''The Adding Machine'' is a 1969 British

fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical elements, often including Fictional universe, imaginary places and Legendary creature, creatures. The genre's roots lie in oral traditions, ...

comedy drama film Comedy drama (also known by the portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.

produced, written, and directed by Jerome Epstein and starring

Milo O'Shea Milo Donal O'Shea (2 June 1926 – 2 April 2013) was an Irish actor. He was twice nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performances in ''Staircase'' (1968) and '' Mass Appeal'' (1982). Early life O'Shea was born and ...

Phyllis Diller Phyllis Ada Diller (née Driver; July 17, 1917 – August 20, 2012) was an American stand-up comedian, Actor, actress, author, musician, and visual artist, best known for her Eccentricity (behavior), eccentric stage persona, Self-deprecation, se ...

, Billie Whitelaw, Sydney Chaplin, and

Raymond Huntley Horace Raymond Huntley (23 April 1904 – 15 June 1990) was an English actor who appeared in dozens of British films from the 1930s to the 1970s. He also appeared in the ITV period drama '' Upstairs, Downstairs'' as the pragmatic family soli ...

. It was based on a stage production of the 1923

Elmer Rice Elmer Rice (born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, September 28, 1892 – May 8, 1967) was an American playwright. He is best known for his plays '' The Adding Machine'' (1923) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, '' Street Sce ...

play '' The Adding Machine'' directed by Epstein in Los Angeles in the 1940s. It was distributed in the United Kingdom by

Universal Pictures Universal City Studios LLC, doing business as Universal Pictures (also known as Universal Studios or simply Universal), is an American filmmaking, film production and film distribution, distribution company headquartered at the 10 Universal Ci ...

. The action of the film takes place on Earth, in 1930s

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

during the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

, and in Heaven.

Plot

Mr Zero is an accountant of twenty-five years standing whose job is about to be taken over by an adding machine. He murders his boss and is executed. He arrives in heaven and is put in charge of the heavenly adding machine. Thirty years pass and Zero is due to be sent back to earth, for the cycle to repeat.

Cast

as Mr. Zero *

as Mrs. Zero * Billie Whitelaw as Daisy Devore * Sydney Chaplin as Lieutenant Charles *

Julian Glover Julian Wyatt Glover (born 27 March 1935) is an English actor with many stage, television, and film roles. Classically trained, he is a recipient of the Laurence Olivier Award and has performed many times for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Gl ...

Shrdlu SHRDLU is an early natural-language understanding computer program that was developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and query ...

as Smithers * Phil Brown as Don * Paddie O'Neil as Mabel *

Libby Morris Libby Morris (born 1932, Winnipeg) is a Canadian singer, comedienne and actress. She appeared in several CBC radio shows of the 1950s and moved into TV and film from the 1960s onward after she moved to London, England. She became a very well know ...

as Ethel * Hugh McDermott as Harry * Bill Nagy as lawyer *

Carol Cleveland Carol Cleveland (born Carol Gillian Frances on 13 January 1942) is an American-English actor, comedian, dancer, and model. She is particularly known for her work with Monty Python. Early life Born in East Sheen, London, she moved to the United ...

as Judy * Bruce Boa as detective

Production

The movie was shot at

Shepperton Studios Shepperton Studios is a film studio located in Shepperton, Surrey, England, with a history dating back to 1931. It is now part of Pinewood Group, the Pinewood Studios Group. During its early existence, the studio was branded as Sound City (not ...

outside

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. The film's sets were designed by the

art director Art director is a title for a variety of similar job functions in theater, advertising, marketing, publishing, fashion, live-action and animated film and television, the Internet, and video games. It is the charge of a sole art director to supe ...

Jack Shampan.

Reception

The Monthly Film Bulletin The ''Monthly Film Bulletin'' was a periodical of the British Film Institute published monthly from February 1934 until April 1991, when it merged with '' Sight & Sound''. It reviewed all films on release in the United Kingdom, including those wi ...

'' wrote: "This adaptation of Elmer Rice's 1923 play keeps fairly closely to the original text apart from two or three irrelevant additions. But though pleasant enough to watch, the film manages to miss most of the essential points of the play, which requires a much more stylised approach than the one Epstein has adopted. ... Though it is difficult to believe in Billie Whitelaw as a middleaged spinster who spends her time wondering what 'them kisses in the movies' are like, all five leading characters are well played, and the film is a charming one which its director has reportedly described as a 'labour of love'. But this love is also its weakness: a more compelling film could have been made from Rice's play if the theme, a sort of nightmare vision of mechanised robot man, had been treated less naturalistically and with far more satirical bite and savagery."

Roger Greenspun Roger Greenspun (December 16, 1929 – June 18, 2017) was an American journalist and film critic, best known for his work with ''The New York Times'' in which he reviewed near 400 films, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for '' ...

wrote in the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'': "Virtually everything in this movie version is a bad idea poorly realized. Epstein's direction is straight pre-New Wave academic, with absolutely regular cross-cutting punctuated by occasional lyrical montage to indicate imagination. He has softened the play a bit, added a dumb discourse on violence, added a needless prison scene for Phyllis Diller, and moved the Elysian Fields to an amusement park. For frumpy Daisy Devore, Zero's long-lost office romance, he has miscast Billie Whitelaw, who would still look ravishing if she dressed in cast iron and took ugly pills for a year. Indeed, each member of the distinguished cast is in his own way unsuitable."

Leslie Halliwell Robert James Leslie Halliwell (23 February 1929 – 21 January 1989) was a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television rights buyer for ITV, the British commercial network, and Channel 4. He is best known for his reference guides, '' Fi ...

said: "Elmer Rice's satirical fantasy of the twenties is here robbed of its expressionist staging and presented naturalistically, a fatal error from which the film never for one moment recovers."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Adding Machine, The 1969 films 1960s fantasy comedy-drama films 1960s English-language films British fantasy comedy-drama films American fantasy comedy-drama films British films based on plays American films based on plays Universal Pictures films Films shot at Shepperton Studios 1960s American films 1960s British films Films scored by Lambert Williamson English-language fantasy comedy-drama films