The Wrong Box (1966)

 "Yes, I enjoy an egg myself. They don't make good pets, though."

This splendid film is, yes, a farce, quite literally, and one executed with delicious clockwork precision, the climactic scene at once wonderfully chaotic and utterly orderly in how everything is tied together. This is entirely true. Yet the farce, perfect though it is, is merely the plot as background: this film is memorable for the wit and the performances.

There is, of course, exquisite visual humour, not least at the end whith the hearse chase, the unexpected real funeral, the band. The concept is delicious: a tontine. A sum of money is invested for a large number of young boys, with the last surviving to inherit all. The film begins with a highly entertaining series of, well, stupid deaths, crammed with cameos from British character actors. Finally, we are left with two brothers, played by those great theatrical knights John Mills and Ralph Richardson, both as adept at comedy as one might expect. The peerless Peter Cook and the no less inspired Dudley Moore steal the show, of course, but Michawl Caine is a superb comic straight man.

It's a shock to see Tony Hancock in colour, at this late stage. He is, let's be honest, phoning it in, and past his best. Yet he phones it in with aplomb. Peter Sellers is superb, but that's a given.

This superb cast, though, would be nothing without the sparkling, witty script, of a type that, despite its Vicxtorian setting, is redolent of the era between the satire boom and Monty Python, when British comedy was in glorious ferment, with Peter Cook at the centre of most things that mattered. A masterpiece that ought to be much better known.