Matt and Jean Spencer (Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna), a young, financially challenged, city couple, inherit a dilapidated cinema in a small town. Working with a good-natured solicitor (Leslie Phillips), they attempt to sell it to a wealthy local businessman (Francis De Wolff) who wants the spot for a parking lot, but he decides to try and cheat them. To get a better offer, the Spencers open the theater with the help of the aged staff: Percy Quill (Peter Sellers), an alcoholic projectionist, Mrs. Fazackalee (Margaret Rutherford), a cantankerous ticket-seller, and Old Tom (Bernard Miles), the senile janitor and doorman.
There’s a strong Ealing feeling to this British Lion film. It’s a compact movie, with a group of eccentric characters,working together in the “British way” against adversity. The difference comes in the leads. Most of the Ealing comedies had everyone as part of the cavalcade of quirky personalities, but Matt and Jean Spencer are only abnormal in that they are better looking and more genial than your neighbors. Jean is so amiable that there is no chance for the cinematically far-too-common marital bickering to sidetrack the story. Real-life-couple Travers and McKenna, best known to American audiences as the lion-raising Adamsons in Born Free, couldn’t possibly have been as pleasant as their characters—no one is—but there is a feeling of real affection in their performances. I was with them from the beginning.
The three ancient keepers of the crumbling theater create much of the atmosphere of the film, but have little of the screen time. Rutherford, a mainstay of British comedy, was incapable of putting in a bad performance, and is again excellent here, though she has the least to do. Sellers is at his best when he can lose himself in a character (here, a man forty or more years older than he), and he does that, without any of his characteristic slapstick getting in the way. He gets many of the broader laughs as he tries to keep “his equipment” in working order. Yup, there’s a double entendre or two.
Much of the comedy comes from Matt, the normal guy, dealing with strange situations that everyone else takes as normal. People pay with chickens, a passing train rattles the ceiling, and the patrons are loud and destructive, but the older folks take it in stride. Surprisingly, once he accepts this unusual world, the film works even better as all the “good guys” plot and plan together.
By 1957, many of the post-war elements were fading from Post-War British Comedies, but not from The Smallest Show on Earth. It has a notable linage with screenwriter William Rose (Genevieve, The Maggie, The Ladykillers), executive producers Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launder (The Happiest Days of Your Life, The Belles of St. Trinian’s, The Green Man, Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s, The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s—and that’s not counting their directing and writing credits), cinematographer Douglas Slocombe (Hue and Cry, Kind Hearts and Coronets, A Run for Your Money, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, The Titfield Thunderbolt). Plus there is the idiosyncratic characters and the us-against-them plot. But what really solidifies its position in the movement is the setting, a ruined building, so common in the earlier films. Run-down theaters were not unusual in England after WWII. Resources were scarce and could not be spent on anything “frivolous,” so cinemas were looking pretty threadbare by the mid ’50s.
As Sellers went on to become the biggest star of the cast, The Smallest Show on Earth is marketed as a vehicle for his brand of comedy. It’s a misleading sales pitch. If you are expecting The Pink Panther, you’ll be surprised by what you get, though not disappointed.