Was There Ever a Right Box?

A complicated inheritance scheme results in a flustered slapstick scramble for mayhem and money in 1966's The Wrong Box, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. It's been more than five years now since I read the book and I think that benefits the movie a lot. However, I think the film has its genuine assets, mostly in the form of an incredible cast.

Michael Caine stars as Michael Finsbury. Wikipedia has a quote frm Caine's autobiography:

[The film] is so British that it met with a gentle success in most places except Britain, where it was a terrible flop. I suppose this was because the film shows us exactly as the world sees us - as eccentric, charming and polite – but the British knew better that they were none of these things, and it embarrassed us.

Fortunately, I'm an American so I'm free to enjoy its Vaudevillian Britishness.

The story involves a tontine, a legal arrangement by which certain heirs of a large family are designated by the order of death of its elder members. It's more complicated than that, its complexity being a point of comedy in both the book and the movie. Michael is set up as the shy, awkward, good young Finsbury while the dastardly, scheming Finsburys are played by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook plays Morris Finsbury, whom I remember being a little more sympathetic in the book. Cook plays the role with some manic zeal, securing a death certificate for his apparently deceased uncle (Ralph Richardson) from a forlorn back-alley abortionist played by Peter Sellers. Sellers is, of course, a highlight, hardly seeming to comprehend his visitor's request. He seems the victim of some kind of mental deterioration caused by a stressful career and lives alone with scores of cats, some of which Sellers cleverly uses for gentle physical comedy.

The two elder Finsburys are played by Ralph Richardson and John Mills. Richardson's funnier and has a running gag about how he bores everyone he meets with his bottomless store of trivia.

Like a lot of ensemble comedies of the 1960s, particularly from England, it's really a lampoon of civilisation. I think Robert Louise Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne were satirising Victorian culture and the movie does this, too, but in the context, its satirical barbs reach much further. I also enjoyed the hearse chase scene.