Word: victorianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...WRONG BOX. Bryan Forbes has a high old time directing Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Peter Sellers in a Victorian spoof of such varied subjects as vast fortunes, star-struck lovers, Bournemouth stranglers, venal doctors, missing bodies and orphaned cousins...
South Africa's Stuart Cloete (rhymes with rooty) is the author of three arresting historical romances about the 19th century Boer settlers and a well-informed study of black Africa (The African Giant). Now his tribal milieu is Victorian England, where white slavery and prostitution flourished underground because a polite society pretended that sexual desire was sinful and disgusting. Cloete's hero (or villain) is Edward Lenton, a hypocritical English country gentleman who seduces five of his children's governesses, then ships the sixth off to be broken in at his favorite London whorehouse. Meanwhile...
...crewmates, traveling in a tiny, nuclear-powered submarine, chart a hazardous course through man's circulatory system. After several unexpected stopovers in the lung and inner ear, the microscopic crew reaches its disembarkation point: the human brain. THE WRONG BOX. Somewhere hidden among the plot machinations of this Victorian spoof is a wrong box, upon which most of the action hinges. The box is a coffin-unoccupied-although Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Mills and Ralph Richardson are more than anxious to find a suitable corpse to fill...
...Michael Caine whose guardian is one of the brothers (you may have liked him in The Ipcress File but wait till you see him now) and his courtship with an orphan whose guardian is the other surviving brother. In an eminently forgettable role, she is a caricature of supposed Victorian modesty (her cousin's hobby of collecting eggs is deemed "obscene" and she practically faints when Caine, a medical student, informs her that his great interest is the human body...
...marquee. Audiences here have come to expect freshness, a fast pace, and genuine, if strange, with from the English imports, as in the Beatles' movie, The Knack, or even Morgan. But producer-director Bryan Forbes is not a Richard Lester. There was no valid reason to use the Victorian setting except to provide some lush decorative backgrounds and to hurl extremely naive lampoons at a sensibility that has already been lampooned to death...