This past week was our short-film week, and I was surprised to see that our film club had never watched Richard Lester‘s and Peter Sellers‘ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. That had to be my pick for our interstitial week.
Rather than critique the short, I want to explain why I chose it.
Okay, I’m a sucker for droll British humor. I fell in love with Monty Python’s Flying Circus back in the 1970s, tracked down LPs of The Goon Show in the 1980s, and can rewatch Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and two Musketeer films — The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers — anytime and thoroughly enjoy them.
Unlike many short films we’ve watched, this one wasn’t an early attempt to break into the business. Pretty much everyone involved in Running — Lester, Sellers, Dick Bentley, Spike Milligan, Leo McKern, Mario Fabrizi, and David Lodge — was an industry veteran, mostly in television and radio, but in a few films, too. If they weren’t already familiar — if not famous — names or faces when the short was made, they would become so later on.
So it wasn’t a springboard to launch careers. Maybe it was just an excuse for a group of, would you say, friends who were bursting with creativity to get together for a project over a couple of weekends.
Running isn’t necessarily original; its visual humor clearly has roots in silent films, but also in the zaniness and silliness from Lester’s and Seller’s earlier works.
I chose it for its influence on what-was-to-come. You see elements of Running in the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (also directed by Lester), as well as Lester’s subsequent films. That influence is also clear in many of the filmed bits in Flying Circus, such as the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Fish-Slapping Dance sequences.
It’s interesting to see what a small group who shared similar tastes in humor can do with a movie camera, the equivalent of about $2,000 (which probably went to film, film processing, and the final set), and two Sunday afternoons.