Word: countesses
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SOMETHING for Everyone follows a predictable fairy-tale formula for its plot: impoverished Countess von Ornstein and her two children are restored to wealth by a dashing adventurer named Conrad in a fable which ends with a grand wedding. The lubricant of the story, however, is sex: sex perverted, sex sublimated into aggression, sex released in libidinal fantasy. The result of Harold Prince's debut directorial effort for the screen is a minor masterpiece of black comedy...
...parodies of history (knight-errantery, courtly love, etc.); Something for Everyone, through parody of the fairy-tale, slyly parodies history. It unmasks in a Bavarian setting the rise of a parvenn power-maniac, played by Michael York, as a cool mastery of perversion and murder. Angela Lansbury as the Countess von Ornstein nostalgically bewails the passing of "real men"-that stalwart Germanic breed in direct lineage from Attila the Hun and Barbarossa. In a world of "upstarts, the American tourists and plastic dirndls," she craves submission to a genuinely phallic male like Conrad. She also craves money...
Conrad insinuates himself into the Ornstein family circle first by murdering a groom, then by revealing the Nazi obsessions of the stolid head butler. While sexually subduing both doe-eyed, effeminate Helmut and the Countess, Conrad seduces the unprepossessing daughter of a German magnate. The millionaire and his imbecilic wife want to buy a castle and instant social status. Conrad, of course, sees the connection between their ambitions and the Countess' wish to re-open her decayed ancestral fief, Helmut marries the heiress, though he and his bride aspire only to sexual bliss with Conrad. Conrad himself mercy awaits...
...Angela Lansbury, as the Countess, wins honors hands down as the film's principal asset. She not only parades around in a dazzling array of black and/or white costumes, but also dominates several of the most clever scenes in the film. Whether insulting her lesbian attendant, or shrieking for fine strawberries, or flamboyantly embracing the quest for money, Lansbury brings to her part the exaggerated theatricality which came off so well in Prince's Mame. After announcing her engagement to Conrad, she takes her fat daughter aside and says: "I was thinking of pink for the bridesmaids, but really...
...touches: the Fellini-esque Bavarian music-makers who pop up on hillsides and in taverns, the bloated Wagnerian singers who rush at each other on stage as Conrad's eye seeks his victims in the opera balcony, the gaudy wedding cake of a hunting-lodge decked out for the Countess's garden party. And, finally, a surprise ending throws the ultimate psychological confusion into a film which plays bewitching games with violence...