Cinema: God's Simpleton

Heavens Above! dresses Peter Sellers —who at one time or another or simultaneously has been a truculent union leader, a dotty dowager duchess, an energetic young soldier, a slimy American playwright, and an earnest Hindu doctor—in round collar and benevolent simper, and makes him a vicar. Sellers gets better and better even if his movies do not. Cinema spoof British-style keeps searching farther and wider for ideas, and audiences have only to consult the credits for proof: this film was based on a conceit of that self-ordained iconoclast, Malcolm Muggeridge.

Oh, it was a terrible mistake, all right, sending a well-meaning ninny like Sellers to take over the parish of Orbiston Parva, home of the great three-in-one restorative, Tranquilax ("A sedative! A stimulant! A laxative!"). Everyone is outraged by the, new vicar's unfashionably golden-rule outlook except a profane and prolific family of Smiths. When the Tranquilax interests toss the Smiths out of the meadow where they have been squatting in grapes-of-wrath raunchiness. Sellers invites them to come live in the vicarage—goat and all. Soon he is up to his bicycle clips in holy hot water.

Heavens Above! bears the hallmark of the Boulting Brothers, whose I'm All Right, Jack gave Sellers his alltime juiciest part. It is a collage of comic bits pasted together with satire: Sellers walking into an open grave in a rainstorm, Sellers munching dog biscuits along with his sherry, a train compartment full of clerics looking startled when "the last supper" is announced in the dining car ahead.

Heavens' vicar and Winter Light's parson are as different as England and Sweden: both have problems all right, but Sellers' troubles are worldly ones. Or are they? In the last scene Sellers is nowhere to be seen, but his quavering voice is heard singing a hymn as he orbits the earth, the first Bishop of Outer Space.