Smashing Time

Smashing Time is a 1967 British satirical comedy film directed by Desmond Davis starring Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave.

Brenda is hired by Charlotte Brillig, a dilettante heiress, to manage her exclusive design shop called "Too Much," and is left in charge while her boss meets her ostensible main employee for lunch.

In turn, when Brenda brings Yvonne to the shop, they learn Charlotte has capriciously shut the business down to go on an impulse trip to Greece, leaving both girls again out of work.

The girls watch a Candid Camera-style TV show on a television in a shop window entitled You Can't Help Laughing in which an old lady's house is demolished as a joke.

The film reunited Redgrave, Tushingham, composer John Addison, cinematographer Manny Wynn and director Davis (a camera operator in A Taste of Honey (1961)) from Girl with Green Eyes (1964).

Murray Melvin and Paul Danquah, Tushingham's co-stars in A Taste of Honey, appear in cameo roles as boutique shop customers.

[3] Some characters' names are borrowed from Lewis Carroll's poetry, chiefly the nonsense poem Jabberwocky: Charlotte Brillig, Tom Wabe, Mrs Gimble, Bobby Mome-Rath, Jeremy Tove, Toni Mimsy, and rock band The Snarks.

In the 1993 BBC series Hollywood UK, about the British film industry in the 1960s, the actresses appeared in the back of a London taxi singing the theme again.

[1] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A clumsy attempt to create a female comedy team, with Lynn Redgrave as a brassy bully of limited intelligence tyrannising her timid and smaller friend, played by Rita Tushingham with a good deal of eye-rolling.

The pair lack the timing and dead-pan humour of Laurel and Hardy, and director Desmond Davis has an enervating habit of slowing down his film in the slapstick scenes as if to make sure that the audience is responding properly.

The London we see is populated largely by flower-power people, velvet-coated queers and eccentric debutantes (with the occasional tramp thrown in for comic relief).

[8] Leslie Halliwell said: "Horrendous attempt to turn two unsuitable actresses into a female Laurel and Hardy; plenty of coarse vigour but no style or sympathy.