A quartet of British discs came in today, including one new addition to the shop’s inventory (the Marty Feldman-starring “Every Home Should Have One”), another customer requested copy of Indicator’s Blu-ray of Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” plus restocks of Mike Leigh’s “High Hopes” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Cross of Iron.”
Best known in America for playing Igor in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein,” Marty Feldman was a British comedian who first found success with the BBC radio series “Round the Horne.” He then became the chief writer and editor on David “Frost/Nixon” Frost’s “The Frost Report,” in which every future member of the Monty Python sketch troupe except American Terry Gilliam appeared at some point. Feldman then did “At Last the 1948 Show” with Python’s Cleese and Graham Chapman (Eric Idle appeared in two of the program’s 13 episodes), a show in which he went from writing behind the camera to also acting in front of it. Feldman then starred in the BAFTA winning sketch comedy show “Marty” before making his feature film debut in Richard Lester’s “The Bed Sitting Room,” whose cast also featured comedians Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Spike Milligan.
For his first starring role as Teddy Brown in “Every Home Should Have One,” Feldman plays a writer at an ad agency who’s been handed the unenviable task of making porridge sexy. It’s the sort of farcical conceit that could be seen as a forerunner of Woody Allen’s “early, funny” films or the work of Albert Brooks. While the film’s primary target is consumer culture, religion is also frequently ridiculed (hardly surprising, considering Feldman was an atheist); it’s a subject that Feldman would explore further with “In God We Tru$t,” which he not only co-wrote and starred in, but directed as well.