Around the year 1830, a group of families agree to organise an investment on behalf of their young sons. £1,000 is invested for each boy taking part, making a total of £20,000. The capital and all accrued interest will be paid out to the last surviving member of the group of boys. (The scheme is described as a "tontine", but under a true tontine interest is not capitalised in this way but paid out regularly to all surviving members of the scheme. It is uncertain whether investments of the type depicted here have ever existed in realise).
Fast forward to the late Victorian era. Eighteen members of the tontine have died; the only survivors are two elderly brothers, Masterman and Joseph Finsbury. They detest one another and have not spoken in may years, although they live next door to each other. They have very different personalities. Masterman is greedy and avaricious, obsessed with winning the tontine to such an extent that he makes several unsuccessful attempts to kill his brother. Joseph is an eccentric scholar, with little interest in money and unconcerned with the tontine.
The plot revolves around a complicated scheme by Joseph's nephews Morris and John to obtain the tontine money by fraud. Wrongly believing Joseph to have died in a train crash- in fact he escaped unharmed- and that Masterman is dying, they try to hush up news of Joseph's supposed "death" until Masterman has died. The plot then gets very complicated, involving mistaken identities and boxes being delivered to the wrong address. (Hence the title). Another important element is the romance between Masterman's grandson Michael and Joseph's granddaughter Julia. To avoid twentieth-century sensibilities about cousin marriages, Michael and Julia are both adopted and therefore not related by blood, although I doubt if the Victorians would have worried much about a marriage between second cousins.
The cast includes a number of leading lights of the British acting profession and comedy scene, including John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Unfortunately, whereas a talented cast may be a necessary condition for a good film, it is never a sufficient one, and "The Wrong Box" is one of a long list of movies that don't really work despite a cast-list stuffed with big names. It must be said that few of the actors here are at their best.
No actor, however talented they may be, can guarantee that every film they make will be a good one, but Caine, more than most actors, seems to have an infuriating ability to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. "The Wrong Box" was his first film after his great performance in one of his biggest hits, "Alfie", but here he just seems to be strolling though the picture without much effort. I must say that I always preferred Cook and Moore as comedians rather than as comic actors, and the attempt to recreate their "Pete'n'Dud" personas by casting them here as Morris and John never really works. (They were to be better the following year in "Bedazzled"). Probably the best here are Sellers as an eccentric doctor (although his is only a small role) and Richardson as the equally eccentric Joseph, the sort of intellectual who possesses a vast store of useless knowledge on the most arcane subjects and who will happily share it with anyone who will listen, or even with those who will not.
The storyline is over-complex and at times difficult to follow. The film has elements of both farce and black comedy, but lacks the manic logic of a good farce and, despite its subject-matter, is never really dark enough to qualify as a true black comedy. Given that his previous film had been the excellent "King Rat", director Bryan Forbes, like his leading man Caine, can be said to have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in one step. 5/10.
Fast forward to the late Victorian era. Eighteen members of the tontine have died; the only survivors are two elderly brothers, Masterman and Joseph Finsbury. They detest one another and have not spoken in may years, although they live next door to each other. They have very different personalities. Masterman is greedy and avaricious, obsessed with winning the tontine to such an extent that he makes several unsuccessful attempts to kill his brother. Joseph is an eccentric scholar, with little interest in money and unconcerned with the tontine.
The plot revolves around a complicated scheme by Joseph's nephews Morris and John to obtain the tontine money by fraud. Wrongly believing Joseph to have died in a train crash- in fact he escaped unharmed- and that Masterman is dying, they try to hush up news of Joseph's supposed "death" until Masterman has died. The plot then gets very complicated, involving mistaken identities and boxes being delivered to the wrong address. (Hence the title). Another important element is the romance between Masterman's grandson Michael and Joseph's granddaughter Julia. To avoid twentieth-century sensibilities about cousin marriages, Michael and Julia are both adopted and therefore not related by blood, although I doubt if the Victorians would have worried much about a marriage between second cousins.
The cast includes a number of leading lights of the British acting profession and comedy scene, including John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Unfortunately, whereas a talented cast may be a necessary condition for a good film, it is never a sufficient one, and "The Wrong Box" is one of a long list of movies that don't really work despite a cast-list stuffed with big names. It must be said that few of the actors here are at their best.
No actor, however talented they may be, can guarantee that every film they make will be a good one, but Caine, more than most actors, seems to have an infuriating ability to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. "The Wrong Box" was his first film after his great performance in one of his biggest hits, "Alfie", but here he just seems to be strolling though the picture without much effort. I must say that I always preferred Cook and Moore as comedians rather than as comic actors, and the attempt to recreate their "Pete'n'Dud" personas by casting them here as Morris and John never really works. (They were to be better the following year in "Bedazzled"). Probably the best here are Sellers as an eccentric doctor (although his is only a small role) and Richardson as the equally eccentric Joseph, the sort of intellectual who possesses a vast store of useless knowledge on the most arcane subjects and who will happily share it with anyone who will listen, or even with those who will not.
The storyline is over-complex and at times difficult to follow. The film has elements of both farce and black comedy, but lacks the manic logic of a good farce and, despite its subject-matter, is never really dark enough to qualify as a true black comedy. Given that his previous film had been the excellent "King Rat", director Bryan Forbes, like his leading man Caine, can be said to have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in one step. 5/10.