Nothing But the Best

Nothing But the Best (1964)

It purrs like a Rolls Royce... It pleasures like bubbly champagne...

Success has James Brewster's name written all over it, and he also has his heart set on his boss's daughter. A con artist hires him to help out on a bank scheme, but then again, James will do anything to get rich and be the most successful businessman in Britain-even if it means murder!!!

Date of release
1964-03-10
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 39m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Clive Donner

Casting

Interesting facts

Nothing but the Best is a 1964 British black comedy film directed by Clive Donner and starring Alan Bates, Denholm Elliott, Harry Andrews and Millicent Martin. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael is based on the 1952 short story "The Best of Everything" by Stanley Ellin.

Production

Film rights to the short story The Best of Everything were bought by Anglo-Amalgamated, where David Deutsch was working. Deutsch hired Frederick Raphael to write the script. The author later recalled he turned the story into " somewhat larky version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, though with a happy ending." Raphael was inspired by his own history of being a young American who moved to England.

Raphael wrote in his memoirs another inspiration for the film was The Scoundrel (1935). Producer David Deutsch chose Clive Donner, who he had known for several years, to direct. According to Raphael "since Clive had gone into the movie business as an apprentice, his ascent had something in common with that of my script’s James Brewster, who... was bent on mounting the slippery pole of modern success."

Raphael claims Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, who ran Anglo-Amalgamated, did not understand the film when they first saw it, so the writer added a narration.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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