I tried to watch this movie about 15 years ago, when I found it too limp to continue. Renting it again to see if I've matured or the movie sucks: it turns out that the movie is just awful. There is no getting around a film whose director thinks the single place humor can originate is in lines recited dutifully from a half-hearted script, and maybe Peter Sellers in drag. Director Jack Arnold has no feel, ear, or sense of timing for comedy. I can only imagine he's never told a joke, and made this chronically unfunny movie for people who don't understand how jokes work. The Columbia logo gag at the beginning, which people are chuckling about, is just the dud joke that sets the stage for all the rest. It caught my attention but where's the laugh? Only Abbott and Costello movies have historically been this corny.
The movie's basic premise, that it's economically smarter to lose a war with the U.S. than to win, is quite fine and very savvy. But it would have been terrific if the first joke wasn't the only successful one. The rest of the movie just sits there getting lazier, dumber and simpier, until it feels like you're watching a children's movie. When you see a bomb around the twenty minute mark, obviously shaped for a football gag, this movie thinks it funny to get to the football gag an hour later. That's just sad. Ditto for lazy film conventions that are unfortunately still with us: There HAS to be a girl (Jean Seberg), and let's see, it's easiest if she's the daughter of a bomb scientist. And she has to protest the invasion for 9 minutes before "falling in love" with the lead invader (Peter Sellers). Oof... it hurts to even describe this movie. It's like they handed the writing of the script to an intern who had 40 minutes before lunch to bang this out. Try to imagine what portions of the classic Lady Killers (Ealing/Sellers) you'd be willing to toss out to make room for a love interest and lots of exposition.
Actors are continually paraded in front of blue screen footage to create rotten, low-budget scenes; that is, when they're not arranged awkwardly in uncomfortable claustrophobic two-shots so that nothing expensive, amusing or visual might enter the frame. It also has a crappy cut-rate "Saul Bass" credit sequence. That the movie is still available when others from 1959 aren't, strikes me as some sort of crime. I can only attribute this to the strange double-bill of Sellers & Seberg, and the viewer tendency to want to say something nice after seeing any movie; which in turn obligates them to invent merits this movie doesn't have. For the record I love many British comedies, and other Peter Sellers movies.
On the plus side, the general concept would likely produce a pretty funny remake (with a new script not written by a dork). A new version could not possibly be worse than this.
The movie's basic premise, that it's economically smarter to lose a war with the U.S. than to win, is quite fine and very savvy. But it would have been terrific if the first joke wasn't the only successful one. The rest of the movie just sits there getting lazier, dumber and simpier, until it feels like you're watching a children's movie. When you see a bomb around the twenty minute mark, obviously shaped for a football gag, this movie thinks it funny to get to the football gag an hour later. That's just sad. Ditto for lazy film conventions that are unfortunately still with us: There HAS to be a girl (Jean Seberg), and let's see, it's easiest if she's the daughter of a bomb scientist. And she has to protest the invasion for 9 minutes before "falling in love" with the lead invader (Peter Sellers). Oof... it hurts to even describe this movie. It's like they handed the writing of the script to an intern who had 40 minutes before lunch to bang this out. Try to imagine what portions of the classic Lady Killers (Ealing/Sellers) you'd be willing to toss out to make room for a love interest and lots of exposition.
Actors are continually paraded in front of blue screen footage to create rotten, low-budget scenes; that is, when they're not arranged awkwardly in uncomfortable claustrophobic two-shots so that nothing expensive, amusing or visual might enter the frame. It also has a crappy cut-rate "Saul Bass" credit sequence. That the movie is still available when others from 1959 aren't, strikes me as some sort of crime. I can only attribute this to the strange double-bill of Sellers & Seberg, and the viewer tendency to want to say something nice after seeing any movie; which in turn obligates them to invent merits this movie doesn't have. For the record I love many British comedies, and other Peter Sellers movies.
On the plus side, the general concept would likely produce a pretty funny remake (with a new script not written by a dork). A new version could not possibly be worse than this.