The title alone was enough to kill it dead
in the water but if you got past that and made it into the few cinemas
that showed it then the first ten minutes might have finished you off
but this hugely self-indulgent picture is actually worth sticking around
for. Okay, the gags are terrible and Newley, who directed it, co-wrote
it, composed the music and plays the lead is no Orson Welles but there
is a surfeit of imagination at work here and presuming it is mostly
autobiographical, (his wife, Joan Collins, and children play his wife
and children), few artists, and Newley surely is that, have ever been so
self-critical in public; it's as if he wants us to hate him.Fellini, of course, is the most obvious object of his affections, (he even gets a name-check), which probably riled the critics the most. How dare he think he could remake "8 1/2" and as a musical comedy, they probably screamed, and needless to say the film was not just a gigantic flop, both critically and commercially, but often figures in lists of the worst films ever made. It's certainly not always an easy watch; like a traffic accident it's very hard to look at what's happened yet impossible to look away. It's also impossible to ignore.
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