Work Is A Four Letter Word
1968
Directed by Peter Hall
Screenplay by Jeremy Brooks
Based on the play “Eh?” by Henry Livings
Music by Guy Woolfenden
Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor
CAST
David Warner – Valentine Brose
Cilla Black – Betty Dorrick
Zia Mohyeddin – Dr Aly Narayana
David Waller- Mr Price
Elizabeth Spriggs- Mrs Murray
Alan Howard – Reverend Mort
plus twenty-four other parts.
American poster
Released June 1968 (UK), September 1968 (USA)
Oddly the Variety review online is dated 31 December 1967
This one started with curiosity. A friend mentioned it to Karen as a potential Swinging 60s film to review. We looked on IMDB. There are very few photos, and no pictures of video or DVD cases. Odd. They usually have them. Amazon? Not even listed, whereas stuff that’s long out of print will be listed with “currently unavailable.” So to my 90s guide book, “Films on Video.” Not listed. Was it never even on VHS? It’s certainly unavailable on DVD here. There are online links to a US DVD but they sniff of ‘bootleg’ to me.
Why? I’d guess because one or more of the principals refused permission, because this film does no one who was involved any favours.
Karen’s copy. Hardback too!
It was directed by Peter Hall who had directed David Warner in Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), said to be the best Hamlet ever (at least by Karen). The Henry Livings play, Eh? was another RSC production, pre-dating Hamlet at the Aldwych in London, in 1964. David Warner had played the same role on stage as in the film, with Donald Sinden as Mr Price. The play went to New York in 1966 and Henry Livings won an Obie for Best Play of The Year.
We have a hardback copy of Eh?, bought by Karen at the time. Then we both have vague recall of the play under its film title Work Is A Four Letter Word. When we met, doing the weekly ELT shows, Colin Granger who then directed, did evenings of short extracts from plays to illustrate a theme. We both have the feeling we did a piece from the play, though glancing through the text brings no memories.
Then the internet trots out the line that Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment was David Warner’s first and last lead role (which I repeated in that review). Not true. This was later. I’m not surprised he has erased it from his personal history.
Then the cinematography is by Gilbert Taylor … Dr Strangelove, Cul-de-sac, A Hard Day’s Night … and Star Wars.
I gave up, but Karen got intrigued and found an online version. So we watched a grainy streaming version. The picture quality and sound were abysmal. I think it’s the only way that it’s possible to see it. Until it becomes a BFI cult movie classic, which some dreadful films do.
Cilla Black as Betty.
They cast Cilla Black as the co-star in her only dramatic film role … she had appeared in the Gerry & The Pacemakers’ film Ferry Cross The Mersey to sing.
Cilla Black: Hey, if somebody like Sir Peter Hall were to come up to you today, and say ‘I would like you to be in a film with me and you’re going to be the only non-Shakespearean person in the whole film,” My God! That is a great compliment to me.
Interview, 1997
Cheap exploitation? Yes … but she was the best actor in it. She definitely didn’t like her image in it, as she went and had a nose job immediately after seeing herself. Then the theme song was confined to a B-side.
Peter Brown (Brian Epstein’s Assistant): She tried, and she wasn’t bad in it, she was pretty good in it, but it didn’t just work as a film.
Cilla Black interview, 1997
The stage play has six characters, and is pretty wordy. I reckon they cut a lot of text as well as adding thirty named characters. Many of the cast had worked at the RSC. Is this the problem with it? They were trying to do a rollicking popular comedy with a “stoner” angle, basing it on a stage play. Were the director and lead actor “slumming it”? The thing is the directors and actors who did popular comedy along the lines of Carry On … were specialists and highly skilled at what they did. Woe betide those used to more serious fare entering that territory.
There are some bad signs. The filming took place in January 1967 according to IMDB- eighteen months before it was released. Alfred Marks was cast as Mr Price (played by Donald Sinden on stage) but walked out during rehearsals, to be replaced by David Waller.
PLOT
IMDB has so few photographs, but so many quotes. The streaming quality was too fuzzy for me to add any “Capture” or iPhone photos of the screen. Unusually too, all the stills on line seem to be either Alamy or Getty copyrighted images. The colour ones mainly come from a YouTube piece on Cilla Black.
At least some quotes are from the longer play text.
FILM:
Mrs Murray: I know you to be an undifferentiated schizophrenic and the least satisfactory sweeper we ever had.
IMDB QUOTE / PLAY TEXT:
Mrs Murray: The fact that I know you to be an undifferentiated schizophrenic and invasive personality with manifestations of primitive and sexual fantasies associated with hostility, and gross evidence of paranoid thinking, does not alter the fact that you are far and away the least satisfactory sweeper we’ve ever had.
Yes, the play IS funnier than the film.
David Warner as Valetine Brose
Valentine Brose (David Warner) doesn’t want to work, and would rather stay at home to tend his giant Mexican mushrooms. However, his bedroom is too small and his fiancée Betty Dorrick (Cilla Black) wants him to settle down. My favourite line is where the hearty vicar, the Reverend Mort (Alan Howard) throws him physically down the church steps:
Valentine: I’m gonna tell God about you!
Brose applies for a job in DICE’s boiler-room, a suitable warm and dark environment to grow his mushrooms.
Valentine: Warm and dark and steamy? I’d like to take this job, Betty. Honestly, I would. We could settle down and grow things together. Just you, and me, and the mushrooms.
It will not be arduous as the plant is fully automated for 23 hours 50 minutes a day, but will need his intervention for just ten minutes, sweeping up. Part of the plot is a prediction of automation replacing humans.
Mr Price: This is a fully automated power station, Brose. It doesn’t need human beings. It doesn’t want them. It only tolerates them so long as they confine themselves to harmless and unnecessary functions such as sweeping out restrooms that do not require sweeping out. Any other sort of activity and you know what will happen to you, Brose?
Valentine: I do not know what will happen to me, Brose.
Mr Price: It will chew you up and spit you out like a used plastic bag.
Mrs Murray (Elizabeth Spriggs) and Mr Price (David Waller). A rare surviving colour still.
Valentine has conflicts with middle-management, especially the personnel manager, Mrs Murray (Elizabeth Spriggs). Brose is more interested in his mushrooms than tending the boiler, so starts off a major power cut.
Zia Mohyeddin as Dr Aly Narayana
The boiler room contains a computer, or rather lots of dials, which towards the end of the film is also breaking down. It was filmed in the Belvedere Power Station, so the fact that it looks fake is down to the real technology of 1967.
Brose marries Betty, but is more interested in having her sweep up the boiler room so he can concentrate on his first love, the mushrooms. Eventually he goes crazy. Well, he puts on a long false nose.
B & W lobby card: gathering the mushrooms
At the end, when everyone munches the phallic giant Mexican mushrooms and goes into hallucination, Peter Hall didn’t even have the gumption to go into psychedelia, either on film (well, a bit of smoke) or musically. There are times when a bit of Pink Floyd are required.
The film ends with Brose and Betty loading up a pram with mushrooms and escaping.
B&W lobby card: Valentine (David Warner) and Betty (Cilla Black) escape
I wondered why everyone pronounces leisure in the American way, lee-zure, not les-zure.
Karen reckoned it astonishingly sexist, even for 1968. I’ve often said “This is the worst film I’ve ever seen” but this time it might even be true.
COMMENTS
George Martin: I remember the film. It wasn’t a knockout. It wasn’t Gone With The wind, was it?
Cilla Black interview, 1997
Weakly futuristic industrial fantasy which the author would probably claim to be about lack of communication. Bored audiences might have a similar view.
Helliwell’s Film Guide
There is an irritating air of improvisation about much of the picture which shows up particularly in the editing, Jack Harris clearly having difficulty in keeping Jeremy Brooks’ wayward screenplay within coherent bounds. The plot and message are merely hooks for a series of off-beat situations, some very funny and others over-reminiscent and over-stressed. Director Peter Hall often hangs on to a point just long enough to blunt it.
Variety 31 December 1967
Work is a Four Letter Word is a bizarre, semi-satirical film whose points become less clear, rather than more evident, as the story draws on.
The Spinning Image
As in most farces, all of the characters converge during the finale, but what begins as a simple slapstick chase throughout the plant ends with everyone engorging on mushroom caps as big as their fist and an orgy of euphoric destruction. Hall’s comic pacing is abysmal, but Warner’s alternately rude and charming role has a lovably-subversive, Lennon-esque edge.
Shock Cinema
SOUNDTRACK
Mainly by Guy Woolfenden, with some electronic music by Delia Derbyshire.
German copy in picture sleeve
Produced by George Martin, arranged by Johnny Spence. Written by Guy Wolfenden and Don Black. Cilla knew what to put on the A sides, and had just had a major hit with Alfie. But this went on the B-side of Where Is Tomorrow? UK chart 39.
Johnny Marr has said he left The Smiths when Morrissey decided to record the song in August 1987 as the B-side of Girlfriend In A Coma:
Girlfriend In A Coma / Work Is A Four Letter Word- The Smiths, 1987
Morrissey: (It was) a bit of a tease really. I wasn’t attempting to produce a great piece of Gothic art … Cilla Black, unbeknown to herself, actually broke The Smiths up!
Johnny Marr: ‘Work Is A Four Letter Word’ I hated. That was the last straw, really. I didn’t form a group to perform Cilla Black songs. That was it, really. I made a decision that I was going to get away on holiday. The only place I could think of was L.A. L.A. was the only place I knew where there’d be sunshine, so off I went. I never saw Morrissey again.
Record Collector, 1992
To be fair to Cilla, her hits were written by the likes of Bacharach & David or Lennon & McCartney, so there’s nothing wrong with “Cilla Black songs.”
Morrissey sings it well, nice jangly guitar too. Very 60s Beat. George Martin’s production on the original sounds vastly better though … Cilla can go higher, there’s a good bass and an orchestra. No jangly guitar at all.
DAVID WARNER
Tom Jones (1963)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
For what it’s worth, it has 92 likes and only 3 dislikes on YouTube, and scores a not-so-low 6.5 on Imdb. But perhaps it appeals to the same audience that made On the Buses the second biggest film of 1971.
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i bought a copy of the DVD from a website called Video Beat
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