian is a real curio of its time, with enough celebrity cameos and ‘60s British Cinema, Beatles and Python connections to appeal to a cross-section of fandoms for cultural and historical interest alone. And it’s good fun: Daft, silly, flawed, patchy, but rarely dull, with Sellers and Starr carrying the film with their infectious personalities alone – for better or worse, a shining example of “They don’t make them like that any more” and “Drugs in the sixties must have been REALLY good

2 people found this review helpful.   ✔︎ Helpful Review?
 
 
gregs45s SUBS
21st Sep 2019
 You'd think with the talent available from both the cast (Ringo aside:)and writers (inc contributions from Graham Chapman,Cleese,Sellers) that this would be funny.It's not! (an hour and a half of my life that i'll never get back;),another case of "too many cooks..."
 

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