The Magic Christian is a 1969 British satirical farce black comedy film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with appearances by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel The Magic Christian by the American author Terry Southern, who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation with McGrath. The film also features pre-Monty Python appearances of John Cleese (credited) and an uncredited Graham Chapman, who had jointly written an earlier version of the film script. It also features an uncredited appearance by Yul Brynner performing “Mad About the Boy” as a drag artist.
Songs by Badfinger, including "Come and Get It" written by Paul McCartney, were used on the soundtrack. The official soundtrack album had other music as well as dialogue from the film. Badfinger released an album, Magic Christian Music, containing their three songs for the film.
The film received mostly negative reviews on release, citing its unrelenting and heavy-handed satire of capitalism, greed and human vanities.
Plot
Sir Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire, together with his newly adopted heir (a homeless man sleeping in the park), Youngman Grand, start playing elaborate practical jokes on people. A big spender, Grand does not mind handing out large sums of money to various people, bribing them to fulfill his whims, or shocking them by bringing down what they hold dear. Their misadventures are designed as a display by Grand to his adoptive charge of the notion that "everyone has their price" — it just depends on the amount one is prepared to pay. They start from rather minor spoofs, like bribing a Shakespearean actor to strip during a stage performance of Hamlet and persuading a traffic warden to take back a parking ticket and eat it (delighted by the size of the bribe, he eats its plastic cover too) and proceed with increasingly elaborate stunts involving higher social strata and wider audiences. As their conversation reveals, Grand sees his plots as "educational".
At Sotheby's art auction house, it is confided to Grand that an original portrait from the Rembrandt School might fetch £10,000 at auction. To the astonishment of the director, Mr. Dugdale, Grand makes a pre-auction bid of £30,000 (£ today) for the painting and, having bought it, proceeds to cut the portrait's nose from the canvas with a pair of scissors, as a mortified Dugdale looks on in open-mouthed shock. In an elegant restaurant, he makes a loud show of wild gluttony, Grand being the restaurant's most prominent customer. In the annual Boat Race sports event, he bribes the coach of the Oxford rowing team to have them purposely ram the Cambridge boat, to win a screamingly unjust victory. In a traditional pheasant hunt, he uses an anti-aircraft gun to down the bird.
Guy and Youngman eventually buy tickets for the luxury liner The Magic Christian, along with the richest stratum of society. Guests seen boarding the ship include John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis (all played by lookalikes). In the beginning everything appears normal, and the ship apparently sets off. Soon, things start going wrong. A solitary drinker at the bar is approached by a transvestite cabaret singer, a vampire poses as a waiter, and a cinema film features the unsuccessful transplant of a black person's head onto a white person's body. Passengers begin to notice, through the ship's closed-circuit television, that their captain is in a drunken stupor and is carted off by a gorilla. In a crescendo of panic, the guests try to abandon ship. A group of them, shown the way by Youngman Grand, instead reach the machine room. There, the Priestess of the Whip, assisted by two topless drummers, commands more than a hundred slave girls. They are naked except for loincloths. Rowing five to an oar, their wrists are manacled and fastened by chains to the ceiling. As passengers finally find an exit, and lords and ladies stumble out in the daylight, it is discovered that the supposed ship was in fact a structure built inside a warehouse, and the passengers had never left London. As they break out, a large painted sign reading "SMASH CAPITALISM" can be seen on the inside wall of the warehouse. During the whole misadventure, the Grands look perfectly composed and cool.