Synopsis
Take a trip round the bend - with the World's Wackiest Family!
A study of absurdity in a suburban family: father recreates the Old Bailey in the living room while the son teaches speak-your-weight machines to sing in the attic.
One Way Pendulum
Cast
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Genre
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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UK
02 Mar 1965
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USANR
Releases by Country
UK
21 Jan 1965
- Theatrical
USA
02 Mar 1965
- TheatricalNR
Popular reviews
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One Way Pendulum follows an eccentric family played by Eric Sykes, Jonathan Miller, Julia Foster and Alison Leggat, who each have various quirks that make up their none-too-normal lives. It’s a promising set-up, but Peter Yates is unfortunately the wrong fit for this type of surreal comedy, directing it far too pedestrianly for the sort of Richard Lester-like zaniness I think the film is supposed to be going for, which just causes every quirky moment to fall flat.
It’s based on a play, but unlike similar swinging sixties Woodfall adaptations like The Knack and How To Get It this just has no energy whatsoever, becoming bogged down in the staginess of the source material without doing enough to ever open the…
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Film version of a successful Dadaist British play of the 60's.
A financial disaster when released, seeing it today it's difficult to imagine this film making its money back, let alone ringing the box office bell. One Way was only one of a handful of films that were made from the 'British Theater of the Absurd,' a movement so badly tracked that there's hardly any academic literature that specifically examines it.
On the comic front, the three leading Brit playwrights of this movement were Nigel Dennis (The Making of Moo, Cards of Identiry), N.F. Simpson (A Resounding Tinkle, One-Way Pendulum) and Spike Milligan (The Goon Show, The Bed Sitting-Room). To some extent, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett could be included…
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Peter Yates’s British comedy in which the very unconventional Groomkirby family, in between making bizarre devices, choose to re-enact a killing and trial in their sitting room.
Adapted from the play of the same name by N. F. Simpson, the movie takes a look of illogicality in a residential family: the father makes again the Old Bailey in the living room, and the son educates weighing machines to sing in the bathroom.
Eric Sykes gives an okay performance in his role as Mr. Groomkirby, the head of the family involved, while George Cole is alright as a defence counsel and Julia Foster is reasonable as Sylvia.
Elsewhere, Jonathan Miller as Kirby, Peggy Mount as Mrs. Mara Gantry, Alison Leggatt as…
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This was a film that had a lot of potential. There were some fantastic ideas in it particularly some of the visuals. Building the court room and teaching the speak your weight machines to sing are wonderfully inventive. But all too often the film was just boring dialogue. Maybe it was less boring in 1965. There were some excellent pieces of dialogue too but it just felt like the film had something it wanted to say and it was going to damn well say it no matter how bored the audience got with it.
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Completely bizarre, extremely surreal oddity. Not sure I really understood it, but I’m glad it exists. Great third-from-last scene / fourth wall break. I’d have ended it there.
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I'm sure the Monty Python team saw this and thought "We could do that but we'll remember to make it funny".
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Surreal nonsense, but there are some truly great absurdist ideas here. Building a life sized replica of the Old Bailey in your spare room, teaching speak-your-weight machines to sing in harmony. Jonathan Miller bring Eric Sykes’ son. However it never quite hangs together right. I wonder how a modern absurdist like Yorgos Lanthimos might deal with the script. Less Python and more Gogol perhaps.
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Adaptation of NF Simpson's Absurdist play. It's a hard one because it has some very funny ideas, but the way they all hang together didn't really work for me, on the other hand I suspect if I had watched it on a different night I might have found it funnier as a whole
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While this film was mostly boring - its roots as a stage production feeling obvious, yet the reason for it being made into a feature film feeling not - I can say that I thought the opening scenes, the sequence in the street with Groomkirby pushing his wooden cart along the street were fun sequences. Also the singing weighing machines were fun. For obvious reasons ;)
It's an interesting mix of british kitchen sink realism, and absurdist farce - a genre mix up I could stand to see more of :)
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I’d not heard of this before it’s tv showing this week. It’s a strange film that I doubt any coherent plot description can make anything of. It was originally a theatre play, and I’d be intrigued to see how it worked there. I suspect that some kind of re-working of it these days might be more successful, largely due to our post-Python sensibilities. (I seriously doubt anyone would do that, however).
If you like your humour rather left-field, then this may have some interest for you, if not I’d avoid it. Much of what occurs is in the area of non-sequitur humour, or has no relationship to anything else except itself. I doubt that much of the cast had any… -
I’m not sure I’d call it good, but it’s certainly one of the strangest mainstream films I’ve ever seen. A lot of it is too random to really hit that sweet spot of anti-logic it seems to be going for, but the trial sequence works pretty well.