The Fox and Mrs Garter (1966)

D. Albert Ross
Colour

Let’s be honest, ‘The Sound of Music’ has caused more deaths than any other movie.

I know that might sound like a contentious theory at first, but bear with me. There’s something about those nuns singing such terrible sickly songs to those creepy, godawful kids that just makes the blood of hitherto right minded people boil. (The old joke is that ‘The Sound of Music’ is a frustrating story of how the Nazis failed to kill seven revolting children.) ‘Natural Born Killers’ and ‘Dexter’ may get the headlines, but I think if an enterprising criminologist was looking for instances where someone snapped – where some sane and peaceful part of a hitherto upstanding member of the community just broke – he or she would find that in the background was a viewing of Robert Wise’s ‘The Sound of Music’. I speak from personal experience: that shot of Dame Julie spinning around on the hill makes me want to go out and bludgeon kittens.

So it’s interesting that right after that movie was made, Julie Andrews herself seemed to respond with violence.

In this genteel, but bloody, comedy Dame Julie plays the eponymous Mrs Garter, a widow who lives in a delightfully opulent house in Bloomsbury and apart from wearing black every day seems to lead a charmed life. Seeking to seduce this charming bereaved lady is Peter Sellers, as Wilberforce Cartwright-Smyth, a dapper and fake white hunter and the bluebeard of the Victorian age. He intends to marry Mrs Garter and take possession of all her money. So begins an expert seduction, which Mrs Garter seems to find impossible to resist. However Mrs Garter has her own secret – she poisoned her last husband and the husband before that and the husband before that. So both parties have murder on their mind, but who will succeed first and will they fall in love beforehand?

Andrews does nothing here that would be considered particularly funny, but in her prim and proper, no fuss approach to murder, she’s absolutely perfect for this movie and the perfect foil for Sellers. (If she couldn’t sing, she might have found her niche as a counter culture version of Margaret Dumont.) Everything he does becomes funnier because it’s so grounded by her. Indeed she brings him back down from the high moments of excitement and loudness that he was prone to at this point in his career – a mugging desperation in the pursuit of laughs. This was the period of ‘Hoffman’, ‘The Ad Man’ and ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ all of which show a somewhat misogynistic star. This movie could have been distasteful in the same way, but Andrews’ charm and strength of her performance negates that. She makes even the most unbearably excited version of Peter Sellers bearable (and funnier).

Apparently the two actors couldn’t stand each other (and Andrews would soon marry another of Sellers’s nemeses [he was a man who had more than one], Blake Edwards), but maybe that helped as well – as much like Alec Guinness and Hayley Mills the other week, these two would be murderers retain a certain wariness to each other even in the wooing, and the whole drips with delicious malice.