Rentadick

Rentadick (1972)

We can't describe it to you... You'll just have to see it. Then see it again.

Armitage runs a chemical company that is on the verge of producing a gas that causes temporary disability. Clearly the military want it but it is also sought by a group of Japanese. Both Armitage and Madam Greenfly hire different people in the same detective agency to guard the gas and steal it respectively... confusion, double crosses and hilarity ensue...

Date of release
1972-12-31
TMDB
4.2 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Jim Clark

Casting

Interesting facts

Rentadick is a 1972 British comedy film, directed by Jim Clark and starring James Booth, Richard Briers, Julie Ege, Ronald Fraser, and Donald Sinden. It is a spoof spy/detective picture, the plot of which involves attempts to protect a new experimental nerve gas. The film was based on a script by John Cleese and Graham Chapman but was greatly changed and has been described as "a missed opportunity."

Production

The original script for the film was called Rentasleuth and was written by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, both of Monty Python, who developed it for producer David Frost. Chapman and Cleese were looking for a director and sought Charles Crichton, whose movies Cleese greatly admired, even admitting to stealing the end for Rentasleuth from The Lavender Hill Mob. Cleese says Crichton was of great assistance helping them with the script:

His expertise was breathtaking to us guys. He would leave us in the evening, and by the time he saw us in the morning, he'd push a piece of paper toward us and say I had a few thoughts last night, but I don't think they're any good.' And you realized he'd solved the problem, put in two jokes, and taken out half a page. He was just that expert on a level that Gray and I had never encountered before. We just loved him.

The cast was to be Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman (in the role of ‘Owltruss’). In April 1971 it was announced Cleese would star in the film, to be called Rentasleuth.

Frost failed to secure finance, so he sold the script to producer Ned Sherrin. Sherrin wrote in his memoirs that "Frost had paid richly for the script. With little prospect of getting together the money to film it, he was anxious to offload it.

According to Sherrin, once the producer bought the script, the Pythons no longer wanted to be involved in the film forcing him to assemble a new cast. Cleese says they left the project because Sherrin did not want to use Charles Crichton as director. "We just didn't know why, and we never quite got an answer out of him," said Cleese. "He just didn't want to."

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