After The Fox (U.)
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1966.
Starring Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Victor Mature, Maria Grazia Buccella, Martin Balsam and Akim Tamiroff. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI on September 21st. 103 mins.
A hotchpotch of international talent; a star and director that didn't speak the same language; a star there with his new wife, a just-born daughter and frequently flying into dark rages: no doubt at some point in the production somebody remarked, One day we'll look back and all of this will seem funny. Well, it's taken over five decades but quite a lot of this 60s Sellers flop now raises laughs.
In 1966 Peter Sellers was at the peak of his international fame and was making a series of big-budget, European and Hollywood projects that veered wildly between success and failure. The odd thing is that seen today the quality of the wild successes (What's New Pussycat, The Pink Panther) and wild failures (this, Casino Royale) often seem interchangeable. After The Fox is one of those projects that seems too big to fail. Aside from the quality of the cast, it was written by Neil Simon, had a score by Burt Bacharach and was directed by De Sica, who made the defining work of Italian Neorealism Bicycle Thieves.
In this Sellers plays Italian master criminal Aldo Vanussi, who comes up with a scheme to smuggle in some stolen gold under the guise of making a film. Sellers is funny enough playing a Bilko- style schemer but his attempts at being Italian are even more superficial than his attempts at being French as Clouseau. To be fair, nobody is really convincingly Italian in this film because all the locals are dubbed. When Sellers introduces a lady to his mother she replies “Pleased to meet you,” in perfect Queen's English.
Simon's script has a few inspired moments such as the ventriloquist act in a restaurant where Sellers appears to be talking to a beautiful woman (Buccella) who speaks with the gruff voice of a gold smuggler (Tamikoff) who is sat with his back to them at the next table. Yep, doesn't sound like much written down but trust me, on-screen, it works brilliantly.
Mostly though the film's joys are peripheral: Victor Mature sends himself up adorably as an ageing screen idol obsessed with staying young and has a nice double act with Balsam as his agent. Everything looks very lavish and sunkissed and Bacharach's score is always there to provide an injection of jauntiness when things start to lapse.
Special Features.
The defining feature of a BFI release is the delightful randomness of their Extras, and After The Fox excels here. It starts straightforwardly with a 2020 zoom interview with Britt Ekland and the original trailer. Then we have the BFI's Vic Pratt discussing Sellers' reputation as a Master of Disguise. It's an interesting appraisal though I would take issue with his pronunciation of “plethora” and having it accompanied by production stills from After The Fox. While Pratt appraises key films in his career, only having visuals from this one gets pretty distracting, especially when you are hearing about the influence of Stan Laurel on his performance in Being There while looking at a photo of a scantily clad Buccella.
After that, it goes all over the place. There's a brief clip from a silent movie entitled Robbery, and an episode of an East German propaganda newsreel called DDR Magazin Nummer 11 which is included simply because it has a short extract of De Sica visiting a performance of The Three Penny Opera in East Berlin.
Maurice Denham appears in two scenes of After The Fox as the head of Interpol but that's enough to warrant a whole section on him entitled The Man with the Golden Voice, where you can see a production from the Children's Film Foundation called The Last Rhino in which Denham dubs the voice of one of the lead actors and a short public information film for tourist about how to get cheap train fares in the 60s called Go As You Please...In Britain! I think I added the exclamation mark but it definitely belongs there.
That's the thing about being the guardians of the nation's film heritage: you've got all this stuff and nobody to see it, yet it is all kind of wonderful.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1966.
Starring Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Victor Mature, Maria Grazia Buccella, Martin Balsam and Akim Tamiroff. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI on September 21st. 103 mins.
A hotchpotch of international talent; a star and director that didn't speak the same language; a star there with his new wife, a just-born daughter and frequently flying into dark rages: no doubt at some point in the production somebody remarked, One day we'll look back and all of this will seem funny. Well, it's taken over five decades but quite a lot of this 60s Sellers flop now raises laughs.
In 1966 Peter Sellers was at the peak of his international fame and was making a series of big-budget, European and Hollywood projects that veered wildly between success and failure. The odd thing is that seen today the quality of the wild successes (What's New Pussycat, The Pink Panther) and wild failures (this, Casino Royale) often seem interchangeable. After The Fox is one of those projects that seems too big to fail. Aside from the quality of the cast, it was written by Neil Simon, had a score by Burt Bacharach and was directed by De Sica, who made the defining work of Italian Neorealism Bicycle Thieves.
In this Sellers plays Italian master criminal Aldo Vanussi, who comes up with a scheme to smuggle in some stolen gold under the guise of making a film. Sellers is funny enough playing a Bilko- style schemer but his attempts at being Italian are even more superficial than his attempts at being French as Clouseau. To be fair, nobody is really convincingly Italian in this film because all the locals are dubbed. When Sellers introduces a lady to his mother she replies “Pleased to meet you,” in perfect Queen's English.
Simon's script has a few inspired moments such as the ventriloquist act in a restaurant where Sellers appears to be talking to a beautiful woman (Buccella) who speaks with the gruff voice of a gold smuggler (Tamikoff) who is sat with his back to them at the next table. Yep, doesn't sound like much written down but trust me, on-screen, it works brilliantly.
Mostly though the film's joys are peripheral: Victor Mature sends himself up adorably as an ageing screen idol obsessed with staying young and has a nice double act with Balsam as his agent. Everything looks very lavish and sunkissed and Bacharach's score is always there to provide an injection of jauntiness when things start to lapse.
Special Features.
The defining feature of a BFI release is the delightful randomness of their Extras, and After The Fox excels here. It starts straightforwardly with a 2020 zoom interview with Britt Ekland and the original trailer. Then we have the BFI's Vic Pratt discussing Sellers' reputation as a Master of Disguise. It's an interesting appraisal though I would take issue with his pronunciation of “plethora” and having it accompanied by production stills from After The Fox. While Pratt appraises key films in his career, only having visuals from this one gets pretty distracting, especially when you are hearing about the influence of Stan Laurel on his performance in Being There while looking at a photo of a scantily clad Buccella.
After that, it goes all over the place. There's a brief clip from a silent movie entitled Robbery, and an episode of an East German propaganda newsreel called DDR Magazin Nummer 11 which is included simply because it has a short extract of De Sica visiting a performance of The Three Penny Opera in East Berlin.
Maurice Denham appears in two scenes of After The Fox as the head of Interpol but that's enough to warrant a whole section on him entitled The Man with the Golden Voice, where you can see a production from the Children's Film Foundation called The Last Rhino in which Denham dubs the voice of one of the lead actors and a short public information film for tourist about how to get cheap train fares in the 60s called Go As You Please...In Britain! I think I added the exclamation mark but it definitely belongs there.
That's the thing about being the guardians of the nation's film heritage: you've got all this stuff and nobody to see it, yet it is all kind of wonderful.
