The Battle of the Sexes (1960)

Obnoxious American business expert Angela Barrows (Constance Cummings) runs into Robert Macpherson (Robert Morley), whose just taken over as head of his family’s Scottish tweed company. She sets him on the route to innovation, but that goes over poorly with the extremely conservative men-only workers and the reactionary Mr. Martin (Peter Sellers). Martin set out to sabotage the changes.

Director Charles Crichton and a few of his old Ealing Studio compatriots get together for a mild satire that just never gets going. It looks good, and all of the supporting characters excel, but it limps along, never daring to be anything more than nice. There’s no laughs and only a few smiles. The problem is the gags are all nasty tricks against either the old-timers or Barrows, and for those to be funny, you have to be on someone’s side. But all these folks are terrible. We are supposed to side more with the men, though it is hard to see why besides they are “quaint.” Ealing made an art of showing quaint people, but Ealing had gone bankrupt and the magic isn’t there.

It’s easy to blame Sellers, and I’m happy to take the easy way out. He loved putting on his old man makeup and shuffling about and I suspect he was far more interested in his own little game than in the film. He’s good at it. He always was, but that doesn’t make it entertaining. With Cummings purposefully being annoying (because women in the workplace are always annoying—yeah, its more than a bit dated, and was in 1960, which I suspect contributed to its poor box-office), and Sellers doing his own thing, it’s left to Morley to put some fun into the proceedings, and he does his best, but it isn’t enough.

I’m a bit harsh on a well-made and (generally) well-acted film, but the problem is one of expectation. In every way, this should have been a better film. So count it not as a bad film, but as a disappointing one.

Charles Crichton’s other Post War British Comedies are Hue and Cry (1947), Another Shore (1948) Dance Hall (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), and The Love Lottery (1954). He returned to directing after a more than twenty year hiatus for A Fish Called Wanda (1988).

Peter Seller’s other Post War British Comedies are: Orders Are Orders (1954), Heavens Above! (1963), The Ladykillers (1955), The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), The Naked Truth (1957), Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), I’m All Right Jack (1959), Two Way Stretch (1960), Only Two Can Play (1962), The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963)