By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Brothers join the army.
Sir Hector Geste (Trevor Howard) decides to adopt a son to be his rightful heir and carry on the family name. He goes to an orphanage where he spots Beau (Michael York) a dashing young boy who shows immense prowess. Hector immediately decides he wants him, but it comes with the caveat that he must also take on Beau’s twin bother Digby (Marty Feldman) who’s not nearly as handsome, or brave. After bringing both boys home Hector then gets married to Flavia (Ann-Margret) a much younger woman who’s more in-love with the Blue Sapphire diamond that’s in Hector’s possession than Hector himself. In order to keep Flavia from absconding with it Beau decides to take it out of the family home and bringing it along with him to Africa where he joins the French Foreign Legion. Digby eventually joins and they go on to have many adventures, but Flavia catches up with them determined to get the diamond using any means necessary.
The film is based on the 1924 novel of the same name written by P.C. Wren that had already been made into a movie three other times: in 1926 starring Ronald Coleman, 1939 starring Gary Cooper, and finally in 1966 starring Guy Stockwell. In 1976 when Marty Feldman signed a 5-picture deal with Universal to write, direct, and star in any film project he choose he decided to do a parody on a film he had seen growing up. He mistakenly thought it was Beau Geste, but came to realize once he watched the movie that it was really The Four Feathers that had a similar storyline and came out around the same time. He eventually went with doing this version since he felt ‘The Last Remake of the Four Feathers’ didn’t sound right.
The production, which was filmed in both Ireland and Spain, was met with many obstacles, including having Feldman getting sick during the shoot and putting the production on-hold for many weeks. It eventually went over budget and over schedule and the studio was not happy with Feldman’s final cut and determined to re-edit it while giving Feldman a 2-week vacation under the guise of letting him rest and recuperate. When Feldman returned and found out what the studio had done he became irate, so the studio heads decided to make him a deal; they would show both versions to a test audiences and which ever one rated better would be the one that would be released. Feldman agreed to this and to the studios shock Marty’s cut got much higher ratings, but the studio then went back on their word and released their version instead, which did not fare well with either the critics, or public. To this day Marty’s version has never been seen, but by only a few people even though those that have viewed say it’s much funnier and efforts have been made to find it and give it a proper Blu-ray issue though this has never come to fruition as of yet.
As for this version it’s okay, but it starts out better than it ends. There’s some funny gags here and there, but the humor tends to be quite broad and many of the jokes fall flat especially after the midway point. The best moment comes when Feldman splices his character into the 1939 film version and we see his character speaking to Gary Cooper and they even share a scene together, which I found to be quite innovative for the time period. Everything else though is hit-or-miss and suffers from not enough people being familiar with the source novel and thus the in-jokes involving the story will most likely go over most viewer’s heads it also makes many changes from the original plot with the biggest one being that in this movie there’s only 2-brothers, but in the book there was 3.
The array of famous faces making cameo appearances is fun for awhile though I felt Peter Ustinov camps it up too much as the evil General Markov and the part would’ve been better served had it been played by Roy Kinnear who instead gets wasted as Markov’s assistant. Howard is quite amusing as the elderly father and I wished he was in it more, but ultimately his character gets confined to his bed for the second and third act. Ann-Margret offers some sexiness, but really has nothing to say or do that’s funny until the very end when she tries to challenge a guy to a fist-fight, which should’ve been played-out more. Terry-Thomas gets some work before his Parkinson’s condition, which is very obvious here with his trembling left hand, became so severe that it forced him out of acting and into a retirement home not more than a year after this was filmed.
Feldman himself is quite good, but I felt he needed to be seen more, which is the biggest problem with the movie in that it’s neither character nor plot driven. Too much nuttiness and wackiness for its own good. If the comedy had been better disciplined and a smaller cast it would’ve worked better, but the barrage of constant craziness all in the name humor eventually gets overblown.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: July 15, 1977
Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Marty Feldman
Studio: Universal
Available: DVD-R (Universal Vault Series), Blu-ray
Scopophilia 