The Bed Sitting Room

Losey predicted the situation (These Are the Damned), Richard Lester brings Ionesco to bear upon Beckett for the aftermath. A very brisk nuclear war, "two minutes, 28 seconds," survivors wander the vast rubbish that was once Merrie Olde England. (The recap is by way of Frank Thornton in half-shredded tuxedo and empty TV frame, "I am the BBC, as you can see.") Rituals and manners are all that's left of the illusion of normalcy, the lass (Rita Tushingham) rides the dilapidated subway with Dad (Arthur Lowe) and Mum (Mona Washbourne) and takes the escalator into a pit. The dithering Lord (Ralph Richardson) carries on the Blimp tradition with a twist, inexorably he morphs into a bed sitting room, floral wallpaper and all. "Ah, that's probably atomic mutation. There's a lot of it about." Spike Milligan's nightmare revue shaped by Lester into a companion piece to How I Won the War, the stiff upper lip turned radioactive. The Captain (Michael Hordern) wears a "Defeat of England" medal, lusts after the monstrously pregnant heroine, marries her in a ceremony with starter's pistol next to conjugal mattress. Ruddy skies and tilted landscapes, bomb detectors on top hats and clown noses on gas masks. "Keep moving," order the two policemen (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore) in an auto carcass dangling from a balloon, elsewhere Marty Feldman in nurse drag ponders the root of the issue: "We should all ask ourselves, is it really necessary for people to leave the womb nowadays? That's when most of the trouble seems to start in this wicked world." Shards of Dr. Strangelove, Weekend, Rosemary's Baby and others float by on the way to the sarcastic happy ending, a lunar wasteland made spuriously verdant for a hollowed-out national anthem. The rowdy Yank variant (A Boy and His Dog) is on the horizon. Cinematography by David Watkin. With Harry Secombe, Jimmy Edwards, Roy Kinnear, Ronald Fraser, Richard Warwick, Jack Shepherd, Henry Woolf, and Bill Wallis.