The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
Title card
Directed byDick Lester
Peter Sellers
Screenplay bySpike Milligan
Peter Sellers
Mario Fabrizi
Dick Lester
Story byPeter Sellers
Produced byPeter Sellers
StarringPeter Sellers
Spike Milligan
CinematographyDick Lester
Edited byDick Lester
Peter Sellers
Music byDick Lester
Production
company
Peter Sellers Productions
Distributed byBritish Lion Films
Release date
November 1959
Running time
11 minutes[1]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget£70

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film is a 1959 British sketch comedy short film directed by Richard Lester and Peter Sellers, in collaboration with Bruce Lacey.[2]

It was filmed over two Sundays in 1959, at a cost of around £70 (equivalent to £1,733 in 2021) (including £5 for the rental of a field).[3]

It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject, but lost to the Jacques Cousteau film The Golden Fish.[4] It was a favourite of The Beatles, which led to Lester being hired to direct A Hard Day's Night and then Help!, in which Lacey makes a guest appearance as George Harrison's gardener in the sequence where the group arrive at their 'home'.[5]

The short film has been made available as a special feature on several home video releases of A Hard Day's Night. It is also featured in The Unknown Peter Sellers and a BFI released collection of rarely seen films from Bruce Lacey's career entitled The Lacey Rituals. It is also included as a special feature of the StudioCanal issue of I'm All Right Jack.

Synopsis

The short consists of a series of surreal vignettes which transpire in the English countryside and involve a rotating array of protagonists. It begins with a man watching through a telescope how an old woman cleans a meadow with a rag and bucket. Other examples are a photographer who tries to develop a film in the water of a lake after wrapping a black piece of cloth around his head, or an athlete who is performing push-ups and is then used as the seat for the model of a portrait painter. The model has numbers on her face which the painter uses to choose the correct colours from his numbered palette. The same athlete later throws a hammer, which is then shot down like a skeet shooting target by a hunter. The film ends with a man wearing a top hat and a single boxing glove knocking out another man he had been luring for a long time. The man then enters a hut, undresses, puts the boxing glove back on and goes to sleep, turning off the light and ending the movie.

Cast

Critical reception

BFI Screenonline concluded that the film's lasting legacy "was its influence (as part of Milligan's overall body of work) on British comedy in general, and on Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–74) in particular. This is evident not only in its surreal humour, but in the way that elements of one routine are threaded through subsequent scenes, transcending the stand-alone sketch form—a tactic subsequently favoured by the Python team."[6] Empire magazine called it "Sublime slapstick surrealism."[7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "THE RUNNING JUMPING & STANDING STILL FILM - British Board of Film Classification". www.bbfc.co.uk.
  2. ↑ "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959) - Richard Lester, Peter Sellers - Cast and Crew - AllMovie". AllMovie.
  3. ↑ "Running Jumping & Standing Still..." A Short History of The Telegoons... The Goon Show Preservation Society. Retrieved 2 July 2008.
  4. ↑ Philo, Simon (6 November 2014). British Invasion: The Crosscurrents of Musical Influence. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780810886278 – via Google Books.
  5. ↑ James, David E. (10 December 2015). Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance With Popular Music. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199387625 – via Google Books.
  6. ↑ "BFI Screenonline: Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, The (1960)". www.screenonline.org.uk.
  7. ↑ Parkinson, David. "The Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film". Empire.
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