Rising Damp **½ (1980, Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour, Don Warrington, Denholm Elliott, Christopher Strauli) – Classic Movie Review 4773

Happily, Leonard Rossiter gleefully re-creates his classic TV performance as the miserly, mean, vain, boastful, cowardly, racist landlord Rigsby in director Joe McGrath’s pleasant and amusing 1980 cinema movie version of the hit British TV sitcom.

Rossiter pleases as his Alf Garnett-style character is debunked by his long-suffering tenants, while Frances de la Tour and Don Warrington please too as the dowdy spinster Miss Jones and Rigsby’s aristocratic black lodger Phillip in his rundown, leaky, seedy old bedsit rooming house.

In what passes for a plot, still written by its creator Eric Chappell, reusing several story lines from the TV series, Rigsby fancies Miss Jones, who in turn lusts after Phillip, while Denholm Elliott plays Charles Seymour, a seedy conman who gets his way with Miss Jones.

Unfortunately this is not much as a film, and the material is very dated, but some of it is funny enough and the performances see it through to some success.

In 22 episodes of the ITV series (1974-1977), Richard Beckinsale had starred as the nice, naive medical student Alan Moore. But, tragically, Beckinsale had died of a heart attack on 19 March 1979, aged only 31, just after making a film of his other TV hit show Porridge. Christopher Strauli was recruited to replace Beckinsale, playing the different character of arts student John, and tries his best to fill in the gap, but he is shaky in the unenviable task of standing in for him, like a star’s unwanted understudy. The character of Alan is briefly referenced, as having left the bedsit house.

Also in the cast are Glynn Edwards as lodger Cooper, Carrie Jones, Derek Griffiths, John Cater, Jonathan Cecil, Alan Clare and Ronnie Brody.

Chappell originally wrote the piece as a 1971 London West End stage play called The Banana Box, which starred Rossiter and Paul Jones. In a plot line taken from the original play, Rigsby finds out that Philip is not to be an African chief’s son after all from but comes from Croydon, but tells him he must really have some royal ancestry and he does not reveal the truth to the other characters.

The film changes the setting from Yorkshire to inner-city London. Frances da la Tour won the Evening Standard British Film Award as Best Actress for Miss Jones.

The film’s theme song features lyrics by Eric Chappell and was released as a seven-inch single with the B-side features comedy dialogue between Rigsby and Miss Jones.

Rising Damp was voted ITV’s best-ever sitcom in the BBC’s 100 Best Sitcoms poll of 2004.

Ah, the days when every hit British TV series sitcoms got a movie spin-off! Even though they were never as good as your memories of the television show, they were invariably pleasant records of happy memories. All three of Beckinsale’s hit sitcoms spawned a film version, starting with the film of his first starring role in 1970 as Geoffrey in the sitcom The Lovers, opposite fellow newcomer Paula Wilcox. But in the Nineties when there was virtually no British film industry, there was sadly no Bread or ’Allo, ’Allo! film.

RIP Richard Beckinsale (1947–1979).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4773

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