There is some addictive raffishness and raciness in this 1964 British black-comedy satire for which screenwriter Frederic Raphael adapts a short story by American mystery writer Stanley Ellin; Clive Donner directs with cinematography by Nicolas Roeg. Alan Bates plays a pushy, plausible young fellow called James Brewster, employed in an upmarket “auctioneer” house – ie estate agent’s – in London’s West End, a firm greedily taking advantage of the construction boom.
Brewster is competent and hardworking but deeply ashamed of his lower-class background and his poor old mum and dad, and suspects he would do much better in the company if he had some patrician polish; his boss Mr Horton (Harry Andrews) is at present more enamoured of his airily entitled colleague Hugh (James Villiers) who is dating Horton’s daughter Ann, played with mischievous sensuality by Millicent Martin, then best known for the TV show That Was the Week That Was.
James chances across a seedy, sleazy but coolly well-born chap in a cafe; this is Charlie, wonderfully played by Denholm Elliott. Charlie scrapes up an acquaintance with James and confesses he’s on his uppers, having been cut off by his wealthy father after he was caught forging a cheque. And, with the private school man’s knack of giving orders, never saying please or thank you and sinuously implying that any objection to this on your part would be embarrassingly declasse, Charlie gets the mesmerised James to lend him cash, pay for taxis, etc.
But James has a plan: Charlie will come and share his room in his down-at-heel boarding house in return for lessons in how to dress and behave. However parasitic Charlie is, his lessons have an effect and James starts impressing both his boss and Ann herself. (Bates and Martin have a great scene in a lift where she briefly permits him to kiss her and then purrs “Basta così.”) There aren’t in fact many scenes of Charlie actually tutoring James, except for somewhat surreal sequences in which he guides him through the lanes of Cambridge (a very Raphaelesque touch), a session of rough shooting and then a scene on the squash court in which Charlie schools James in what to say and think about various nationalities and ethnic groups: a scene which has earned this rerelease a trigger warning about historical attitudes.
Nothing But the Best is an intriguing mix of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley with Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top, and of course Robert Hamer’s class comedy School for Scoundrels. Elliott’s rather reptilian and shameless attitude to his own lawbreaking makes him a villain that Patrick Hamilton might have imagined. The fascinating thing about the film though is that James gets his new upper-class authenticity through a sort of osmosis. Simply by keeping the sweaty, sleazy Charlie in his bachelor room as a sort of secret, James appropriates his prestige for public show.
Raphael and Donner deliver some outrageously macabre twists, worthy of Roald Dahl (the original Ellin story also formed the basis of a 1981 episode in the Dahl-flavoured British TV show Tales of the Unexpected) while the film is a great time capsule taste of 60s London with that once ubiquitous journalist and man-about-town Bernard Levin playing himself in cameo.
• Nothing But the Best is on digital platforms from 26 August.
