“Face it, it’s a filthy stinking world but there are some smashing things in it” – Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates).
One afternoon a few years ago I was at home idly scrolling through TV channels and chanced upon Nothing But the Best (NBTB), a 1964 film directed by Clive Donner and starring Alan Bates, Denholm Elliot, Millicent Martin, and Harry Andrews. It piqued my curiosity as it is set in London (where I was living at the time) and allowed a time-machine glimpse of the city in the 1960s. Curiosity turned to enjoyment, and I ended up watching the whole film.
Alan Bates (Women In Love, Far From the Madding Crowd) stars as an ambitious young real estate clerk Jimmy Brewster, who sets his sights on getting to the top of the social pile. He has a chance meeting with Charlie Prince, a down-on-his-luck and thoroughly disreputable aristocrat played by Denholm Elliott (A Room with a View, Raiders of The Lost Ark). With similarities to the 1960 Terry Thomas film School For Scoundrels, Brewster hatches a plan to have Prince teach him the ways of the upper-classes and invites him to share his one room digs. This allows him to borrow Prince’s manners and well-tailored clothes, “one more ambitious yob, because that’s what you are, isn’t it?” chides Prince. The object of Brewster’s affections is the boss’s daughter, Ann Horton, played by Millicent Martin (That Was The Week That Was, Alfie, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines) and their meeting accelerates his scheming and insinuation into the gentlemen’s clubs and lavish parties of the upper crust in order to get ahead.
The 4K restoration has removed the layer of age from the muddy version I saw on television and revealed a crisp, bright London in a similar way to the restored Get Carter which showed that rather than being grim up north it was actually sunny. However, the restoration could not do anything about some of the outdated attitudes towards women who are mostly there for men’s pleasure. The saving grace is Millicent Martin’s character who, rather than being an object of desire and nothing more, is smart, wryly funny, and more than a match for Alan Bates ladder climbing wannabe. If anything, she is smarter and more switched on that he is and though taken by him, sees him for exactly who is: “you’re ambitious, charming, good looking, and completely immoral. In other words, you represent everything I could possible want.” It’s at this moment you see Brewster pivot and realise he does love her and, in many ways, their relationship in the only honest thing in the film.
Nothing But the Best is mostly a scathing attack on the upper-classes who are portrayed as money-grabbing, greedy pigs easily led to the trough by Brewster; and the scene at the Hunter’s Ball (was that an uncredited Jane Asher on the stairs handing out tombola tickets?) is an amusing montage that exposes their arrogance, ignorance and disconnection from the social class that Brewster seeks to escape from. The film is surprisingly more amoral than you might expect from a satirical 1960’s comedy. There are several twists and dark story lines (that I won’t give away here) which most modern films wouldn’t dare attempt.
The year before NBTB Donner had directed Bates in The Caretaker and a year later he would direct the gloriously ridiculous sex comedy What’s New Pussycat with Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, and Woody Allen. Also notable is that the film is photographed by Nichols Roeg (Don’t Look Now, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) who demonstrates flashes of the handheld camera work, odd angles and time-jumping edits that later became his trademark. The score is by Ron Grainer who composed the theme to Man In A Suitcase (later used as the theme for Chris Evans’ TFI Friday), Steptoe and Son, and co-wrote the theme to Doctor Who. The score is peppered with musical ‘winks’ to the audience which trumpet home the sex and death which always occur off-screen. But the real star here is Frederic Raphael’s script, with sharp dialogue (“you’ve had something facetious done to your hair”, “A-type lady, E-type Jag”) that flies between the characters, particularly in the scenes between Bates and Elliot (who is playing one of the greatest screen cads here) and Bates and Millicent Martin.
Though you may find your eyebrows shooting up at some of the dialogue and attitudes, it still stands as an hugely entertaining nihilistic comedy on the haves and the have nots, social mobility through one-upmanship and it also gives you a fascinating glimpse at a bygone Central London full of bowler hatted businessmen, Routemaster buses, Ford Cortinas, Humbers, MGs and Vauxhall Victors. The cast is outstanding, and the gleeful way the main actors deliver the sparkling dialogue hints that they all had a huge amount of fun making it.
The 4K restoration of Nothing But the Best is released by STUDIOCANAL and available now on DVD as part of their Vintage Classics series.
EXTRAS: film trailer, behind the scenes stills gallery, an inciteful new interview with writer Frederic Raphael, and a slightly boring 1972 black and white interview with Clive Donner from the University of London that’s more of a curiosity than a .
Review by Paul F Cook
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