Heavens Above! 1963 Based on an idea by Malcolm Muggeridge, screenplay by Frank Harvey and John Boulting, produced and directed by John Boulting and Roy Boulting. A British satire that pokes fun at the church and charity.
Peter Sellers is Reverend Smallwood, a prison chaplain who's reassigned to the small town of Orbiston Parva. There's hardly anyone coming to his new church. He tries to recruit the locals but they've got plenty of excuses for not attending regularly. He hires a black dustman as his churchwarden and not many parishioners are liking that. There's a lot of racism in the Christian community. Hmm.
The Despard family are the local rich landholders, they own a factory that hires a lot of citizens. The Despard's want to expand the factory, they need the parcel of land next to their factory but some squatters are living there. It's fairly easy to get the huge extended Smith family tossed out. Rather than see the family split up between various council houses the reverend invites the family into his huge vicarage. That upsets a lot of people. The Smiths aren't upstanding citizens, they're on the dole and totally fine with producing children for the stipend the government hands out. They add to their income with a side of larceny. They take up a place in the Reverend's house and play along to get the free room and board. Small Faces singer Steve Marriott plays one of the Smith sons.
When Lady Despard offers the church some free food for the poor the Smiths steal as much as they can and sell it on for cash to line their pocket. Lady Despard hands out so much free food the local merchants are effected by the loss of sales. Things get worse when the free food scheme gets shut off by Lady Despard's son. The town turns against the Reverend. The church hierarchy reassigns the reverend to the governments space operations base on Ultima Thule. They make the reverend the new Bishop of Outer Space. There's a nice goofy ending.
I enjoyed the rather harsh commentary on the lack of christian values among the local Christians. Somethings don't change much, we have the same lack of values in modern day USA.It's the sort of movie I'd want to watch again someday. The Boulting Brothers wrote, directed and produced I'm All Right Jack the following year. I think that was better but only slightly.
There's a great bunch of actors in Heaven's Above!: Cecil Parker, Isabel Jeans, Ian Carmichael, Brock Peters, Eric Sykes, Irene Handl, Miles Malleson, Eric Barker, William Hartnell, Roy Kinnear, Joan Hickson, Kenneth Griffith, Mark Eden and John Comer.
There's a new Blu-ray coming out 4-15-25 from Kino Lorber. I have a nice copy already and didn't think I would need to upgrade. The only extra is a commentary by British film and TV historian and author Robert Ross and his wife Gemma. I find him a bit wishy-washy when it comes to looking at some material.
Comments