THE BED SITTING ROOM

There are movies that are just good, there are movies that are just bad, there are movies so bad they're good... And then there are those rare movies that are so damn weird that words like good or bad just don't quite fit. Richard Lester's 1969 black comedy The Bed Sitting Room is one of those movies.

An adaptation of the one-act play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, The Bed Sitting Room is brilliant but boring, hilarious but incoherent, affecting but nihilistic and ugly. This is the sort of movie you sit through wondering why you don't just walk out... Only to find yourself still thinking about it weeks later.

Set in a post-apocalyptic London, The Bed Sitting Room follows a handful of survivors as they stagger through the rubble, trying to resume their old lives as if the world hasn't gone boom around them. The BBC (now just one poor soul in the tattered remnants of a tuxedo) wanders among them, offering an endless repeat of the news that was. The police hover overhead in their Volkswagen balloon, senselessly barking orders at everybody to "keep moving". Every now and then somebody will mutate into a piece of furniture or an animal, but it's treated as a relatively minor inconvenience. Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson) is quite distressed about his imminent transformation into a bed sitting room, but his biggest worry is that he'll transform before he can make it to a classy neighborhood and he'll end up stuck in some run-down part of town with a poor family squatting inside of him.

The Bed Sitting Room has been described as being "like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes", and that pretty much nails it. These characters aren't just silly types doing their vaudeville routines in the shadow of the broken St. Paul's dome. They are madmen all, driven out of their skulls by unthinkable tragedy, trying to figure out what they're supposed to do after the end of everything.




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