The Bed-Sitting Room

Dir: Richard Lester

1969

*****

Richard Lester's 1969 The Bed-Sitting Room is an absurdist, post-apocalyptic, satirical black comedy, the likes that could have only been written by the great Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. The story is set in London a few years after the nuclear war (that lasted two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, including the signing of the peace treaty). It's silly, bizarre, very British, very funny and also pretty clever. Story revolves around several core characters. Penelope (Rita Tushingham), who is seventeen months pregnant, lives with her lover Alan (Richard Warwick) and her parents (played by Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne) on a tube carriage that goes around in a constant loop on the still functioning Circle Line. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore play policemen who have converted the shell of an old Morris Minor into a hot air balloon and float above the remains of London telling any passer-by to 'Keep moving' just in case they become a target of any further, but unlikely hostilities. The National Health Service is represented by just one male nurse and television is now one surviving newsreader who travels around from person to person with the frame of an old TV giving updates on a situation he knows nothing about, his upper body (the bit seen on TV) is dressed immaculately, while the rest of him is in rags. The pretence of keeping up ones appearance even though the world has all but ended is very British indeed, and the fact that Lord Fortnum (played by the brilliant Ralph Richardson) fears he will soon transform into a Bed sitting room is a wonderfully surreal and extreme example of British nebbishness, hypochondria and general worry of things no matter how unlikely they are. He does indeed turn into a bed sitting room and soon the other characters worry similar deformities may start effecting them. Hypocrisy, bureaucracy and absurd conformity soon lead to other transformations, Penelope's mother is convinced she is dead (when she is not) and turns into a wardrobe upon receipt of a death certificate and her father turns into a parrot out of the worry this causes and is duly eaten due to the starvation of others. The rest of the cast includes some of British comedy’s finest, including Spike Milligan himself, Harry Secombe, Marty Feldman, Roy Kinnear, Michael Hordern, Jimmy Edwards, Ronald Fraser, Frank Thornton and dandy Nichols. It's somewhere between Monty Python and Alejandro Jodorowsky but really, you can't compare it to anything else. Originally written as a stage play, director Richard Lester really does give it the full epic workout it needed for it to reach its full potential. It's a stunning film, criminally overlooked but hardly surprising given its very limited release. The classic no one ever talks about and a work of utter genius.