The story begins simply enough with the signing of a 'tontine' where 20 young men are entered into a lottery. Their fathers pay $1,000 pounds for their sons which will be put into a bank account and allowed to grow. The last surviving son will be rewarded with all of the money. So it begins and the years pass, 63 to be exact, with the boys growing up and some meeting their maker in an inspired scene that had me rolling. Then, it comes down to 2 brothers, the Finburys, Masterman (John Mills) and Joseph (Ralph Richardson), who live next to each other but haven't spoken in 40 years.
Joseph is away on vacation with his two nephews, Morris (Peter Cook) and John (Dudley Moore), so when Masterman finds out they're the only two remaining men, he sends for him with a very made-up deathbed message. Masterman intends to kill his brother and give all the money to his grandson, Michael (Michael Caine), to help pay off the family debt and also put him through medical school. Morris and John catch wind of the news and are thrust into an awkward situation when the train they're riding on crashes, and they believe Joseph was killed. The money is so close, and they believe all they need is Joseph to outlast Uncle Masterman for a few days. Not so fast though, Joseph is very much alive.
So starts a story that bounces around and all over the place with far too many cases of misunderstanding and scheming to even mention here. If it all sounds ridiculous, it is but don't be scared away. The humor comes out of these ridiculous situations and the crazy reactions these individuals have to 'solve' their problems. Having the two brothers live next to each other provides for an easy use of general confusion as boxes intended for the other house goes to the wrong one. Some unnecessary but still funny title cards help move things along.
What makes this work from start to finish is the casting. Mills and Richardson as the two longlost brothers are dead-on. Mills is made up to look like he is on death's doorstep but he's really anything but as the scheming, murdering brother, and Richardson nails the part of the clueless brother who collects facts and bores people to death with everything he's learned. Caine is even funny in an early part as the straight man, including a possibly forbidden love with his cousin Julia (Nanette Newman) who lives with Uncle Joseph. The best part of Caine's role is his scenes with Peacock the butler (Wilfrid Lawson), the weary, tired, slow-moving house attendant who hasn't been paid in 7 long years.
In the more slapstick scenes, Cook and Moore as the bumbling but still devious brothers provide their fair share of laughs, especially Moore who can't curb his interest in working class women. And in a small but still funny cameo, Peter Sellers plays Dr. Pratt, a clueless drunk of a doctor who provides Morris with a death certificate for his dead grandfather which you can check out here and here. I've never been a huge fan of Sellers, I just don't get some of his humor, but he's too much here, making the most of his two-scene appearance.
The movie isn't available in DVD format, and VHS tapes can be a little expensive to track down but good news from Youtube! A user has kindly made The Wrong Box available broken up into 10-minute segments. The link earlier is Part 1, and you can go from there if you wish to watch the rest of the movie. It's not well known at all here in the States, but I'm glad I stumbled across it. Dry and slapstick humor, it's laugh out loud however you look at it.
The Wrong Box (1966): ***/****
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