moonspinner55 Mild satire on corporate greed versus small town mores and morals has Peter Sellers nicely cast as a prison cleric who becomes the divine pawn in a clerical error: he is summoned to take over a neighborhood parish by mistake. This new vicar's 'radical' ideas in beginning a Good Will policy seem destructive to the Christian hypocrites in the slowly-progressing town...and once his actions take a toll on Big Business, the immoral majority turns against him. Sellers worked this small (but no less ambitious) British comedy into his schedule sometime between "Lolita" and "Dr. Strangelove"; it isn't the monumental comic performance one might expect, however the then-rising star is nevertheless congenial and appealing (albeit in a low key). Producer-director sibling team John and Roy Boulting have some light fun skewering the rich and soulless, but perhaps their final act takes the film's title too literally! ** from ****

Bill Slocum "Heavens Above!" is a barbed satire that cuts both ways, ridiculing organized religion for its complacence and its unrealistic aspirations and humanism regarding the perfectibility of man, especially the working-class kind. Though far from the funniest Peter Sellers comedy, it certainly is worthy in its own unique way.Sellers plays Rev. John Smallwood, an Anglican prison chaplain accidentally assigned to the affluent community of Orbiston Parva. A sincere man of faith, Smallwood tries to drum up a little church fervor from his largely lapsed congregation, preaching the Gospel as Living Word rather than as aural wallpaper for weddings and funerals. Yet every earnest effort only stokes greater amounts of selfishness, even brutality."There aren't enough real Christians about to feed a decent lion," Smallwood laments.At the same time, he must deal with the miserable quality of the clergy around him, like his own bosses in the Church of England hierarchy who strain only to keep their rich donor base happy and generous or the odd Pentecostal preacher who offers up damnation-filled sermons: "It's only the fires of hell that keep the churches warm.""Heavens Above!" is a comedy of despair. If there is a God, it seems to say, He has better sense than to waste His time with blighted human riffraff like the Smiths, an itinerant family who leeches off Smallwood while feigning piety. Sellers is terrific, though in a largely straight performance, pulling us in with his naive gentility to the point where a lot of the gags turn painful when he is the butt of humor. The closest Sellers gets to laugh-getting - other than when Smallwood unknowingly snacks from a bowl of dog treats - is the opening, where he provides an uncredited voice-over as an American narrator introducing us to the uninspiring sight of Orbiston Parva. However much he stumbles and is tripped up, Smallwood is simply too nice a character to laugh at.For all the apparent agnosticism in "Heavens Above", there's a strain of true religious belief in Smallwood's situation. Perhaps it's because the idea came from Malcolm Muggeridge, the last faith-friendly satirist England has produced. Smallwood is presented as a man of good works, but also doctrinal zeal. His scorn for the local pep-pill product "Tranquilax", it seems, is largely due to its proclaiming itself the "three-in-one restorative". For him, the only 3-in-1 restorative is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost."Heavens Above!" is also interesting for the fact it catches Sellers just on the cusp of becoming an international star, still relatively round in body, making one of his last films aimed exclusively at his home British market. Like the later "Hoffman" and "Being There", this shows just how well Sellers could carry a film without resorting to silly accents or slapstick.The film's directors, John and Roy Boulting, do well to set Sellers up with an ace supporting cast recognizable from other Sellers productions of the period, including George Woodbridge and Cecil Parker as a pair of agreeably venal curates; Irene Handl and Eric Sykes as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, heads of a scruffy, thieving clan; and Kenneth Griffith as the fire-and-brimstone preacher.If only they cut that silly ending! There's other issues, too, like a penchant for slow camera zooms without reason, and the way the movie piles on Smallwood at the expense of comedy, but the out-of-left-field ending stings worst, an attempt at giving the film a falsely up note. Alas, when you really think about it, it only leaves Smallwood worse off than ever.But you do care about the guy, a sign someone was doing something right. Obviously that includes Peter Sellers. With more laughs and a tighter ending, "Heavens Above!" would have ranked among his greatest films. As it is, it's pretty good all the same, food for thought in our secular times.

ShootingShark Owing to a clerical error, John Smallwood, a prison padre and good-natured believer in goodwill to all men, is appointed vicar of the conservative village of Orbiston Parva. Soon his wild ideas about being nice to people and offering charity to the poor begin to cause both commercial and political ructions ...This is a lovely gentle satire on both the lapsed, self-serving attitude of middle England towards Christianity and the tenuous position of the torporific Church in the face of consumer culture. Sellers is excellent as Smallwood, whose simple faith in the merits of Christ's teachings - self-sacrifice, forgiveness, penitence - are at odds with a community which is too busy to go to Sunday Service, likes to evict layabouts and wants to build factories to attract business. Boulting and Frank Harvey's script is excellent, making its points subtly and effectively through character, but also with some witty gags (a train guard addresses a compartment full of clerics, saying, "Last supper, gentlemen."). The large cast all acquit themselves well, especially Sykes and Handl as a pair of spongers with an indeterminate number of children, Peters as a dustman-turned-church-warden, Miles as a quietly ruthless butler, and a very young Kinnear as an ex-convict. This is the film for those people who consider themselves religious and think the Church is a wonderful institution, but don't actually feel they need to go.

veemoffa While Peter Sellers does a good job with his role as a naive minister -- and most of the supporting roles are also well-played -- the film as a whole is not especially interesting. It has a few funny moments, but is mostly yawn-inducing. Most of the characters, from low-life rogues to the stuffy gentry, are cliches that I've seen a dozen times before. What saves this film from being a total failure is a talented cast -- too bad they didn't have a better script to work with.