The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

directed by Richard Lester
UK
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is your typical dry British comedy about the state of the nation following a "nuclear misunderstanding" (the bomb being referred to as "that rude thing", "that mess", and various hand gestures and sound effects) and an apparently very brief WWIII. I think I've mentioned before that for reasons even I don't understand I'll eat up any films related to a nuclear-war-induced apocalypse, even movies like this that are comedies and don't show any of the emotional devastation following the destruction of a nation.

Except... it kind of does show emotional devastation, in its own weird, non-confrontational way. Which was unexpected. The landscape is an exaggerated, comical wasteland full of elaborately-constructed ruins that are really quite visually pleasing (something about a mountain of shoes in the middle of nowhere spoke to my aesthetic sensibilities) but at the heart of it all, it uses its humor as a coping mechanism, and sometimes not even that. Beneath the absurdism and the jokes is a stiff-upper-lipped type of mourning, a refusal to acknowledge the end of the world out of difficulty coming to terms with it. Family ties and the pursuit of happiness (wait, wrong country) are still very much intact and are held onto with a death grip despite the ruination of the world around the characters, and that desperation occasionally breaks through the humorous exterior to be something weirdly touching.

It gets a little more meaningful when you consider the time it was released in as well. I initially thought it came out in 1989 but it turns out it was 1969, and while that's fairly far removed from the devastation of WWII, this is still a nation dealing with the aftermath of what was close at some points to total annihilation. A factoid that gets tossed around a lot is that London only returned to its pre-WWII population in 2015. Considering how much was lost in the war, this film's use of humor as a coping mechanism gets a little more reasonable.

Unfortunately I felt that this movie felt a little too thrown-together as a whole to be all that it could have been. It's disjointed and the jokes come rapid-fire instead of being set up and executed with any kind of pacing, and it is still very funny- Marty Feldman is in it, after all- but it wears out its welcome eventually, and jokes at the speed of machine-gun fire for 87 minutes can tucker you out.