The American producers did hire an English director, Tony Richardson, and commissioned a script by Christopher Isherwood. The decision was then made, however, to update the story, and the topical satire, to the 1960s. So the American writer Terry Southern, hot off his collaboration on Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, was hired to hipsterize the material. According to Southern's "journal" of the film's production, his script included such things as a one-shot scene in which Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the book's humorless defender of the respectability of the English colony in Hollywood, appears in drag at a gay leather bar. (Robert Morley refused to shoot the scene, proof to Richardson that he was behaving like "a boorish prima donna" (195)).
This is enough to indicate that Southern's writing has the juvenile impertinence of an undergraduate revue, and though one commentator noted the "imprint of an unadult mind" on Waugh's book (Ward 83), it's puerile in a very different way from the movie that resulted. (Southern's Journal includes a "transcript" of a prank phone call he made to a pet cemetery asking how much a funeral would cost for an 11-foot python that died swallowing a pig.)
In addition, Richardson shot the film "almost wholly in sequence" to preserve "the improvisational potential of the film in creation" (Journal); Southern was considered an expert in ad hockery on the set. This is how the silent slapstick stars worked with their teams of gag men, but Richardson, with his "distinguished" background directing Shakespeare and John Osborne, doesn't have the craft to select and shape knockabout material. A scene in which a wedding ceremony has to be accelerated so that the chapel can quickly be converted into a funeral parlor is about as snappy as it gets.
Richardson can't think in either Waugh's or Southern's terms, as is shown by the casting: as Dennis, the American Robert Morse, with his boyishly impudent air, isn't brazen enough for Southern or Waugh (and doesn't seem to come "of an earlier civilization with sharper needs" (54)), and as Aimée, the conventionally whiny ingénue Anjanette Comer lacks the skill to make something of that wobbly character, sententious yet diffident, and "doomed to sterility." (Among young actors of that era Terence Stamp and Barbara Harris, for instance, would have been better choices.) And while Richardson later wrote that the all-star supporting cast (apart from Morley) got into the spirit (195; the cast includes John Gielgud, Jonathan Winters in two roles, Rod Steiger, Milton Berle, Margaret Leighton, Roddy McDowall, Dana Andrews, James Coburn, Liberace, Tab Hunter, Lionel Stander, and, in roles cut to "whittle" the movie from five hours down to two, Ruth Gordon and Jayne Mansfield), the actors seem to have been assembled for a variety of reasons having little to do with appropriate comic talent. Anarchy is not that hard to achieve if you don't pay attention to what you're doing. The result inverts Waugh—irreverence is the only thing holding the picture together.
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