The Worst Film Ever

From my favorite movies..

Expected more

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

When the film begins, an elderly man is dying...and he commits a prank on his way out of this world. But it's not his final prank...that comes in his will. When it's read to his four relatives, they're each told they'd receive 50,000 pounds...provided each do something odd and specifically tailored to them. His haughty sister is told that in order to collect, she must become a domestic and serve as one for a year. His cousin, the writer, must act out his dime novels...and get himself incarcerated for 28 days. His meek relative must hold up a bank with a fake gun...and his playboy cousin must marry the first woman with which he strikes up a conversation! And, all of these must be completed without telling anyone why they are doing it! What made this one especially good is that, for the most part, the folks all learned a positive lesson from all this and there were also a few laughs along the way. Worth seeing and clever.

Alastair Sim would make a perfect undertaker. With those Bassett-hound eyes and that mournful hand-wringing manner, he's made to preside over the Slumber Room and ease you into the priciest model. So, it never fails to surprise me that he's also a first-rate comedic actor, maybe even the last word in droll comedy. And he pulls off the humor so slyly, with just a minor change of expression. What a wonderfully artistic contrast he is to today's rub- your-nose-in-it brand of comedy. This is not his best vehicle, but the movie does have a clever premise and a couple of good set-ups—the shoplifting sequence, and any scene with Joyce Grenfell. The sketches, however, are more amusing than hilarious, and the humor never really peaks out in a climactic way. It's also perhaps one of the sweetest comedies on record, insisting that the key to happiness is pairing up with another, even in the case of those two cranky old people. That's the wisdom behind the will's requirement— old man Russell makes each beneficiary experience what is most missing from his or her life, and in the process, become a better and happier person.Note the shot taken early on at America's brand of hard-boiled detective fiction, probably then making inroads into popular British fiction. So, by combining America's street- tough style with traditional British prose, writer Russell (Sim) produces something amusingly ridiculous, like "Petal arched her alabaster arm above her patrician brow in a moment of precise exasperation before he smacked her in the kisser." Anyway, I thought those passages were both funny and cleverly offbeat. All in all, this little comedy may be no knee-slapper, but it is rather sweetly memorable.

From the very beginning this is a classic. The characters are built up very nicely, each one of them having a particular character flaw. Their dead relative, henry russell (the practical joking man) has set them a task which they must achieve before they can gain their inheritance. seems pretty simple on the base level. but when you look close it is a fantastic piece of social commentary and spiritual guidance. each character changes for the better, having seen the light and the error of their ways doing something they would never have thought of on their own. it takes something like that to show people their own faults and force them to do something about it. this film does it with such class and grace that you can't helpt but find it a masterpiece. and i was a stoned 19 year od when i first watched it!! the money not being there is the coup de gras and the perfect end to this tale. no one is that bothered about it, as their reward has already been recieved - the change to their lives that they all needed and didn't even know they desired!brilliant

This has got to be a classic of Ealing comedies.Alistair Sim is at his best, the scene with the window (Fact-he ad-libbed most of the scene too)is proof that actors like him are few in between.I saw this when I was a nipper as my father said that he enjoyed it when it first came out and even though I've seen it quiet a few times it's still fresh and amusing. Watch it and anything else with Mr Sims, this is British at it's best.