Word: goon
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...Something Completely Different is a film extracted from the BBC's madhouse revue Monty Python's Flying Circus, which is descended in turn from the gone-but-not-forgotten Goon Show of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. From the Goons, the Monty Python crew learned how to raise nonsense to dizzying heights: a filmed cabaret act of two brothers who play tape recorders concealed in their noses; a Hungarian tourist who reads to startled British shopkeepers such sentences as "My Hovercraft is full of eels" from a wildly mistranslated phrase book; a mob of old ladies...
Back in the 1950s, before the telly really took over, all England seemed addicted to a BBC radio program called The Goon Show, which was the making of Actor Peter Sellers, among others. When the Goons got together again to do a special program for the BBC's 50th birthday, Sellers brought four "friends": Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and Princess Anne. Another royal Goon fan, serving with the navy in the Mediterranean, sent his regrets: "Last night my hair fell out, my knees dropped off, and I turned green with envy at the thought of my father...
...unusually acute and sometimes vitriolic account of the way two lovers destroy each other. The Bed Sitting Room carries reminders of both the other films and of other styles. Indeed, it shows its lineage proudly: a little Marx Brothers, settings out of Krazy Kat, a lot of The Goon Show (altogether appropriate, since the co-author of the original play, Spike Milligan, was one of the show's originators). Yet it is indisputably a Lester film, a product of a passionate, painful comic vision that is helping to establish him, more and more, as one of the world...
...been downhill since"). By 22, he had left a director's job at a local television station to tour Europe and Africa on $2 a day, coming to rest later at the BBC. There he was assigned to Peter Sellers' memorable madcap comedy series, The Goon Show, which in spirit at least resembled Lester's later movies. "We did sketches that had no beginnings and no endings," he recalls. "They would just evolve into totally unrelated situations. You would have a spiral staircase, for example, and down it would be coming a line of U-boat captains...
...respectively. Yet the film that outstripped all its box-office competition, with receipts of $28,000, was an unknown sexpotboiler called The Aroused. It is one of the 50 or so low-budget "nudies" that are cranked out each year for the "goon market." Capitalizing on the decline of censorship, these "exploitation films," as their producers refer to them, are now bigger and bawdier than ever...