It is the third or maybe fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the Third World War. It’s also the third or maybe fourth anniversary of the end of the same war. It took less than three minutes on account of nuclear hellfire and all that. In this scenario, Penelope Frereton (Rita Tushingham) lives with her parents (Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne) on a train on the Circle line, where they’ve been subsisting on sweets and snacks from vending machines on the platforms. Mr and Mrs Frereton are pleased by their daughter’s chubbiness in spite of the global predicament, blithely ignoring the fact that she is in reality heavily pregnant; she’s been having trysts with the man in the next carriage over (Richard Warwick) and is some eighteen months gone. It’s no world to bring a child into. Ah, well, after so long, their food source runs out and they have to abandon train and venture forth into the wastelands. Penelope’s of a marryin’ age, so they should find a suitable man to fob her off onto; one who can provide for the lot of them. Meanwhile, in said wastelands, Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson) is feeling rather under the weather. Much to his chagrin, the professional opinion is that he’s mutating as a result of radiation… into a bedsit. Bad enough to mutate, but for a man of his standing to become a bedsit rather than a stately home, it’s just too embarrassing. Still, it could work out for some people; Captain Bules Martin (Michael Hordern), ostensibly tasked with assisting Lord Fortnum with his predicament, could do with a place to live.

An adaptation of a stage play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, this pretty much put a stop to Richard Lester’s short period of rather cynical satirical comedies in the latter part of the sixties, which included such fair as the well-regarded The Knack …and How to Get It (1965) and the considerably not-as-well-regarded How I Won the War (1967). This presumably being on account of its massive critical and commercial failure, and also, prior to said failures, being buried by the studio on account of them hating the finished product. I suppose it’s plausible that United Artists didn’t know what they were getting into; this was apparently pitched to them as a replacement for Up Against It, Joe Orton’s failed Beatles vehicle to which Lester was linked (sans Beatles) and which fell through quite abruptly. Apparently, Orton and Halliwell’s bodies were found by the chauffeur who was to take him to the meeting with Lester. Honestly, from the synopsis, I doubt they’d have been all that thrilled with Up Against It either, but that’s by the by. The Bed Sitting Room was reportedly complete for nearly a year before it saw the light of day at the Berlinale, and then didn’t see an actual release for another nine months. And so Lester spent pretty much the next twenty years making considerably more mainstream and crowd pleasing fare, most famously such as his Musketeers films or his Superman sequels. (As I write this, he’s still alive, but the last film he made was a 1991 concert film for Paul McCartney. For why he stopped, there’s definitely stuff we could speculate about, but that’s not for here.)

Whatever. This whole shebang is a hard sell. With that said, the original stage version was apparently quite successful. I’m rather at a loss as to how this would work on stage, but I don’t know how faithful the film is. The aforementioned two previous films, by Lester’s own admission, use the source material as more of a jumping off point rather than being straight adaptations of the texts. I suppose I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the same is true here, at least to some extent; unlike those, Antrobus was involved in the screenplay and Milligan is in the cast, so presumably they were on board with whatever might have changed in the adaptation. For all I know, the only changes could be the setting being made less abstract and the various characters having unique actors (the original cast list for the play that Wikipedia presents includes a lot of doubling up of roles). Well, either way. The stated aim of the stage play was to satirise mankind’s innate refusal to change, and the film does capture that pretty well, though it feels like its bitterness is more focused even than that.

You see, the film, in its absurdity, does seem to boil down a lot of the country’s (that is to say the UK’s) diseased psyche, something that, judging by this, doesn’t seem to have changed all that much in the past fifty years. The central conceit is that the characters, in particular the establishment figures, are utterly loath to admit that anything has changed at all. The world has already burned, but if we just ignore it then it’s as if nothing happened, what even are you talking about? This is normal, everything’s fine, don’t mention that whole unpleasantness. A running bit is the refusal to actually mention the bomb, like it’s something vaguely distasteful to be talked around rather than something that has had an immutable impact on the world the characters inhabit. The absurdity becomes more desperate and grim as the story enters its last act, as Penelope finally gives birth, the baby ambiguously mutated, and all around her continue to act as if all is well while she struggles to keep it alive; already the person least committed to this ludicrous society, her tolerance of the charade erodes ever more.

The problem with the product as a whole however is that as trenchant, and frankly more relevant seeming than ever, as the commentary seems, it’s not really hung on much. Clocking in at about 91 minutes, the film nevertheless feels like it's stretching itself out. Characters mill about and interact with a deadpan earnestness to their mundanely absurd actions; there are, as you might have guessed from the lengthy cast list, a lot more of them in the film than I’ve alluded to in the synopsis, most of whom represent some sort of establishment figure that continues to act in a (usually self-important) manner as if their role in society, such as it is, is the same as ever, such as the last member of the government (Harry Secombe) hunkered down alone in a fallout shelter tut-tutting the depravity that is totally going on outside, the police (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Chris Konyils) whose contribution to crisis management consists entirely of making sure people move along despite a lack of anywhere to move along to, and of course Dandy Nichols’ cameo as “Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone”, the reigning monarch as the survivor judged to be highest in the line of succession, who gets referenced a lot and who doesn’t do a single damn thing. The scenarios and dialogue are all decently witty, but it all has this weird problem where the film simultaneously doesn’t really have enough plot to stop it feeling being a sequence of vignettes but has too much to make it feel like a straight up sketch film. We return to the exploits of Lord Fortnum or of Penelope with enough regularity that it instead feels like there should be more of a through narrative than there is. It feels like there could have been a way to balance this better; by way of example, Jonathan Miller’s then recent rendition of Alice in Wonderland (1966) is similarly vignette based (much like the source material) and highlighting of the absurdity of social mores, but manages a coherent throughline despite its lack of overarching plot. Maybe it’s down to having a focal character whom the audience follows throughout and whom acts as an entry point to goings-on. It feels like Penelope is meant to have this role; indeed, she is the one who comes closest to comprehending how silly everyone and everything around her is; but she doesn’t really have enough presence in the film to fulfil it. Still, it’s perhaps testament to Rita Tushingham’s strength as an actress that she can deliver a soliloquy that is at incredibly ridiculous in terms of what she’s actually saying but manages to make it an oddly affecting and haunting moment.

In fact, the film is actually quite rich with this sort of thing. The cinematography and production design are bizarrely beautiful, capturing a peculiar desolate mood that is incongruous with and helps amplify the strangeness of what the characters are actually doing. The pointlessness of this society everyone’s playacting appears stark against the environs of Chesil Beach and Chobham Common and the myriad other locales that serve as the wastelands. In all it’s an odd film and one that isn’t wholly successful despite having quite a lot of merit, but the artistry of its world is almost worth it on its own.