Grave Fun

The Wrong Box. In a proper English drawing room at the turn of the century, two pulsating Victorian lovers come face to face, and old-style title cards flash a legend upon the screen: Alone with Her at Last--in a Room Full of Eggs. The eggs are part of a collection belonging to the young lady's cousin. The lovers are Michael Caine, a nincompoop medical student bursting with latent virility, and Nanette Newman, a delectable Victorian miss sustained largely by fantasies about the 300 helpless girls molested each year in London. He, confronted by the fleshly reality of The Girl He Worships from Afar, is moved to confess: "I have often had a burning desire to nod." She, overcome by a rippling tendon in his forearm, is propelled into a swoony slow-motion ballet of plainly requitable passion.

Though their playing has exquisite style, Caine and Newman merely provide teatime treats in this slice of Victorian gingerbread adapted from the classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. Director Bryan Forbes (King Rat) reveals an unexpected gift for utter nonsense, using every period cliche and corny camera trick that might imaginably be fermented into vintage black comedy. Some of the gags crumble on impact, others are stretched out like taffy, but there is enough fun left over to leave most moviegoers happily wallowing in greed, sex, homicide, body snatching and other nefarious diversions.

The plot demands nothing of audiences except that they remember the definition of a tontine, a sort of lethal lottery: the families of 20 English youngsters each invest -L-1,000 in a fund, and some 80 or 90 years later, the last survivor takes all. Two brothers, played with tireless bravura by John Mills and Ralph Richardson, are the champions of longevity, and their efforts to outlive each other lead to a hilarious family reunion in which Mills tries to do away with his sibling by poison, stabbing, strangling and flying crockery.

Co-Scenarists Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove (who wrote the 1962 Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) dress hip gags in a graceful English manner, and their wayward humor brightens train wrecks, horse-and-buggy chase scenes and a hearse-to-hearse search for missing bodies. Among the grimly gay daguerrotypes at hand are Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as a pair of craven city cousins. Peter Sellers, as a sawbones who specializes in questionable cases, looks like a depraved caricature of Benjamin Franklin, while Wilfrid Lawson all but steals the show as a loyal family retainer so pickled in alcohol that--whatever the charge--he is ready to swear the butler did it. The vogue for sick screen comedy has obviously fallen into capable hands. Softened by the ruddy glow of the gaslight era, Wrong Box makes graveside humor a gas.

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