Officine Cinematografiche

Stasera le Officine Cinematografiche proietteranno il film capolavoro della comicità "MAGIC CHRISTIAN" di Joseph McGrath con Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Roman Polanski, Richard Attenborough (date un occhiata alla lista degli attori in fondo all’articolo!).

Sala Cinema CPA Firenze Sud – via Villamagna 27/a – 2° piano 

bus: 3, 8, 23, 31, 32, 33 

proiezione in pellicola 16mm ore 22,30 – puntuali che lo zio Jo si arrabbia!

ingresso: 2 € per coprire le spese di spedizione e noleggio delle pellicole cinematografiche

è gradito l’omaggio di un bicchiere di vetro! 

trailer:

estratti:

"Magic Christian" info (english language):

fonte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Christian_(film)

The Magic Christian is a 1969 film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel by U.S. author Terry Southern.

[edit] Overview

McGrath’s film adaptation differs considerably in content from
Southern’s novel. Relocated to London in the 1960s, it introduces an orphan whom Sir Guy Grand picks up in a park and on a whim decides to adopt. The role was written with Ringo Starr (who plays it) in mind. The movie is often remembered for its song "Come And Get It" written and produced by Paul McCartney and performed by Badfinger, a British rock band promoted by Apple Records.
The lyrics refer to Grand’s schemes of bribing people to act according
to his whims (‘If you want it, here it is, come and get it’). Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the Air is also dominant in the film’s soundtrack. British actor and dancer Lionel Blair
was responsible for the film’s choreography. A host of British and
American actors (see cast) have brief roles in the movie, many playing
against type. Episodic in character, The Magic Christian is an unrelenting and often heavy-handed satire on capitalism, greed, and human vanities. Notable are the appearances of (pre-Monty Python) John Cleese and Graham Chapman (uncredited), who had written an earlier version of the film script, of which only the scenes they appear in survived.

[edit] Plot

Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) an eccentric billionaire, together with his newly adopted heir (formerly a homeless derelict), Youngman Grand (Ringo Starr), start playing elaborate practical jokes
on people. A big spender, Grand doesn’t mind handing out large sums of
money to various people, bribing them to fulfill his whims, or shocking
them by bringing down what they hold dear. Their misadventures are
designed as a display of father Grand to his adoptive charge that
"everyone has their price" – it just depends on the amount one is
prepared to pay. They start from rather minor spoofs, like bribing a
traffic warden (Spike Milligan)
to take back a parking ticket and eat it (who delighted from the large
bribe, eats its plastic cover too) and proceed with increasingly
elaborate stunts involving higher social strata and wider audiences. As
a father-son conversation reveals, Grand sees his plots as
"educational" ("Well, you know, Youngman, sometimes it’s not enough
merely to teach. One has to punish as well.").

At Sotheby’s art auction house, it is proudly claimed that an
original Rembrandt portrait might fetch £10,000, yet to director Mr.
Dougdale’s (John Cleese)
astonishment, Grand makes a final offer of £30,000 for it (‘Thirty –
thousand – pounds? Shit! I beg your pardon, I do beg your pardon!’) and
having bought it, proceeds, in front of a deeply shocked Dougdale, to
cut with his scissors the portrait’s nose from the canvas. In a classy
restaurant he makes a loud show of wild gluttony, Grand being the
restaurant’s most prominent customer. In the annual Boat Race sports
event, he bribes the Oxford team (where Graham Chapman
plays a member of the rowing team) and makes them ram purposely the
Cambridge boat, to win a screamingly unjust victory. In a traditional
pheasant hunt he uses an anti-aircraft gun to down the bird.

Grand and Youngman eventually buy tickets for the luxury liner S.S. Magic Christian,
along with the richest strata of society. In the beginning everything
appears normal and the ship apparently sets off. Yet soon, things start
going wrong. A solitary drinker at the bar (Roman Polanski) is approached by a transvestite cabaret singer (Yul Brynner), Dracula (Christopher Lee)
poses as a waiter, a cinema show turns out to feature the unfortunately
unsuccessful transplant of an African-American’s head onto a white
body. Eventually passengers start noticing through the ship’s CCTV that their Captain (Wilfrid Hyde-White)
is in a drunken stupor and finally gets carted off by a gorilla. In a
crescendo of panic the guests try to find their way to abandon ship. A
group of them, led by the Grands, reach instead the machine-room, which
turns out to be powered by hordes of topless rowing slaves, under the
Priestess of the Whip’s (Raquel Welch)
command. As passengers finally find an exit and lords and ladies
stumble out in the daylight, we discover that the supposed ship was, in
fact, a structure built inside a warehouse, and the passengers had
never left London. During the whole misadventure, father and son Grand
look perfectly composed and cool.

Towards the end of the film, Guy Grand fills up a huge vat with
urine, blood and animal excrement and adds to it thousands of bank
notes. Attracting a crowd of onlookers by announcing "Free money!",
Grand successfully entices the city workers to recover the cash. The
sequence concludes with many members of the crowd submerging
themselves, in order to retrieve money that had sunk beneath the
surface, as the song "Come and Get It" is heard by the movie’s audience.

The film ends with Grand and Youngman, having returned to the park
where the film opened, bribing the park warden to allow them to sleep
there, stating that this was a more direct method of achieving their
(mostly unstated) ends.

[edit] Reception

Most mainstream critics have been quite negative on the film,
especially for its extensive use of black humour. Darrel Baxton, in his
review for Splitting Image, refers to the film as of "the school of
savage sub-Bunuelian satire"[1]. Christopher Null in filmcritic.com states that "it’s way too over-the-top to make any profound statement"[2]. In his study of homosexuality in films The Celluloid Closet, author Vito Russo states(on page 184) that "Yul Brynner in drag sings Noel Coward‘s ‘Mad About the Boy‘ while the ‘fag’ jokes fly in a viciously homophobic film".

[edit] Cast

[edit] Trivia

• In with the style of the movie – and only shown by a close reading of the credits – is the casting of a lookalike pair to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
  The "Lennon", with long hair, beard and specs, then serves to distract
  the viewer’s attention from Lennon himself, in short wig, false nose
  and no specs, playing a member of a hunting party.^{[citation needed]}

• In the posters for Chevy Chase‘s 1985 movie Fletch, Chase’s character shows a fake ID of himself as an afro-wearing basketball player, named "Magic Christian".

• The scene towards the end of the film, involving the vat containing urine and excrement, was filmed on London’s South Bank on a stretch of wasteground on which The National Theatre was later built.

• The episode of The Simpsons entitled "Homer vs. Dignity" follows the movie’s plot line to a point.

[edit] External links

• The Magic Christian at the Internet Movie Database
• The Magic Christian at Allmovie
• The Magic Christian in RottenTomatoes.com (Synopsis & Notes)
• Film review in TheSpinningImage.co.uk