God, Man And The Devil - On Film
From the International Herald Tribune, Friday the 18th of August 1967:
Mary Blume:
God, Man and the Devil - on Film
Stanley Donen, left, producer-director of “Bedazzled,” shares a joke with the film’s writer-actor team Dudley Moore, centre, and Peter Cook, during a break in filming near London.
LITTLE GADDESDEN, Hertfordshire - A most unlikely group of theologians, headed by American film director Stanley Donen and “Beyond The Fringe” graduates Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, is tackling the problem of God and the Devil today.
Their researches are incorporated, or perhaps buried, in a wild comic fantasy called “Bedazzled,” now being filmed in and around London. Mr. Donen directs Mr. Cook and Mr. Moore, who wrote the script, appear respectively as a modern-day Devil and as a Faust-like short-order cook. The brilliant young actress Eleanor Bron plays Mr. Moore’s waitress girl friend and Raquel Welch makes a guest appearance as Lust.
“Peter and I have had discussions on very thorny problems,” said Dudley Moore. “Why did God tell Eve the apple was the only thing she shouldn’t eat when that was a sure way to get her to eat it? Strange thing to do,” he mused. He was dressed in a nun’s habit.
“We’ve read St. Augustine, Pascal and a lot of modern theology,” said Peter Cook. “In Barcelona the university was in permanent debate for 50 years on how many wings an angel has.”
“I wouldn’t want to do just a plain old farce,” said Mr. Donen.
“It’s really very pro-God in the end,” said Mr. Cook. “God isn’t dead or hiding in Argentina. He’s very much alive.
“I have a sad ending as the Devil,” he said. “I’m rejected by heaven. I just can’t swallow my pride. I can’t adore God, I want to BE God.”
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“The devil has to stay on earth so people can choose between good and evil,” Dudley Moore pointed out.
“We haven’t cast God’s voice yet. We’re doing it last in case he takes offense and strikes us down,” Peter Cook piously added.
None of these theological implications were apparent in the day’s shooting, in which Mr. Moore had become a nun in the non-denominational order of Leaping Berelians in fulfillment of his wish for selfless love.
The company was shooting in the Victorian Perpendicular chapel of one of those stately homes that nowadays serve either as reducing spas or management training schools. This one has become a management training school.
In other wish-fulfillment scenes, Mr. Moore becomes a fly and, in a desire to be articulate, a Welsh intellectual who spouts such words as urmenschgefuhlnaturlichkeit and succeeds only in boring his girl to tears. In all, Mr. Cook and Mr. Moore play 24 roles between them.
Mr. Cook is lean and sardonic with what he claims is a very devilish right eyebrow. Mr. Moore is 5 feet 3 and is known to his English TV fans as Cuddly Dudley. Next winter they will return to Broadway in a two-man show.
The two met when they were undergraduates. Mr. Moore was studying music at Oxford, Mr. Cook was reading modern languages at Cambridge. Eleanor Bron, who appeared with them in “The Establishment” in London and New York, was studying French and German at Cambridge at the same time as Mr. Cook.
“He still has my German notes,” she said.
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Miss Bron has appeared on the stage in “Howard’s End” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and will end the summer doing “Hedda Gabler” and “The Playboy of the Western World” in repertory.
She was in The Beatles’ picture “Help,” and in “Alfie,” and she gave a startingly accurate comic portrayal of a young American matron in Stanley Donen’s “Two for the Road.”
“She should be a big star,” says Mr. Donen. “I’ve never known an actress like her. She’s one of the best actresses in my lifetime.”
Mr. Donen, famous as a director of film musicals and romantic comedy, is having a ball with “Bedazzled.”
“It’s not like anything I’ve done before,” he said. “Dudley is marvelous and Peter is very evil. They’re nothing like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.”
An ex-hoofer who started in the chorus of “Pal Joey,” Mr. Donen left Hollywood ten years ago, long before it became fashionable to settle in England.
“Everyone in Hollywood thought I was crazy. They all said you’ll lose touch with what’s happening,” he said, grinning with the happy irony of it all.
The reference to Cook and Moore playing twenty-four roles between them is a slight exaggeration, taken straight from the film’s pressbook. In its article The 24 Faces of Cook And Moore it states:
In “Bedazzled”, the comedy produced and directed by Stanley Donen, they have written and are starring in for Twentieth Century-Fox, the actor-satirists Peter Cook and Dudley Moore play no less than 24 roles between them.
Basically, it is an updated version of the classic Faust theme – the devil (Cook) grants his victim (Moore) seven wishes in return for his soul.
In a setting of contemporary England, Cook and Moore act out several fantasies in which the devil has transferred his victim from a drab, workaday world to circumstances that seem more favourable to lasting happiness.
This presents the Cook-Moore combination in the following roles:
1. The Devil (Peter Cook)
2. A short-order cook (Dudley Moore)
3. 4. Millionaires (Cook, Moore)
5. A Welsh intellectual (Moore)
6. 7. Pop stars (Cook, Moore)
8. A student (Moore)
9. 10. Nuns (Cook, Moore)
In between the main ‘wish’ sequences of producer-director Stanely Donen’s “Bedazzled”, the two stars appear in various London settings, but never as themselves. They are seen as:
11. 12. Frogmen (Cook, Moore)
13. 14. Post Office telephone engineers (Cook, Moore)
15. 16. Flies (Cook, Moore)
17. A social worker (Cook)
18. A university professor (Cook)
19. 20. Travelling salesmen (Cook, Moore)
21. 22. Parking meter attendants (Cook, Moore)
Add to these the faces (known to every TV fan in Britain) of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and a grand total of 24 is the result.
Is this a record?
