Review: Every Home Should Have One
Blu-ray: Every Home Should Have One (1970)
Mention Marty Feldman to me and immediately a plethora of quotes from Young Frankenstein always spring to mind (I still can’t pass a horse without wanting to say “Frau Blücher” to it). For me he was a comedy genius as both a writer and an actor, specifically in his roles in the aforementioned Young Frankenstein, as well as other personal highlights including The Last Remake of Beau Geste, In God We Tru$t and of course his self-titled television series ‘Marty‘. His style of humour always appealed to me, and in hindsight that is is probably thanks to my Dad who brought me up watching and listening to the likes of Monty Python, The Goon show, and Pete & Dud. Though I have to admit to not having seen Every Home Should Have One before now…maybe my Dad kept this one away from my innocent eyes due to the content of the story?
Marty plays Teddy Brown; an enthusiastic yet downtrodden employee of an advertising agency. His passion (or craziness?) for his job is established early when you see him going through his morning routine all accompanied by the songs and cartoon visuals of advertisements. In a steady relationship with his wife Liz (Judy Cornwell) and trying to keep his son Richard (Gary Miller) under control (especially difficult when Richard’s hobby is collecting knickers), Teddy’s life goes quickly from boring to tumultuous thanks to a decision made by his smarmy boss Nat Kaplan (Shelly Berman). With the current television advert for McLaughlin’s frozen porridge not impressing it’s owner and namesake (Jack Watson), Teddy is tasked with creating a new series of adverts based on selling the frozen porridge with sex! This leads to an uproar from the ‘Keep Television Clean’ brigade, of which Teddy’s wife is a member. Add into the mix a Swedish nanny (Julie Ege; who I’m sure was responsible for many a VHS tracking issue during her nude scenes), a German nanny (played brilliantly by Penelope Keith) and some completely over the top set pieces, and you have a recipe for 94 minutes of comedy that I’m sure will polarize its viewers.
With writing credits including Marty Feldman, Denis Norden and Barry Took, you would think to be assured of comedy gold. However, it comes across as though they threw every crazy idea into the script as soon as they came to mind with no thought for continuity or the viewers sanity! I would have loved the opportunity for someone like Barry Cryer to have been given the opportunity to have given it a polish before filming began. This is not to say that the movie isn’t funny, it contained many belly laughs from me, but it also contained as many moments where it just seemed absurd. One scene particularly stands out near the end of the movie and contains a madcap chase through a theatre and Marty sat astride a flaming dragon descending from the ceiling (see, I told you it was crazy). This had the potential to be fantastic, but due to having overlong scenes and being poorly directed by Jim Clark (whose work as an editor is superb in Marathon Man, Yanks, The Killing Fields, and many more) it struggles to find any consistency throughout its running time.
It is definitely a product of its time (complete with fashions still entrenched in the 60’s) and your enjoyment of it will be swayed by how open you are to embracing the sights, sounds and (what appears to be) LSD fuelled writing.
As a fan of Marty Feldman I look forward to giving it another viewing. Maybe I should have a few beers and some frozen porridge at the same time?
Every Home Should Have one is released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 6th 2016.
Special features:
- Original Theatrical trailer
- Textless Material (mute) (The nude sequence with Julie Ege is finally available without the distractions of audio or text to get in the way. Many a lads dream back in the days of VHS)
- Image Gallery
- Promotional and pressbook PDFs
Review by Dave (host of 60 Minutes With) from a disc kindly supplied by Network On Air.
