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MovieMail's Review
One of the first releases from the BFI Flipside range starring the cream of '60s British comedy and acting talent.
‘British? What a lot of use that is! We don’t even know who’s won the war. We’ve run out of food, no medicine, and we’re eating our parents!’
Featuring a host of British comic and acting talent, Spike Milligan’s The Bed Sitting Room combines stream-of-consciousness absurdism with a genuinely affecting sense of post-apocalyptic despair.
On the anniversary of the ‘nuclear misunderstanding’, Lord Fortnum of Alamein (Ralph Richardson) is convinced he is about to turn into a bedsit (and later does); father, mother and their 18-month pregnant daughter leave the shelter of their tube carriage in search of a doctor, and a pair of policemen (Cook and Moore), roam the wastelands ordering people to ‘move along’ in case of a repeat attack. Uneven yet entirely brilliant, the film’s visual imagination anticipates the best of Monty Python, and beneath Milligan’s characteristic absurdity lies a real Kafkaesque pathos.
90 minutes of extras, including archival interviews from 1967 with Richard Lester, Spike Milligan and Peter Cook
Original trailer
Illustrated booklet with essay by Michael Brooke and original review and promotional material.
Film Description
In the hazy aftermath of World War III, the fallout from a ‘nuclear misunderstanding’ (which lasted two minutes and twenty eight seconds, including the signing of the peace treaty) is producing strange mutations amongst the survivors, and the noble Lord Fortnum finds himself transforming into a bed sitting room…
This vividly imagined, darkly satirical filmic vision of a post-apocalyptic England, directed by Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, How I Won the War, The Knack), is based on the highly-regarded play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. It also boasts great performances by the cream of ‘60s British comedy and acting talent: Rita Tushingham, Ralph Richardson, Peter Cook, Harry Secombe, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Michael Horden, Roy Kinnear, Arthur Lowe, Dandy Nichols, Marty Feldman...
