This commentary contains some spoilers and may be better read after the screenings.
The Boulting Brothers’ 1963 satire Heavens Above! is geographically eclectic. It roams from urban prisons to rural villages to Scottish islands – and finally into space. The hero is the idealistic reverend Smallwood, who ultimately launches himself in a rocket to the stars, presumably in the desperate hope that he may find a committed flock out there; in all his terrestrial travels, he struggles to find people who display Christian values, discovering, instead, only greed and selfishness.
This film is a peculiarly caustic satire. The targets for pillory are many: the hypocrisies of the Church; the limits to the concept of Christian good deeds; the condescension and lack of charity of the landed gentry; the self-interest of middle-class business owners; and the avarice and indolence of the dispossessed. This is a film which seems to like no one. Only the organ-playing dustman Matthew, played by Brock Robinson, seems to be beyond criticism, and even he ends up fleeing.
The film is impressively free of sentimentality. A potentially cute child is no sooner introduced than he is sticking two fingers up at his older sisters as she makes out with her lover in the long grass. The family taken in by the good reverend ultimately strips his house of anything they can steal. And even Smallwood himself is not an uncomplicated angel; Simpson, butler to the local aristocrat, asks him ‘What did you want to come here for, upsetting people?’ The law of unintended consequences means that Smallwood’s plan for Christian redistribution has led to social collapse. Simpson, whose pension fund is in the form of now-worthless shares in local business Tranquilax, goes on icily to fling two passages of the Bible at Smallwood: ‘Matthew 27:5 – And he went out and hanged himself; Luke 10:27 – Go and do thou likewise.’
There is something potentially sour about a satire none of whose characters really encourages sympathy. But to introduce a lovable servant or a cherubic child into the bleak, loveless landscapes of Heavens Above! would risk diluting the astringent social commentary. The film’s pessimism about the paucity of care in post-war Britain is total; our one hope – and it is a comically hopeless hope – is to abandon Earth for parishes further afield.
The Boulting Brothers, who steered the ship – or piloted the rocket – of the film, are perhaps best remembered for a series of satires made in the 1950s and 60s. The institutions lampooned by the brothers included the army (Private’s Progress, 1956), academia (Lucky Jim, 1957), the legal system (Brothers in Law, 1957), and, perhaps most famously, trade unions and board rooms (I’m All Right Jack, 1959). Heavens Above! eased the Boultings into the 1960s, the decade in which British satire flourished with Beyond the Fringe, That Was the Week that Was, and performers including Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Bernard Levin.
And one of the Boultings’ great companions in satire was Peter Sellers, that chameleon actor whose centenary we’re celebrating this year. Where many fine actors would have insisted on making Smallwood sympathetic, Sellers leans into his haplessness and gullibility. He naïvely pursues his idée fixe to the point of insensitivity. Sellers makes the sweet smile of the cleric somehow unsettling; satirising meanness and selfishness is easy, but Sellers pulls off the harder trick of satirising decency. This nuanced performance is a wonderful reminder of Sellers’ particular brand of comic superstardom.
1963
Directed by John and Roy Boulting
Written by Frank Harvey
Peter Sellers (Reverend John Edward Smallwood)
Cecil Parker (Archdeacon Aspinall)
Isabel Jeans (Lady Lucy Despard)
Ian Carmichael (the other Smallwood)
Bernard Miles (Simpson)
Brock Peters (Matthew Robinson)
Eric Sykes (Harry Smith)
Irene Handl (Rene Smith)