NOTHING BUT THE BEST (1964)

The Swinging London of the 1960s might have been hip and brightly coloured (at least if you ignored most of it), with post-war austerity banished to an unpleasant memory, and the younger generation embracing more liberal feelings (though not as much as we sometimes imagine). But the British class system still sailed on majestically, and if you didn’t want to drop out, one way to get ahead was to climb the social ladder.

The degree to which this could still dominate the thinking of smart young things supposedly freed from the hidebound ways of their elders is the biggest joke of all in Clive Donner’s Nothing But the Best; and further smaller jokes, virtually all of them successful, come in a seemingly endless stream as Frederic Raphael’s screenplay tracks the rise and rise of Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates), a working-class young man determined to become a toff and help himself to the lifestyle of the upper classes.

“Face it,” he says in voiceover at the beginning, “it’s a filthy stinking world. But there are some smashing things in it.”

Brewster has great aspirations at work, but only a junior position at a posh estate agent’s firm, and confesses to “butterflies” when he has to interact with his social superiors. His sights are set high where women are concerned too, but for now he has to content himself with less prestigious trophies; we see him early on in the film making moves on Nadine (Lucinda Curtis), another junior employee at the firm, because “one has to keep in practice”.

Soon, however, an opportunity presents itself for Jimmy to better himself on both fronts when he is assigned to mentor young Hugh Langham (James Villiers), whose breeding has won him a position at the firm even if his brains would not,and who is courting the boss’s daughter Ann (Millicent Martin). Brewster manages to undermine Hugh at work and make himself look good in the process, and he also carries off a successful business deal by accident, but his biggest stroke of luck comes when he runs into Charlie Prince (Denholm Elliott), a drunken layabout with a bad gambling habit, disowned by his parents but undeniably upper-class.

Brewster does not really like Prince, or vice versa (he considers Brewster an “ambitious yob”), but the working-class lad extends both friendship and financial support to the posh chap, who has to accept it because he is so often broke. (“One must feed the goose if one wants him to lay the golden eggs,” Brewster muses.) This comes with one condition, though:Prince must teach Brewster the ways of truly top-drawer people. And so they embark on a series of lessons in faking high status—a day at Cambridge so Brewster can pose as a graduate, a wine-tasting session, instruction on shooting, discussion of “what’s wrong with the British workman”.

He’s a natural, and it’s not long before he’s able to successfully gatecrash a hunt ball. He learns to describe his father, in reality a retired stevedore, as being in “import/export”. He becomes accustomed to helping himself to Prince’s possessions, and he soon has access to Prince’s occasional influxes of cash too; spending Prince’s money, wearing Prince’s suit, he starts to feel like he is Prince.

Most importantly for his prestige, his love life and his future at the firm, he also manages to charm Ann (“the only girl in London who says no”) away from the well-spoken but dim Hugh. She has Brewster’s measure (“charming, good-looking and completely immoral”) but she does seem genuinely taken by him, and things are looking good until Prince has a big win on the horses and decides it’s time to say goodbye…

It’s surprising that a film on such an English theme, so heavy on English locations and traditions, comes from an American source. However, Nothing But the Best is based on a short story by Stanley Ellin, The Best of Everything, which was first published in 1952 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and then anthologised a few years later. The story is set in the US—Ellin rarely left Brooklyn—but clearly resonated with the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who, although American-born himself, had spent most of his life in Britain. Raphael first adapted it for Drama ’61 on ATV, part of the British ITV network of commercial TV stations (and the short story would later also be the basis of a 1981 episode of Tales of the Unexpected, another ITV production). It then became a film screenplay for Donner and producer David Deutsch of Anglo-Amalgamated, a company which was best-known for low-budget pictures including the Carry On franchise but also produced some critically significant movies such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).

his was only Raphael’s second movie—he would win an Academy Award for his next, John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965)—but he clearly had a strong idea already of how to achieve his goals. On one of this disc’s bonus features, he explains that he tried to give the cast “things they can say, but not too many” and not “cram their mouths with words”; the result is a film full of one-liners (“I always believe in starting a new job drunk” / “I’ve no intention of earning an honest penny at my time of life”) and even the occasional daring innuendo (“it’s one darn thing on top of another” says a character when he and a woman are seemingly about to go to bed), dialogue that is completely unnatural but never monotonous.

The writing can be sharp, too—Brewster’s ignorance of the Latin term viva voce incontrovertibly pegs him as someone who didn’t go to the very best school and Oxbridge (I don’t know if this is in the Ellin short story, but I doubt it). And the three interconnected twists toward the end of the film are well-constructed and clever, if not completely unforeseeable.

The cast are as mannered as the screenplay, quite rightly because all the parts are really caricatures rather than believable people, and they seem to be having fun (which Raphael confirms in his interview on this disc). In a film which consistently takes a male point of view—it’s presented as slightly comical, slightly annoying when a woman has her own agenda—it is the men who stand out. Bates, a star by this stage, is a more nuanced actor than you’d think at first glance (his previous role, in Carol Reed’s 1963 film The Running Man, is a fine example of this) and crucially he comes across as likeable and almost innocent, though by any objective measure the character is obnoxious and near-psychopathic.

But the outstanding performance comes from Elliott, whose Prince is a magnetic wastrel both impossible to ignore and impossible to completely like. Elliott leaves us guessing about how much of Prince’s louche playboy act is in fact an act. He lets us know, without overemphasising it, that the character is intelligent as well as dissolute, and also lets us see a touch of dangerous aggression.

Harry Andrews as Horton, the boss of the firm where Brewster works, renders a certain kind of old-school English gentleman perfectly: completely assured in his position at the top of the pecking order, impeccably polite but not necessarily friendly about it. He’s tellingly contrasted with the more plain-spoken hard-nosed businessman Coates (Godfrey Quigley)—who obviously went to a lesser school—and the equally posh, but younger and therefore more casual, money man Slater (Donald Pickering).

Villiers as Hugh, Brewster’s early rival for the hand of Ann, is an amusing cartoonish upper-class twit. The journalist Bernard Levin (becoming a familiar face to the average British viewer after his appearances on the BBC’s satirical TV series That Was the Week That Was) makes a cameo appearance as an intellectual snob overheard in a theatre lobby,describing the show as “positively the worst play I’ve seen since last Tuesday”. Willie Rushton, the co-founder of Private Eye magazine and another That Was the Week That Was regular, also has a tiny role. Both he and Levin must, at the time, have given Nothing But the Best an air of freshness and topicality.

Among the female cast, it’s Pauline Delaney who stands out as Brewster’s tirelessly flirtatious landlady, Mrs March. Martin’s Ann in the biggest female role is convincing enough as a strong-willed, clear-sighted young woman, but (unlike with Mrs March) we never really get a sense of her having a perspective or goals of her own. She exists to be pursued,and to be hard to get. This is an issue with the writing as much as the performance, of course, but it limits what Martin can achieve with the part.

Donner’s direction isn’t subtle, because subtlety isn’t the objective here. When Brewster lies that “I’m a bit full next week”, we get a shot of his empty diary. The sign of a pub called ‘The Young Pretender’ is dwelt on by the camera. A prominent and ungainly flypaper in Brewster’s kitchen both reminds us of his undignified circumstances and serves as a symbolic trap for Prince. But the direction is frequently skilful—a scene where Brewster struggles downstairs at his lodgings with a heavy trunk is masterfully shot—and makes great use of locations too. Many of them, such as the West London Air Terminal, are now evocative of a disappeared world.

Nor is the musical soundtrack subtle in the slightest. Martin performs the title song in standard 1960s style. Ron Grainer and His Orchestra provide incidental music, and the credit for The Eagles refers to a brief appearance by the British band of that name, hailing from Bristol—not the later American mega-group. (Both Grainer and The Eagles had recently worked with Donner on his 1962 film Some People.) What’s much more striking, though, is the use of classical music for ironic effect, including a jazzed-up instrumental version of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, the Mendelssohn “Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture”; the British national anthem also makes a tongue-in-cheek appearance. It’s all very much giving the finger to the Establishment in a way that was so popular during the 1960s it became almost a convention in itself.

Indeed, Nothing But the Best isn’t trying to break new ground. Much of its narrative and thematic content can be frequently found elsewhere in both film and literature: for instance the story of the social climber and the rich man’s daughter in Room at the Top (John Braine’s novel filmed by Jack Clayton in 1959), the tensions between two men of different classes sharing a home in The Servant (Robin Maugham’s novella filmed superbly by Joseph Losey in 1963), the socially ambitious young man tempted to steal another’s identity in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley stories (later filmed several times). There’s even an important plot element which could have come from Rope (Patrick Hamilton’s play adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1948). The echoes of Ripley are especially strong and it’s interesting that both he and the man whose identity he takes are American; perhaps Nothing But the Best’s Brooklyn origins aren’t all that surprising after all.

The film’s ending is open, explicitly, with a question mark superimposed on the last image. The uncovering of something hidden may be about to precipitate Brewster’s fall. But up to that point, his rise has been so fast-moving and thoroughly entertaining that even if there is nothing remotely profound about Nothing But the Best, it’s a delight from start to finish, and one that manages both to be firmly set in the 1960s and to not feel excessively dated at all. Status and the seeking of it are always with us.

UK | 1964 | 99 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Blu-ray Special Features:

• NEW 4K restoration of the film. Absolutely nothing about this bouncy, energetic film is dull or drab, and StudioCanal’s restoration from the original camera negative does full justice to the bright lighting and vivid colours of cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (who had also worked with Clive Donner and Alan Bates on The Caretaker the previous year, and of course would later become better known as a director). The opening titles—designed by Jim Baker—also look great, with effective use of still images in negative.
• NEW The Best of Everything: Interview with Frederic Raphael. A shortish but interesting new interview in which Nothing But the Best’s screenwriter expounds on his writing philosophy, also taking in other films on which he has worked such as Clive Donner’s Rogue Male (1976) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
• University of London interview with Clive Donner. A 1972 interview in talking-heads style (and black-and-white) where Nothing But the Best’s director discusses the film with writer and publisher Ian Cameron, a prominent critic of the period. Though it’s rather difficult to hear and a lot of time is spent on another of Donner’s movies, Some People (1962), the conversation is insightful.
• Trailer. Tries to sell the film with the distinctly untempting and uninformative tagline “How to succeed in the living business by really trying”.
• English subtitles.

Cast & Crew

director: Clive Donner.
writer: Frederic Raphael & Stanley Ellin (based on the short story ‘The Best of Everything’ by Stanley Ellin).
starring: Alan Bates, Denholm Elliott, Harry Andrews, Millicent Martin, Pauline Delaney, Godfrey Quigley, Alison Leggatt, Lucinda Curtis, Nigel Stock, James Villiers & Drewe Henley.