Bedazzled (1967 / 2000), Contrast Review

Two Films, One Wish

Two films share the same story, and the distance between them could hardly be greater. The 1967 Bedazzled is one of my favorite British comedies, dry, sad and very funny. The 2000 remake is a watchable American comedy that doesn’t get what made the first one work.

Both follow a lonely man who sells his soul to the Devil for seven wishes, each of which goes wrong because the Devil takes him too literally. The difference lies in what goes wrong and why, and it’s worth looking at closely, because it’s a lesson in how the same premise can produce two completely different films.

What I love about the 1967 film is how little it cares about being liked. Cook plays the Devil as the most tedious man in London, Moore mopes and hopes, and the jokes arrive dry enough that you could miss half of them. The remake has more money on screen and plenty of energy from Brendan Fraser, and I still missed Cook’s sneer every few minutes.

Bedazzled (1967). 9/10

Stanley Donen directed the original, and Peter Cook wrote the script from a story he developed with Dudley Moore. Moore plays Stanley Moon, a miserable short-order cook at a Wimpy bar in London, hopelessly in love with a waitress named Margaret who barely knows he exists. After a failed suicide attempt, he’s visited by George Spiggott, the Devil, played by Cook, who offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul.

It’s a small, strange film. London looks wintry and faded, the colors are muted and the humor is bone dry. It came out at the height of Swinging London, and it has almost none of the era’s gloss. It’s a comedy about disappointment, and it’s all the funnier for knowing that. Donen, better known for glossy musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, keeps the camera still and lets the two comedians work. The direction is unshowy, and it trusts the script completely. That restraint is a large part of why the jokes still land.

Cook and Moore

By 1967 Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most famous comedy double act in Britain.

They’d come out of Beyond the Fringe, the revue that started the British satire boom, and their television series Not Only… But Also had made them household names. Bedazzled is the best film either of them made, because Cook wrote it for exactly what they did well.

Cook is the cool, bored, superior one, and Moore is the small, eager man he torments. Moore also wrote the score, a jazzy, melancholy thing that sounds like London in the late sixties and gives the film a sadness under the jokes. Watching them together, you can see why they became legends, and why their partnership later fell apart.

Their partnership was never easy, and the film captures something of that. Cook’s contempt for Stanley is funny because there’s a little real contempt in it, and Moore’s hopeful, battered persistence is funny because there’s real hurt behind it. Few double acts have been this honest on screen.

A Petty Devil

Cook’s Devil is magnificent, and the joke is that he isn’t grand at all. George spends his days doing tiny, spiteful things: scratching records so they skip, tearing the last pages out of Agatha Christie novels so readers never find out who did it, letting wasps loose at picnics. He’s less a prince of darkness than a bored civil servant with a grudge.

The scratched records and the torn-out Agatha Christie endings are my favorite jokes in the film, because they’re so small. I think Cook understood that most malice is plain boredom, and his Devil is funnier for it than any horned villain could be.

God threw him out of heaven for wanting a little attention, and he’s been trying to win his way back ever since by collecting enough souls to beat God’s score. It’s a funny idea, and underneath it is a real grievance: George thinks God treated him unfairly, and the film half agrees with him.

That’s what makes the ending work. George is a resentful employee who wants recognition, and when he finally tries to do a good deed to impress his old boss, it goes as badly as everything else he touches.

The Wishes

Every wish goes wrong in the same way.

Stanley asks for something, and George gives him exactly what he asked for, with one clause left out. He wishes to be articulate, and becomes a pretentious intellectual, and Margaret screams the moment he makes a move. He wishes to be rich and married to Margaret, and finds her bored and having an affair. He wishes to be a pop star, and George forms a rival band that sings a song of pure, flat indifference and steals every fan he has.

The funniest and cruelest is the wish for a quiet, loving life with Margaret. Stanley forgets to say he wants to be himself, and he ends up as a nun in a silent order that worships by jumping on trampolines, still in love and unable to speak. It’s funny, and then it’s awful, and the film means both.

That trampoline sequence is where the film becomes great for me. It’s a ridiculous image, and then you remember Stanley can’t say a word to the woman he loves, and the laugh turns sour in your mouth.

The structure is simple and ruthless. Each wish is a short film with its own world, and each one ends the moment Stanley blows a raspberry to cancel it. That device, the silly noise that ends the dream, becomes more painful each time he has to use it.

The Seven Deadly Sins

George has a staff: the Seven Deadly Sins, each played as a person who follows him around London. Raquel Welch is Lust, in a brief and famous appearance.

Barry Humphries, years before Dame Edna made him famous, is Envy. The others turn up at odd moments to help ruin Stanley’s wishes, bickering and sulking like office workers.

It’s a lovely comic device, and it turns damnation into a job with incompetent colleagues who resent their boss and each other. It also keeps the film’s theology light while it takes its questions about desire, envy and regret quite seriously, and it gives Cook a chorus to play against.

Welch’s cameo, as Lust in lingerie, got most of the publicity, but the quieter sins are funnier. They’re bored, petty and put-upon, a workforce that’s been in the same dead-end job for eternity, and they make hell feel like a badly run office.

Eleanor Bron’s Margaret

It’s easy to miss how much the original depends on Eleanor Bron. Margaret is the object of every wish, and Bron plays her slightly differently in each one: bored, devoted, fearful, oblivious. She’s the fixed point Stanley keeps trying to reach, and her warmth turns his failures from merely funny into sad.

The remake writes Alison as a prize to be won. Bron’s Margaret is a person, and the whole film is built around Stanley never really seeing her.

Bedazzled (2000). 5/10

Harold Ramis, the director of Groundhog Day, remade it with Brendan Fraser as Elliot Richards, a lonely, awkward tech-support worker, and Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil. The structure is the same: seven wishes, each twisted. Frances O’Connor plays Alison, the colleague Elliot adores from a distance.

Ramis is a good director and Groundhog Day is one of the great comedies, a film built on exactly this kind of repeating structure, so the remake should have worked. It doesn’t, and the reasons are instructive for anyone who writes. The premise survives intact. What’s missing is any sense that the wishes are telling us something about the man making them.

Costume Changes

Each wish in the remake plays as a costume change. Elliot becomes a Colombian drug lord, a sensitive man who weeps at sunsets, a basketball star with no brain, a famous writer and even Abraham Lincoln on the night he’s shot. Each segment is a comic sketch about the costume, and Fraser throws himself into every one with real commitment and range.

But the original’s wishes were about Stanley himself.

Each one exposed something in him, his vanity, his cowardice, his inability to be loved as he is, and they hurt. The remake’s wishes are about outfits. Nothing in Elliot changes because of them until the film announces that he has, so there’s nothing for the ending to resolve.

That’s the lesson the remake teaches by accident. A wish story works only when each wish reveals the person making it. Swap in a new costume and a new set, and you get variety without meaning, the comic equivalent of flipping channels.

Hurley’s Devil

Elizabeth Hurley looks the part and delivers her lines well, and she clearly enjoys the costumes.

But she plays the Devil as a glamorous seductress, all red dresses and innuendo, and much of the comedy leaves with that choice. Cook’s Devil was funny because he was petty and bored. Hurley’s is simply a temptress, and temptresses aren’t funny in themselves.

Hurley’s casting is the choice that sinks the remake for me. She’s game and she looks terrific in the red dresses, but a sexy Devil gives the film nowhere to go, and I’d have traded every costume in it for one scene of Cook scratching a record. Elliot also gets a gentle, sentimental ending in the remake, about learning to be himself and finding a nicer girl next door, and it’s pleasant and entirely forgettable. The original ends with God slamming the door in the Devil’s face, and it’s much sadder and much funnier.

Cook’s Script

Peter Cook’s script is sharper than it first appears.

The wishes are funny, and they’re also a satire of late sixties Britain: its class system, its church, its pop culture and its sexual revolution. Each wish targets a different fantasy of the period. Stanley works at a Wimpy bar, the cheapest kind of job in the cheapest kind of restaurant, and every wish is a fantasy of escaping into a different class or a different kind of life.

The church gets an especially dry treatment. The Devil is a bored functionary with a petty grudge, God is an unseen bureaucrat who won’t let him back in, and the nuns of the silent order are funnier than any priest in any British comedy of the period. Cook had been sharpening this kind of satire since Beyond the Fringe, and here he points it at the idea of salvation itself.

The pop star sequence is the most pointed. Stanley becomes a teen idol singing a love song, and George outdoes him instantly with a flat, bored performance of total indifference.

The screaming fans prefer the indifference. That’s a joke about pop music. It’s also a joke about how celebrity works, and it still works, half a century and several pop revolutions later.

None of this makes the film heavy. The satire is carried lightly, underneath the jokes. It’s one of the reasons the original feels so much richer than the remake. The remake aims at easier targets.

How the Original Has Aged

The 1967 film has aged better than almost any British comedy of its decade. Its jokes depend on character, not topical references, and its satire of vanity, envy and wishful thinking is as sharp now as it was then. Only a few of the pop culture gags feel like period pieces. It has also grown in reputation as Cook and Moore’s television work has been rediscovered. Viewers who come to it from their sketches find the same partnership at feature length, with a story strong enough to hold it together.

The Faust Behind Both

Both films come out of the old Faust story, the scholar who sells his soul for knowledge and pleasure. The 1967 version gets what Marlowe and Goethe understood: the bargain is a trap because the man making it doesn’t know what he really wants, and getting it only proves that.

The 2000 version keeps the bargain and forgets the man. That’s the difference in a sentence.

It’s why one film is still watched and quoted fifty years later and the other is mostly remembered as a Brendan Fraser vehicle that did reasonable business and faded. If you want to understand how a premise differs from a story, watch them back to back.

Craft Note

Which Bedazzled is better, 1967 or 2000?

By a mile. The 1967 film gets a 9 from me because Cook, Moore and Eleanor Bron made a comedy that’s funny and sad in the same breath, and my only complaint is that a few of the pop culture gags have dated. The 2000 remake gets a 5. Watch the original for Cook and Moore at their best and for Bron. Watch the remake if you want to see Brendan Fraser work hard in a film that doesn’t deserve him.

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