majesticmeteor I seen this dilly on a St Louis cable station back in probably 1982. Just surfed upon it maybe 1/2 hour into it. And there I see frigging Ringo Starr, and I'm like what's THIS!?! It's wild! For Ringo just wanders around and benignly witnesses all these outrageous things and acts that Peter Sellers is bribing people to do.I remember laughing like crazy, and this was before my days of drinking, so it must've been funny, hey? Some of you might remember Ringo's cut on the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" album, where he's warbling about "They're gonna make a big star out of me, and all I have to do is act naturally." Well, this is surely what Ringo was singing about, and indeed he just walks around as if he's an autistic dog on a leash. You will laugh your asses off at Ringo's deadpan indifference, it's as if Ringo is just marking time and patiently putting off the inevitable "Is my bit through yet... can I have me money?" I am currently happy to be downloading the torrent for this free on-line here > (Screw-it! IMDb wouldn't allow the link.)WARNING: You may indeed laugh so hard than you need a sick bag.Sincerely, Chauncey "Sonney" Earlington, III

JRogers714 This film is some piece of work I will give it that. Seldom have I seen such a bizare movie. Somewhere I read that Vincent Price was supposed to make a cameo in this film. But unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your opinion on Vincent Price as well as The Magic Christian)he was unable. This was supposedly because filming on The Witchfinder General (or The Concoring Worm)went over schedule. So Price was unable to make a cameo appearance like Christopher Lee, Laurence Harvey and Yul Brynner. Has anyone else heard this story? And if you have heard it, where? I cannot find where I read that story. And I cannot recall where I read it. I don't think it was in the book by his daughter though. Thoughts?

fedor8 Maltin the Leonard calls this pathetically pretentious comedy "fiendishly funny", which is in itself the best confirmation and most dire warning one can hope to get that a movie sucks. When Leonard gives a film his unholy blessing, then that sort of becomes "a seal of disapproval". If he says it's black then it must be white: that nerdy critic is the perfect anti-litmus test.Based on a novel by Marxist Terry Southern (who gave us lovely cinematic garbage such as "Easy Rider", "Barbarella", and Kubrick's vastly overrated and unfunny "Dr.Strangelove"), this absurdist experimental comedy makes the rather trite point that people are bribable, greedy, obsessed with money, la-di-da... What an amazing discovery Terry had made there: "Hey, I just figured out that people lust after money! I must write a novel in which I can hammer that point home, over and over, through a series of oh-so symbolic vignettes!" Money rules the world! Eureka! What a shock...You gotta love it when a hypocritical Western Marxist, of all people, drones on about the supposed evils of Capitalism and money. What I'D like to know is how much money Southern earned from his TMC book and movie profits, and to which charities he gave all his money away to, the generous and ungreedy Leninist that he is, totally and utterly incorruptible and uninterested in money, the hippie idealist that he surely must have been... Oh, but I forgot: the movie flopped, which means it made no money. How ironic. What sweet poetic justice. Apparently, the audiences made the strange error of expecting a movie billed as a comedy to be funny. How weird of them; don't they know that comedies are all supposed to be unfunny, dumb satires? A very rich man (Sellers) decides to adopt Ringo "The Lucky Beatle" Starr, and no reason is given. They then proceed to harass everyone in sight, but mostly rich people, but again no explanation is given. Sellers has two sisters, but their inclusion is pointless: they serve no purpose in the story at all. The movie is like a bunch of badly strung-together sketches that are almost never funny. The exceptions are the John Cleese scene and the mildly amusing Spike Milligan scene. The rest is a mixture of confusing, chaotic, weird-for-the-sake-of-it drudgery that just screams SIXTIES (in the negative sense). Watching Yul Brunner in drag as he caresses Polanski's nose and sings for minutes (which seemed like hours) is the absolute low-point in this crap-fest. In the meantime, most of the cast mumble half the time, making it difficult to understand half the bull...Even the music is garbage. Paul McCartney donated one of his "throwaway songs" to the movie. Sort of like: "You can have this one. I wouldn't even put it on a C-side - if there were such a thing - but it should do for your movie." "Come & Get It" is played AD NAUSEAM throughout TMC, but the vile repetitiousness of the movie's same-subject skits (greed, greed, greed...) blends in well with the annoying song.The movie's finale includes celebratory images of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, i.e. two mass murderers - and I, for one, believe that being greedy for cash is a comparably tiny sin when put in contrast to GENOCIDE. There is nothing quite as touching as the humanism of a Left-wing extremist. They so care about the proletariat and humankind... Sniffle. There is also a "Crush Capitalism" banner being waved in that appallingly chaotic, idiotic (and other "tic"s) finale. I do so regret that Mr. Terry Holier-Than-Thou Uninterested-In-Materialistic-Possessions Southern isn't alive today so that I could ask His Red Deity why he let CAPITALIST companies and corporations distribute his ineptly written novels and films, if he is such a back-to-basics back-to-the-cave Communist... The general rule with "humanists" is this: the more a "humanitarian" is known for his "selfless self-sacrificing work", the bigger his villas and the faster his private jets are. (At this point I would like to say "hi" to Bono, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Steven Spielberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Lady Di. May you all rot in Heaven, for ye are all so so utterly unselfish and wonderful.) TMC ends with Peter Sellers saying: "There must be a better way." How utterly poignant. Yes, Southern's idea of a better way is going back to nature, which is so veeeery cleverly symbolized by Sellers and Starr taking their sleeping bags into a London park. Southern was an anti-intellectual moron, hence his pitiful and arrogant attempts to "enlighten" us - the ready-to-be-brainwashed proletariat viewers - about this "Red New Way" deserves the biggest laugh. Meanwhile, while that movie was being released into UK and US cinemas, thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians were being killed in Mao's Happy China... Where are the 60s movies crying out for political change THERE?

bkoganbing One day the fabulously wealthy Sir Guy Grand who is Peter Sellers with a much larger nose finds a young orphan kid in a park. On the spur of the moment he adopts young Ringo Starr, probably because Ringo has a well known honker in real life and Sellers sees something of himself in Ringo.The idea is that Sellers has to have someone not just to leave his money to, but someone to impart his accumulated wisdom of the years which is boiled up into one single thought; that EVERYBODY has his price. The rest of the film is a Monty Pythonesque group of skits in which Sellers tries to prove just that to Starr. They range from Laurence Harvey doing a striptease while doing Hamlet's soliloquy to a beat cop eating a parking ticket for 500 pounds. The title The Magic Christian refers to a Titanic like cruise ship that only caters to the upper crust. Sellers and Starr integrate that ship's maiden voyage in a most interesting fashion.That the film is like Monty Python is no accident with Graham Chapman and John Cleese doing the writing. Ringo's former Beatle companero, Paul McCartney wrote The Magic Christian theme, Come and Get It which sums up the philosophy of the film.After almost 40 years, The Magic Christian is acidly funny, but a still unsettling.