Heavens Above! **** (1963, Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Ian Carmichael, Isabel Jeans) – Classic Movie Review 1859

Malcolm Muggeridge came up with the idea for the Boulting Brothers’ thoughtful and entertaining 1963 satirical comedy film Heavens Above! Peter Sellers tickles the funny bone even in a largely serious performance as the Rev John Smallwood. 

English journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge came up with the idea for co-writer/director John Boulting and his producer brother Roy Boulting’s thoughtful and entertaining 1963 satirical comedy Heavens Above!, in which the clergy are as corrupt and cynical as the congregation, and God seems to favour the wicked.

Peter Sellers tickles the funny bone even in a largely serious performance as the Rev John Smallwood, an Anglican prison chaplain accidentally assigned to the posh, affluent parish of Orbiston Parva, where he finds apathy and selfishness, and gets involved with mad acts of charity and the British space race.

With Sellers holding the centre firm as the comedy movie’s straight man, the admirable ensemble cast of British comedy greats can get on merrily with the job of providing plenty of big, intelligent laughs. Cecil Parker and George Woodbridge are excellent as Archdeacon Aspinall and the Bishop, amusingly venal curates.

Irene Handl and Eric Sykes are hilarious as Mr and Mrs Smith, the parents of a scruffy, thieving, itinerant family spunging off Reverend Smallwood while pretending piety. And Kenneth Griffith is outstanding in a perfect role for him as the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the Rev Owen Thomas.

The comedy great cast also includes Ian Carmichael (as the Other Smallwood, the man Sellers is mistaken for), Isabel Jeans (as Lady Despard), Brock Peters, Bernard Miles, Miriam Karlin, Roy Kinnear, Eric Barker, Miles Malleson, William Hartnell (promoted from his usual sergeant role to Major Fowler), Joan Hickson, Thorley Walters, Basil Dignam, Conrad Phillips, Derek Nimmo, Mark Eden and Cardew Robinson.

So much talent, where did it all go?

However, John Boulting and Frank Harvey’s screenplay is stronger on character, situations and satire than comedy, and is slightly patchy as far as laughs are concerned. And it is also stuck with an ending that sounds all the wrong notes. And John Boulting’s comedy direction is slightly languid sometimes and jittery at others.

So overall, with the vintage cast, the result is a fun, intelligent, thought-provoking entertainment, a near classic, but running just a shade down from the same Boulting Brothers team’s I’m All Right Jack with Sellers in 1959. Heavens Above! can certainly be ranked as one of Sellers’s best performances if not quite one of his best movies.

Muggeridge also appears as a clergyman, and other media names of the day, Scottish journalist Ludovic Kennedy, radio personality Franklin Engelmann and broadcaster Tim Brinton, appear as themselves. So now it is also a sharply focused snapshot of its bygone era, though its points about God, faith, religion and the Church remain still bracingly current.

Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990.

Malcolm Muggeridge worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy during the Second World War. He converted to Christianity and was a critic of the sexual revolution and of drug use.

Franklin Engelmann was the original host of Pick of the Pops In October 1955. But he was best known for hosting radio’s Down Your Way (1955–1972) and Gardeners’ Question Time (1961–1972).

Tim Brinton was an ITN newscaster from 1959 to 1962 and a Conservative Party politician as MP from 1979 to 1987.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1859

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