{"id":721,"date":"2009-09-01T05:00:33","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T04:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=721"},"modified":"2009-08-31T16:48:25","modified_gmt":"2009-08-31T15:48:25","slug":"penny-points-to-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2009\/09\/01\/penny-points-to-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"PENNY POINTS TO PARADISE"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"Penny<\/a><\/p>\n

\nFormat:<\/B> DVD and Blu-ray

\nRelease date:<\/B> 3 August 2009

\nDistributor:<\/B> BFI

\nDirector:<\/B> Tony Young

\nWriter:<\/B> John Ormonde

\nCast:<\/B> Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers

\nUK 1951

\n68 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\nDuring an interview in the 1970s, Peter Sellers was asked to recall his screen debut. His verdict – perhaps unsurprisingly for such a famously self-critical character - was pretty damning: Penny Points to Paradise<\/i>, he said, was ‘a terrifyingly<\/i> bad film’. Viewed at a distance of 58 years since its release, it’s hard to disagree too wildly with Sellers’s own opinion. As a very low-budget, very knockabout farce made in a hurry by a group of untested newcomers, at best it’s an uneven affair. Still, there’s more than enough rough vitality here to compensate for the film’s manifest shortcomings. <\/p>\n

\nMarking the first cinema outing for three quarters of the team who would very shortly afterwards find fame as The Goons, Penny Points to Paradise<\/i> follows gormless pools winner Harry Secombe and his friend Spike Milligan as they attempt to avoid gold-digging girls and thieving forgers on holiday in an extremely gloomy-looking post-war Brighton. Paying homage to silent comedies, Abbott and Costello and some ancient music hall humour (‘did you know that a man dies once every six months from flu?’ ‘how boring for him’), at best the film is enthusiastically played - Secombe’s lengthy mime of a surgeon performing a heart operation is particularly memorable - but its main point of interest lies in seeing the young Goons – Milligan was the oldest at 33 - finding their feet despite the very obviously cheap and rushed circumstances surrounding the picture’s creation. <\/p>\n

\nIndeed, Penny Points to Paradise<\/i> was made so quickly that Arthur Dent’s Adelphi Films encouraged the team to fill a spare week in Brighton improvising the skits that ended up as the 30-minute short Let’s Go Crazy<\/i>. Also included on this DVD, Let’s Go Crazy<\/i> sees Sellers take on six different parts (including a passable Groucho Marx impersonation) with evident relish in a manner that prefigures both the multiple roles of 1959’s The Mouse that Roared<\/i> and, more famously, Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove<\/i>, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. Interspersed with some local Brighton end-of the-pier-type variety turns, the result is a vivid portrait of the era of British seaside entertainment also captured in Tony Hancock’s underrated The Punch and Judy Man<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Both films flopped when released, although in 1960 enterprising distributors in Australia attempted to cash in on Sellers’s new fame by cutting segments from Penny Points to Paradise<\/i> and replacing them with scenes from Let’s Go Crazy<\/i> to increase the comedian’s screen time. Painstaking work was necessary on the part of the BFI to restore both films to their original form - and while neither exactly qualifies as art, as an artefact documenting a period in British history this new DVD is of undeniable importance.<\/p>\n

Pat Long <\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

This release launches the BFI’s new strand The Adelphi Collection. <\/I><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marking the first cinema outing for three quarters of the team who would very shortly afterwards find fame as The Goons, Penny Points to Paradise<\/i> follows gormless pools winner Harry Secombe and his friend Spike Milligan in an extremely gloomy-looking post-war Brighton.
\nReview by Pat Long <\/B><\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvds-and-blu-rays"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-bD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4115,"url":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/03\/08\/the-rats-are-coming-the-werewolves-are-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":721,"position":0},"title":"The Rats Are Coming! 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