"GREAT CATHERINE"...........ZERO FOR CONDUCT.........

Great Catherine (1968)    Of all the decades to go fishing for oddball movies, nothing comes close to the 60's for pure, undiluted madness.......

              Oh how we practically went into cult-cinema orgasm as we unearthed this one........an insane blending of an obscure George Bernard Shaw play about  Russia's Catherine The Great with the madhouse, slapstick stylings of Zero Mostel.....

              No slapdash junk, this one......its main titles open with the very last of Dimitri Tiomkin's busily overripe scores  and features the cream of  Britain's filmmaking greats behind the camera.....editor Anne V..Coates, Oswald Morris, production designer John Bryan........

              In front of the camera, we have Peter O' Toole as a stuffy officer fresh from battling the rebel American colonists at Bunker Hill.........he's been summoned to Mother Russia to entertain Empress Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) with an account of the battle.....and also totes along his uppercrust, stunning fiance (Angela Scoular)

                Don't hold your breath waiting for huge amounts of George Bernard Shaw witticisms.......before O'Toole can even attempt an audience with Moreau, he's  subjected to the raging drunken madness of Prince Potemkin (Zero Mostel), an almost indescribable lunatic lout.......

                There's no adjectives worthy to apply to Mostel's performance here....... a human tornado of pratfalls, double takes, bellowing anger and delicate, fine-tuned lunacy.   He's all Three Stooges rolled up into one human........he barrels through the movie as if he's the only one in it......he's literally his own special effect.

                 When Mostel's not on screen, the film makes one game attempt to amp itself up to his level of craziness.......by having O'Toole and Moreau engage in an elaborate re-creation of the Bunker Hill battle, deploying the toy cannons in  the meticulous model constructed in Moreau's huge bathing pool. 

                But once the mighty Zero comes roaring back into action, the movie returns to untold amounts of screaming, running and falling down......a breathless farce that hardly ever stops to take a single breath.......

                 Exhausting, yes. Funny?  It finally wore us down into a few smiles.......but then this movie always had our full attention, for no other reason than it's just so damn odd.........it's one of those movies that has us constantly asking......who thought this was a good idea?  who the hell did they think was gonna sit through this?
                
               Who knows what the filmmakers intentions were........they concocted their very own genre......a comedy of manner with enough stumbling on the floor to fill up a lifetime Of Charlie Chaplin movies.

                 And the BQ wouldn't have missed it for anything.......adding it to our burgeoning collection of 1960's genre-bending mutated movies that never found an appreciative audience to fully embrace their off-the-rails nuttiness.....

                 Until now...... 3 stars (***) And one big Zero you'll not soon forget.......