begob The heirs of two feuding elderly brothers who are the remaining beneficiaries of a Tontine lottery struggle to make sure they're on the side of the last man standing.This opens on a promising scene, where the schoolboys who stand to benefit from the lottery are lectured to by a Dickensian master, but then moves through a montage of untimely deaths that will tell you whether this movie is for you. I found the montage lame and underdeveloped, and nothing that followed improved the experience.Judging by other reviews it's clear comedy is a subjective experience, but it's hard not to see how poorly scripted this story is, how hard the actors struggle to give life to the material, and how many jokes were left on the table.The cast is wonderful, but I did feel sorry for them - especially Caine - having to deliver some really poor lines. Music is whimsical. Nothing else to report. Grrr.Overall: Disappointment verging on resentment.

zardoz-13 "Stepford Wives" director Bryan Forbes' "The Wrong Box," adapted by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne, qualifies as a supremely silly Victorian comedy of errors about an unusual lottery. Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Mills, Ralph Richardson, and Peter Sellers, as well as a host of other familiar English character actors grace this amusing bit of nonsense. Rare is the film that can teach us new words, but "The Wrong Box" does. Specifically, we learn at the outset about the word tontine, and tontine means a lottery. A group of twenty relatives has contributed one-thousand pounds individually to a family lottery, but only the last surviving member of the family will inherit this fortune which has risen to the sum of a hundred-thousand pounds. After an opening scene when a cantankerous judge announces the tontine and its process, "The Wrong Box" presents a number of vignettes of people dying under humorous and not so humorous circumstances, until only two men remain. Masterman Finsbury (John Mills) and Joseph Finsbury (Ralph Richardson) are in their seventies. Masterman wants his clueless son Michael Finsbury (Michael Caine of "Play Dirty") to obtain the fortune so that he won't be crushed under an avalanche of bills. Michael is training to be a doctor. Masterman is a scheming, conniving imbecile, while his brother Joseph is a pedantic, equally oblivious man with has little concern for the tontine. That is not true of Joseph's two scheming sons Morris (Peter Cook) and John (Dudley Moore) who are just as treacherous as Masterman. At the same time, Michael has fallen hopelessly in love with his cousin Julia. Peter Sellers steals the show as a physician gone to seed. Wilfrid Lawson is a hoot as Masterman's braying butler Peacock. This featherweight fluff is entertaining from fade-in to fade-out.The plot goes in absurd circles as each struggles to outsmart the other. The major complication that occurs and is referenced in the title is head-on train wreck. Morris and John are taking Joseph to London when the train on which they are riding collides with another train, and Joseph is separated from his sons. At one point during the train ride, Joseph sneaks away from his sons to indulge in his nicotine habit and joins another man in a carriage. Morris and John track Joseph down to the new carriage, but they don't do anything initially until John spots Joseph scrambling along the aisle. As it turns out, Joseph forgot his deerstalker's cap and long coat and left in the compartment while he nicked out to smoke. Meantime, the other occupant, a fugitive from justice known as "Bournemouth Strangler" (Tutte Lemkow of "Red Sonja") appropriates Joseph's hat and coat. During the imaginatively stage train wreck, the Strangler dies, and Morris and John discover his body. Their cursory inspection fails to take in the fact that it is not their father but the fugitive. Nevertheless, the frantic brothers decide to bury their father in the forest to keep anybody from learning about his demise. Furthermore, they set out to find a doctor who can furnish them with a death certificate that they can post-date in the event that Masterman dies. Meantime, Joseph visits Masterman, and Masterman tries futilely to kill his brother. Morris and John ship the strangler's body in a box, but they send it to the wrong address. Hilarity ensures! Forbes' black comedy resembles Stevenson's book in several instances. First, it maintains that premise about the tontine and the feud between the two Finsbury brothers and the antics of their relatives in trying to win the money. The book contained a train wreck and so does the film, but Stevenson was not content with the initial characters and added several others. For example, Julia and Michael do not become romantically engaged. Michael is a lawyer instead of a doctor who is learning to cut up people. Mind you, the movie qualifies as far funnier than the novel and its structure is easier to follow. The performances are good, but Ralph Richardson steals the show every time that he shows up and launches into a lecture about some obscure thing or another before he wears out his welcome with whoever has the misfortune to prompt him onto one of his pretentious lectures. Actually, I think that Stevenson would have enjoyed this cinematic adaptation of his work. Fans of the composer John Barry will appreciate his serene orchestral score.

mark.waltz This delicious black comedy starts off with some delightfully funny views of bizarre deaths, all men who were part of an "tontine" (insurance bequest) where only the last surviving will receive any cash. Decades go by (as this was given to each of them when they were young boys) and now only two of the men, ironically brothers, survive. With one (John Mills) on his deathbed, the other (Ralph Richardson), a delightfully senile old codger, is out of town, chewing the ear off of anyone he can revel with his plethora of useless knowledge. Mill's son (Michael Caine) is a decent chap, a promising doctor, while Redgrave's wards, nephews Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, come up with a scheme to get their hands on the money when Richardson goes missing. Visiting his uncle (whom he hasn't seen in years), Caine falls in love with his cousin (Nanette Newman), while Cook and Moore try to pass off another corpse as their uncle, assuming that Mills has already croaked. This leads to a hysterical chase at the end, sort of a British early 1900's version of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", with a bit of Monty Python and Benny Hill thrown in.You'll delight at the ensemble cast here, which also includes Peter Sellers in one of his zanier roles as the quack doctor utilized to sign a death certificate for Redgrave, who gets the best lines in the film and is extremely funny. A delightful chase of horse-drawn funeral home carriages includes a ride through a band playing ragtime which has to change to somber funeral music every time these carriages go through the park they are playing in. There's also a Boston Strangler like serial killer and a senile butler, so those who like their comedy's eccentric will enjoy this one to the fullest.

Michael Neumann A madcap cross-country chase for an inherited fortune by two elderly brothers and their many offspring ought to be funnier than this, especially with so many familiar names and faces along for the ride. Viewers with a weakness for the mugging style of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore might be entertained, but others may find themselves longing for more scenes with trivia freak Ralph Richardson, and a bigger part for Peter Sellers, seen all-too briefly as a dotty MD with a fondness for cats. Elsewhere the various routine plot complications and misunderstandings are (at best) fitfully amusing, but the presentation is rarely more than just plain silly, with coy title cards ("Disaster Ensues!") providing a labored chuckle along the way. The script was based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, which would explain the otherwise gratuitous Victorian setting and trappings.