Rentadick | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jim Clark |
Written by | John Cleese Graham Chapman John Fortune John Wells |
Produced by | Ned Sherrin Terry Glinwood |
Starring | James Booth Richard Briers Julie Ege Ronald Fraser Donald Sinden |
Cinematography | John Coquillon |
Edited by | Martin Charles |
Music by | Carl Davis |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Rank Film Distributors |
Release date | 1972 |
Running time | 94 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Rentadick is a 1972 British comedy film, directed by Jim Clark and starring James Booth, Richard Briers, Julie Ege, Ronald Fraser and Donald Sinden. [1] [2] It is a spoof spy/detective picture, the plot of which involves attempts to protect a new experimental nerve gas.
The original script for the film was written by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, both of Monty Python.
The script was bought by David Frost who failed to secure finance, so he sold the script to Ned Sherrin. Sherrin made an appointment with Frank Poole, who ran filmmaking for Rank and that company agreed to finance. [3]
However, the producers made so many changes to the partnership's material (including commissioning additional material from John Fortune and John Wells) that Chapman and Cleese successfully instigated action to have their names removed from the finished print. This left Rentadick with very peculiar on-screen acknowledgements; the only writing credit is given to Fortune and Wells, who are explicitly credited only with "additional dialogue". However, the British company Network released a DVD in 2007 using a print that still shows the names of Cleese and Chapman during the opening titles (frames at 2:00 minutes into the presentation) and uses their names in its promotional material. [4]
Jim Clark says Sherrin offered him the script to direct when Clark was working on X Y & Zee (1972). Clark said he did not "remember the original script" but "in any case I wasn’t going to flounce out of this since I was keen to return to directing and found most of the revamped film amusing. It was a reasonably cheap film." [5]
The script was originally called Rentasleuth but was retitled on the first day of shooting to Rentadick which Clark felt was a terrible title. It sounded like a gay porno movie." [6] Clark later said, "it was a mystery that I was seen as a director of comedy, but the legacy of the Will Hay and George Formby comedies hung over me." [7]
Filming took six weeks mostly at place at a country house near Elstree Studios. Clark was influenced by the Will Hay comedy Ask a Policeman (1939). He wrote "Unfortunately I didn’t have the trio of comics, Hay, Marriott, and Moffat, to work with. But despite the many problems and my almost total inability to pull it off, I enjoyed directing the film and did not think it too bad." [8]
Clark says the film previewed well but it was "slaughtered by the critics and nobody saw the film, which comes up regularly on late night television to embarrass me." [9] Sherrin says Rank lost its entire investment. [10]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The blessed relief of total insanity in the person of Spike Milligan's Arab Customs official ("Any fish derivatives? . . . sodium glutamates? . . . artificial ski slopes? . . . inflatable models of Raquel Welch? . . . hand-carved bidets ?") does not justify the previous ninety minutes of formless boredom." [11]
Graham Chapman was a British actor, comedian and writer. He was one of the six members of the surreal comedy group Monty Python. He portrayed authority figures such as The Colonel and the lead role in two Python films, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979).
John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).
Monty Python were a British comedy troupe formed in 1969 consisting of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. The group came to prominence for the sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974. Their work then developed into a larger collection that included live shows, films, albums, books, and musicals; their influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Their sketch show has been called "an important moment in the evolution of television comedy".
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Q... is a surreal television comedy sketch show written by Spike Milligan and Neil Shand, and starring Spike Milligan with supporting players, usually including Julia Breck, John Bluthal, Bob Todd, and John Wells. The show ran from 1969 to 1982 on BBC2. There were six series in all, the first five numbered from Q5 to Q9, and a final series titled There's a Lot of It About. The first and third series ran for seven episodes, and the others for six episodes, each of which was 30 minutes long.
Yellowbeard is a 1983 American comedy film directed by Mel Damski and written by Graham Chapman, Peter Cook, Bernard McKenna, and David Sherlock, with an ensemble cast featuring Chapman, Cook, Peter Boyle, Cheech & Chong, Martin Hewitt, Michael Hordern, Eric Idle, Madeline Kahn, James Mason, and John Cleese, and the final cinematic appearances of Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, and Peter Bull.
The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins is a 1971 British sketch comedy film directed and produced by Graham Stark. Its title is a conflation of The Magnificent Seven and the seven deadly sins. It comprises a sequence of seven sketches, each representing a sin and written by an array of British comedy-writing talent, including Graham Chapman, Spike Milligan, Barry Cryer and Galton and Simpson. The sketches are linked by animation sequences overseen by Bob Godfrey's animation studio. The music score is by British jazz musician Roy Budd, cinematography by Harvey Harrison and editing by Rod Nelson-Keys and Roy Piper. It was produced by Tigon Pictures and distributed in the U.K. by Tigon Film Distributors Ltd.
Julie Ege was a Norwegian actress, model and beauty pageant titleholder. She appeared in many British films of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn is a 30-minute comedy film directed by Joseph Sterling and starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Dick Emery. It was made in November 1955, and released in 1956.
Up the Front is a 1972 British comedy film directed by Bob Kellett and starring Frankie Howerd, Bill Fraser, and Hermione Baddeley. It is the third film spin-off from the television series Up Pompeii!. The plot concerns Lurk, a coward who is hypnotised into bravery.
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Robert Ryerson Kellett was a British film director, film producer and screenwriter, and one of British cinema’s most prominent comedy directors in the 1970s, working with many of the big names of the era, including Ronnie Barker and Frankie Howerd.
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The National Health is a 1973 British black comedy film directed by Jack Gold and starring Lynn Redgrave, Colin Blakely and Eleanor Bron. It is based on the play The National Health by Peter Nichols, in which the staff struggle to cope in a NHS hospital. The film satirically interweaves the story of the real hospital with a fantasy hospital which exists in a soap-opera world where all the equipment is new and patients are miraculously cured – although the only "patients" seen are doctors or nurses who are themselves part of the soap opera plots. In the real hospital, the patients die while the out-of-touch administrators focus on impressing foreign visitors.
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