This film is a bedtime fairy tale, with princes, wolves and preyed-upon damsels, castles and woods. Fairy tales are often designed to be instructive, or to inculcate a moral. 'Bedtime Story' is instructive - we learn how to cheat, lie, humiliate, plot, bribe, wager, impersonate, amuse; and is cheerfully amoral. Like the traditional fairy tale, it ends in marriage, which is another word for soul-destroying prison, the final trap set by a master conman.
'Story' is one of the few genuinely funny comedies from the 1960s, and I can't understand why it hasn't been acclaimed as such, or developed even a cult following. It may not be very cinematically inventive, but there are sequences here of such audacity, cruelty and gasping hilarity that it puts even the Peter Sellers bits of 'The Pink Panther' movies to shame.
Its influence, furthermore, can be seen in two of the most important films of the last five years. Like 'In the Company of Men', two men coldly wager on winning the affections of an innocent woman. Like 'The Idiots', one of the characters pretends to be disabled to 'subvert' bourgeois normality (in this case, to wring money and jewels from them). Maybe this is why comment on the film is silent, some people confusing a character as morally callous as Freddy Benson, who would impersonate the disabled for his own gain, with a general attitude of mockery towards the disabled. It is true that these scenes are very uncomfortable, which is why they are so eye-poppingly funny; maybe it IS offensive to use being disabled as character short-hand - even though it is a good metaphor for Brando's physicality being paralysed by mental grace, he still gets to walk up again.
I don't know. I loved 'Me Myself and Irene' too. Maybe I'm not a nice person. The film's air of cold bonhomie extends to its structure which operates with a mathematical precision appropriate to its German setting, not only in its three act structure (introduction of characters; working together; final wager), but in the way in introduces its characters, seperately, before putting them together, like a theorem, or a chemical experiment.
The chief joy of this film is the way it plays on their stars' very well-developed personae, both public and private; David Niven is the conman with perfect English elegance and etiquette, with suave, quick, alert movements figuring the practical clockwork in his head, whose sense of morality and decency conveniently gets competition out of the way. His performance plays most obviously on his 'Pink Panther' role, but there is a touch of Phileas Fogg in his Freudian doctor impersonation, which allows him to inflict clinically methodical cruelty, to uproarious results.
Brando, meanwhile, is a comic revelation. Like Robert De Niro, his serious, dramatic roles are always laced with a menacing, self-aware humour, but his straight comic vehicles have been humorless mugfests. He is in his element here as the kind of brash, unprincipled, cheating, thieving, blackmailing American the real Brando despises, making fun of the solemn brilliance of his best films, especially 'The Men', with that familiar Brando whine and hurt-baby-face-in-tough-guy-body look. Because this is a film about acting, about two of cinema's greatest performers, from totally different traditions, trying to outskill each other; there is genuine admiration to be seen as each watches the other do his stuff, just as each character's bluff is outbluffed by the other. And this is what gives this marvellous film its depth, the idea of acting in life, of assuming roles, of constructing identities, as a necessary defence against the stolid domesticity to which Brando is apparently condemned. The film seems to have a moral after all - better the settled married man over the aging, 'free' bachelor, which Jameson acknowledges, while mock-sadly making off to indulge that freedom.
'Story' is one of the few genuinely funny comedies from the 1960s, and I can't understand why it hasn't been acclaimed as such, or developed even a cult following. It may not be very cinematically inventive, but there are sequences here of such audacity, cruelty and gasping hilarity that it puts even the Peter Sellers bits of 'The Pink Panther' movies to shame.
Its influence, furthermore, can be seen in two of the most important films of the last five years. Like 'In the Company of Men', two men coldly wager on winning the affections of an innocent woman. Like 'The Idiots', one of the characters pretends to be disabled to 'subvert' bourgeois normality (in this case, to wring money and jewels from them). Maybe this is why comment on the film is silent, some people confusing a character as morally callous as Freddy Benson, who would impersonate the disabled for his own gain, with a general attitude of mockery towards the disabled. It is true that these scenes are very uncomfortable, which is why they are so eye-poppingly funny; maybe it IS offensive to use being disabled as character short-hand - even though it is a good metaphor for Brando's physicality being paralysed by mental grace, he still gets to walk up again.
I don't know. I loved 'Me Myself and Irene' too. Maybe I'm not a nice person. The film's air of cold bonhomie extends to its structure which operates with a mathematical precision appropriate to its German setting, not only in its three act structure (introduction of characters; working together; final wager), but in the way in introduces its characters, seperately, before putting them together, like a theorem, or a chemical experiment.
The chief joy of this film is the way it plays on their stars' very well-developed personae, both public and private; David Niven is the conman with perfect English elegance and etiquette, with suave, quick, alert movements figuring the practical clockwork in his head, whose sense of morality and decency conveniently gets competition out of the way. His performance plays most obviously on his 'Pink Panther' role, but there is a touch of Phileas Fogg in his Freudian doctor impersonation, which allows him to inflict clinically methodical cruelty, to uproarious results.
Brando, meanwhile, is a comic revelation. Like Robert De Niro, his serious, dramatic roles are always laced with a menacing, self-aware humour, but his straight comic vehicles have been humorless mugfests. He is in his element here as the kind of brash, unprincipled, cheating, thieving, blackmailing American the real Brando despises, making fun of the solemn brilliance of his best films, especially 'The Men', with that familiar Brando whine and hurt-baby-face-in-tough-guy-body look. Because this is a film about acting, about two of cinema's greatest performers, from totally different traditions, trying to outskill each other; there is genuine admiration to be seen as each watches the other do his stuff, just as each character's bluff is outbluffed by the other. And this is what gives this marvellous film its depth, the idea of acting in life, of assuming roles, of constructing identities, as a necessary defence against the stolid domesticity to which Brando is apparently condemned. The film seems to have a moral after all - better the settled married man over the aging, 'free' bachelor, which Jameson acknowledges, while mock-sadly making off to indulge that freedom.