FEATURE FILM

Director: John Boulting
Producers: Boulting Bros
Prod Company: Charter
Scr: John Boulting-Frank Harvey

Distributor: British Lion - Romulus 
Cert: A-cert (original)

No Ken Griffith tribute event worth its salt could afford to ignore the Welshman’s inspired  teaming with Peter Sellers in some of the finest British post war comedies. I’m All Right, Jack (1959) and Only Two Can Play (1962) (set in Swansea) were shown at last year’s Film Festival so we’ve chosen Heavens Above!, a deliciously jaundiced take on religion and the perversion and exploitation of its ideals by a self-serving community.

A clerical error brings the wrong Rev. Smallwood (Peter Sellers) to the village. This new arrival is a bushy- tailed enthusiast whose naive trust in his fellow man causes mayhem. He’s warned by Griffith, inimitable as a pungent sceptical cleric, that seemingly - soporific Osbiston Parva is a veritable Sodom but persists in making appointments which scandalise and give succour to benefit fraudsters. (Eric Sykes is just one of the shysters!) Soon the Rev. Smallwood falls foul of splenetic pressure groups…

Ken enjoyed himself immensely and he was to don clerical garb again, amusingly, in The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain (1995) and in his last feature Very Annie  Mary (2001).

Dave Berry