The Naked Truth [Your Past Is Showing] **** (1957, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton, Dennis Price, Joan Sims) – Classic Movie Review 1864

Producer-director Mario Zampi’s eager-to-please 1957 British black and white comedy The Naked Truth [Your Past Is Showing] is a minor but definite vintage pleasure. A broad, mostly successful black farce, it is based on a solid original story and a fairly witty screenplay, both by the prolific and talented comedy writer Michael Pertwee.

A bit rough and ready, The Naked Truth is not a perfect comedy, but it certainly can boast energetic and cheerful acting from a great cast, lots of laughs and a fragrant whiff of the Fifties too. There is a particularly funny turn from the then emerging star Peter Sellers, who is clearly relishing playing a nasty TV personality named Sonny MacGregor, and eagerly grabs his opportunity to adopt various delightful disguises.

Among the other delights of the movie, Terry-Thomas plays a philandering peer called Lord Henry Mayley, who cheats on his wife Lady Lucy (Georgina Cookson), Peggy Mount is a bluff novelist named Flora Ransom and Shirley Eaton plays a sweet young model, Melissa Right. The trio come together with Sellers’s MacGregor in a plot to get rid for ever of Nigel Dennis (played by Dennis Price), the blackmailing publisher of a scandal magazine, who has threatened to expose them. It is indeed a very British comedy, typical of its mid-Fifties period, but still welcome and funny today.

Also in the cast are Joan Sims (as Ethel Ransom), Miles Malleson (inevitably as a vicar, the Rev Cedric Bastable), Kenneth Griffith, Moultrie Kelsall, Wilfrid Lawson, Wally Patch, John Stuart, George Benson, Bill Edwards, Henry Hewitt, David Lodge, John Hurley, Marianne Stone, Peter Noble, Victor Rietti and Jerrold Wells.

The Naked Truth was shown as Your Past Is Showing in the US.

The Naked Truth [Your Past Is Showing] is directed by Mario Zampi, runs 92 minutes, is made by Anglofilm, is released by Rank, is written by Michael Pertwee, is shot in black and white by Stan Pavey, is produced by Mario Zampi and is scored by Stanley Black.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1864

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