After more than 40 years, The Magic Christian still entertains. Its style is very much of the Sixties, but its profoundly cynical message---that anything can be bought, that everyone has his price---is, if anything, more relevant now than in 1969 when the film was released. The star, of course, is Peter Sellers as the obscenely wealthy Sir Guy Grand, who manages to seem almost childlike as he spreads his bounty of cynicism throughout London.

This is not a great film, or even necessarily a good one, but even second- or third-rate Peter Sellers may be preferable to a lot of first-rate work by others. The childless Sir Guy decides one morning to acquire an heir, so he goes to the park and picks up a homeless man played by Ringo Starr, and adopts him as his son, Youngman Grand. (Ringo actually doesn't have much to do in this film except react to Sellers.) Sir Guy then enlists Youngman in escapades that, in his hands, skewer the stuffed shirts of upper-class London society and turn the most solemn occasions into a carnival of absurdist nihilism. The most extreme comes at the end of the film, where he scatters money into a huge vat of blood, urine and excrement, and then watches as bowler-hatted City of London types wade into it for the money. This scene doesn't quite work. There is an extended sequence aboard a bogus cruise ship called The Magic Christian that tends to try one's patience because it degenerates into a very Sixties psychedelic montage. One moment from this sequence, however, is worth the whole thing: Raquel Welch as the Priestess of the Whip. Dressed as a dominatrix, she never looked more luscious or voluptuous. Film aficionados will appreciate the many old-line British actors who contributed supporting or cameo roles (Spike Milligan, Lawrence Harvey, Richard Attenborough, John Le Mesurier, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Christopher Lee, and others less well known outside the UK) as well as glimpses of younger now-famous faces, especially John Cleese in a hysterically funny scene at Sotheby's. Cleese plays the terminally smarmy, unctuous, patronizing curator Mr. Dougdale, whose supercilious mien is punctured beyond repair by Sir Guy in a scene involving the defacing of a priceless painting. There is a Monty Python skit that looks like it was directly inspired by this scene. This film was shot at about the time of the first season of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and what with the appearance in the film of at least two Pythons that I could identify, there are definitely echoes of Python in it. The other Python was (an uncredited) Graham Chapman as the leader of the Oxford team during the famous Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Watch also for an uncredited Yul Brynner playing a female impersonator who does a sexy torch song. Alert listeners---especially lovers of the classic 1950s BBC radio comedy program the Goon Show---will also notice that Sellers does almost all of the off-screen voices and several voices of characters seen only in long shot, reminiscent of the films of Orson Welles; so if you suddenly think you hear Henry Crun or Major Bloodnok off-screen, it's not your imagination.

All in all, a solid five or six stars out of ten.

This film is definitely a product of its times and I seriously doubt that you'd have seen a film like this at any other point in history. Because of this, it probably played pretty well at the time but now, almost forty years later, it is practically unwatchable and...well...stupid. Sure, there are flashes of brilliance here and there, but in general, the film is a terribly unfunny stream of consciousness piece that meanders and looks like it needed a re-write and an infusion of humor.

Also, while the film had several writers (including Monty Pythoners John Cleese and Graham Chapman--who also appeared in the movie as well),it was NOT a Python film per se--regardless of what the DVD cover said. Many films that were made by one or two of the Python alumni have been deliberately mismarketed this way to try to dupe loyal fans (JABBERWOCKY is a prime example). Now the movie DOES have some similarity to Python sketches and the flow of the show in general, however, the chemistry is severely lacking--being brilliant on occasion (such as during the art auction or rowing competition) but often just dragged and dragged as if there was no script and Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr were just told to "wing it". Unfortunately, for Ringo, this meant to just stand there and say practically nothing throughout the film or things like "that sounds like a good idea". And for Sellers, a brilliant performer, he turned in an amazingly lifeless and uncomedic performance. In fact, through his film career, Sellers alternated from great film portrayals (DR. STRANGELOVE and THE MOUSE THAT ROARED) to horrid and awful and flat ones (SUCH AS WALTZ OF THE TOREADORS and THE FIENDISH PLOT OF FU MANCHU and THE PRISONER OF ZENDA). This is one of his flattest.

The bottom line is this movie was meant to tweak the nose of society (especially the rich) but ended up instead just being muddled and dull. If they had stuck with the original plot idea of having rich Sellers and Starr just wondering from scene to scene doing obnoxious things just because they are rich and can get away with it, THEN it would have been a brilliant and perceptive film. These portions of the film were great and very subversive. But with all the irrelevance and tedium, this aspect is all but forgotten. With a little discipline and a re-write, this could have been a great film.

One day the fabulously wealthy Sir Guy Grand who is Peter Sellers with a much larger nose finds a young orphan kid in a park. On the spur of the moment he adopts young Ringo Starr, probably because Ringo has a well known honker in real life and Sellers sees something of himself in Ringo.

The idea is that Sellers has to have someone not just to leave his money to, but someone to impart his accumulated wisdom of the years which is boiled up into one single thought; that EVERYBODY has his price.

The rest of the film is a Monty Pythonesque group of skits in which Sellers tries to prove just that to Starr. They range from Laurence Harvey doing a striptease while doing Hamlet's soliloquy to a beat cop eating a parking ticket for 500 pounds. The title The Magic Christian refers to a Titanic like cruise ship that only caters to the upper crust. Sellers and Starr integrate that ship's maiden voyage in a most interesting fashion.

That the film is like Monty Python is no accident with Graham Chapman and John Cleese doing the writing. Ringo's former Beatle companero, Paul McCartney wrote The Magic Christian theme, Come and Get It which sums up the philosophy of the film.

After almost 40 years, The Magic Christian is acidly funny, but a still unsettling.