As marvellous as the Goons often were on the radio (as we know from the audio tapes and CDs preserving those broadcasts today), they were absolutely terrible in this film. As a movie, it is simply awful. The only Goon consistently amusing throughout is the delightfully demented Spike Milligan. Peter Sellers plays an army major (who in one major scene is called Colonel, but then the Goons were never interested in continuity) and is so boring and unfunny one wants to go to sleep. He comes alive only for a brief skit where he impersonates two American army officers, a flickering moment when he is genuinely funny. The film is interrupted by singing and by dance acts performed by a group called the Twelve Toppers, who do nice synchronised thirties-style numbers. But what has all that got to do with a witless farce? Nothing. Michael Bentine goes around in a bushy black wig like Harpo Marx with heavy whiskers, being ridiculously unfunny as a dotty scientist who has lost his formula which has defence implications. Harry Secombe is dead boring, slicks back his hair a few times, and tries to be amusing, without success and without a script. This whole thing is a mess, a waste of precious celluloid, and clear proof that comedy takes a bit more effort than is shown here. The director was Maclean Rogers, who made 87 undistinguished films including three of the four Paul Temple detective films (see my reviews), including one made this same year, and such B nonsense as ASSIGNMENT REDHEAD (1956, see my review). There seems to have been an understanding in the British film industry between 1929 and 1960 that whenever a producer wanted to make something inferior he could turn to Rogers as a safe pair of hands at making a film of suffocating mediocrity. His last film was titled NOT A HOPE IN HELL (1960), which I think describes the possibility of Rogers being admired posthumously. The writers of this disappointing effort were 'Francis Charles', who never wrote anything else and was presumably a pseudonym for one of the Goons, and Jimmy Grafton, whose name is not up in lights in any Comedy Hall of Fame that I ever heard of, nor does it deserve to be. Someone should go out into the pet cemetery and dig a decent small hole for this DVD.
Review of Down Among the Z Men
