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An utterly bizarre film, but its sheer perverse strangeness seems to come from all of these extremely comfortably familiar comedy actors doing a kind of post-apocalyptic Samuel Beckett play targeting (and embodying!) all the most familiar British institutions, particularly those involving ridiculous amounts of paperwork and officious officials, as well as money and class.

There is a strange kind of stasis to the film, a hopelessness that you might expect to a post-apocalyptic world, but it is expressed in a different, all too familiar and destructive urge of nostalgia for the past. There is a suggestion that even the apocalypse can somehow be accomodated into the routines of daily life if everyone just pulls together and does their part! (But that leads to the more uncomfortable, and perhaps more truthful, feeling that nobody actually learns anything from their mistakes, or gets past their prejudices, just rebuilds only to repeat them all over again)

I especially liked the moments of pure farce, such as the seeming attempted rape scene involving Harry Secombe and Mona Washbourne(!), where the "things my first wife did for me" that he wants Mother to now do turns out to involve chucking dishes at him while he dodges them all the time pleading with her to stop!

The locations are excellent and I particularly like the lakes full of now useless oil. Reading Michael's booklet essay I was excited to hear that some of the location shooting apparently took place in the quarries surrounding St Austell in Cornwall at the time. I grew up in a little town close to St Austell called Penwithick in the 1980s and remember some of these old disused quarries surrounding the area very well - in fact I used to go with my parents for walks and blackberry picking around that area. So watching some sections of the film, though I don't note any particularly familiar area, brings back a certain happy nostalgia for my own childhood! A lot has changed since our family left there to move up north in the late 80s - for instance on return visits we could see that the quarry roads had become actual roads and the bushes cut well back from these more official public highways. And of course these roads now lead to the Eden Project which was completed in the 1990s on the quarry land.

Bizarrely, close to the area where I now live is a place called Winnat's Pass, which turns up in a few brief shots in Jorge Grau's Spanish horror film, The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue! (It is the location which has the entrance to the church in the film. In reality there's no church on top of that peak, but it is most definitely Winnat's Pass!) There must be a lot of these rural locations used in the most bizarre films dotted about the whole country.

Here's the trailer for Bed Sitting Room. As well as being the link between The Goon Show and Monty Python, as suggested in the booklet, I wonder how much influence it had on similarly sci-fi apocalyptic found location films like Kin-Dza-Dza.

The Now and Then interviews are absolutely fascinating and brilliant additions even if they aren't from the period of The Bed Sitting Room. It is very interesting to see interviews that aren't being cut for time or having an interviewer hurrying along to the next point or trying to drive the conversation in a particular, commercially viable, direction. Is there any information about who the other people interviewed were? It would be amazing to just have a set of the raw interviews themselves, maybe with a context setting documentary (or booklet essays, as included here) if it were felt absolutely necessary.

colinr0380 wrote:The Now and Then interviews are absolutely fascinating and brilliant additions even if they aren't from the period of The Bed Sitting Room. It is very interesting to see interviews that aren't being cut for time or having an interviewer hurrying along to the next point or trying to drive the conversation in a particular, commercially viable, direction. Is there any information about who the other people interviewed were? It would be amazing to just have a set of the raw interviews themselves, maybe with a context setting documentary (or booklet essays, as included here) if it were felt absolutely necessary.

All the 300-plus raw interviews (or at least the usable ones: a handful turned out to have got separated from their soundtracks, which have since vanished) have been published on the BFI InView site. For various copyright reasons, this is academic access only, but since you're based in the UK you might be able to work out a means of entry.

A handful of film and TV-based interviews have also been published on Screenonline, which is also educational use only, but is (or should be) available in British public libraries.

colinr0380 wrote:An utterly bizarre film, but its sheer perverse strangeness seems to come from all of these extremely comfortably familiar comedy actors doing a kind of post-apocalyptic Samuel Beckett play targeting (and embodying!) all the most familiar British institutions, particularly those involving ridiculous amounts of paperwork and officious officials, as well as money and class.

I am supremely glad I'm not the only one thinking that. even the desolate setting seems positively Beckett. Maybe my favorite bit (and the most like Beckett to me) is the filtered drinking sequence. I also have to say that after five Lesters I can't help but see him as a British Tashlin with all of the good and bad that comes with that (naturally this means Superman III is his The Alphabet Murders).

Have to admit, I found this unwatchable, like sub-standard Python meets Carry On. But at least the bluray only cost £5-99.

This will be reissued as a Dual Format edition on October 24 - details here.

I finally got around to watching Flipside #1 this morning. I really loved Herostratus and the Jack Bond/Jane Arden films, so The Bed Sitting Room which seemed like such a sure thing turned out to be a huge disappointment. I wish I had read Michael B.'s excellent scene-setting essay in the accompanying booklet before I watched the film (and this piece alone will be the reason I might revist the film down the road), and aside from some brilliant and inventive visuals courtesy of the sets and the photography, the film was an endurance test. I watched the film on a double-bill with All the Right Noises (which I watched after The Bed Sitting Room and was much less confident about, going in) and the latter film was far superior, an altogether upside down state of affairs...

RobertAltman wrote:One of my favourite Lester, even though I´ve only watched a wretched torrent version of it (with a constantly changing aspect ratio).

So... this is a bit of a head-scratcher.

I've just done a series of four films by Richard Lester in Philadelphia, all showing in 35mm prints from Park Circus (who has the MGM library). The Bed Sitting Room was the final film. The first three films (The Knack... and How to Get It, How I Won the War and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) were all 1.66:1. In projecting The Bed Sitting Room all sources (IMDB, the cans and the film print itself) said the film was in 1.66 but what was up on the screen was a big surprise. There were three different aspect ratios of the image that were constantly changing (like the poster said above). One was a full screen, as it should have been, the other had a black bar on the top of the image and the third had black bars on the top and the bottom. The third scenario obviously was a 1.85 aspect ratio but the other two scenarios were something different. Towards the end of the film, I finally thought about consulting the specs for this release which are indeed 1.85. Projecting the whole thing at 1.85 would have stretched the image and also cut out a lot of the frame. I wonder how this release would have dealt with these differences, if some shots were zoomed and cut off or stretched to accommodate.

This is one of the few Flipsides I don't yet own, so I wonder what anyone knows about this and if it's addressed in the liner notes. I've not really seen a print done in this way before and it was very distracting (to me, perhaps most of the audience didn't notice or mind though).

htshell wrote:

RobertAltman wrote:One of my favourite Lester, even though I´ve only watched a wretched torrent version of it (with a constantly changing aspect ratio).

So... this is a bit of a head-scratcher.

I've just done a series of four films by Richard Lester in Philadelphia, all showing in 35mm prints from Park Circus (who has the MGM library). The Bed Sitting Room was the final film. The first three films (The Knack... and How to Get It, How I Won the War and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) were all 1.66:1. In projecting The Bed Sitting Room all sources (IMDB, the cans and the film print itself) said the film was in 1.66 but what was up on the screen was a big surprise. There were three different aspect ratios of the image that were constantly changing (like the poster said above). One was a full screen, as it should have been, the other had a black bar on the top of the image and the third had black bars on the top and the bottom. The third scenario obviously was a 1.85 aspect ratio but the other two scenarios were something different. Towards the end of the film, I finally thought about consulting the specs for this release which are indeed 1.85. Projecting the whole thing at 1.85 would have stretched the image and also cut out a lot of the frame. I wonder how this release would have dealt with these differences, if some shots were zoomed and cut off or stretched to accommodate.

This is one of the few Flipsides I don't yet own, so I wonder what anyone knows about this and if it's addressed in the liner notes. I've not really seen a print done in this way before and it was very distracting (to me, perhaps most of the audience didn't notice or mind though).

If the aspect ratio was supposed to be 1.85, then normal cinema masking would have covered up the shifting ARs of the basic footage. In my experience it's not uncommon for films to be composed of material in different ARs, none of which would be apparent in a correctly framed projection. The 1.33 material, for instance, may have been shot open matte by the second unit, but it was never intended to be seen that way. This was an occasional problem I encountered with 16mm prints of 35mm films, when the reduction to 16mm was done without correctly masking the image to present the correct aspect ratio throughout. Thus, in most amateur projection contexts, you had to helplessly watch the aspect ratio flip and flop distractingly.