The Adding Machine (film)

The Adding Machine is a 1969 British fantasy comedy drama film produced, written, and directed by Jerome Epstein and starring Milo O'Shea, Phyllis Diller, Billie Whitelaw, Sydney Chaplin, and Raymond Huntley.

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.

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.

"[4] Leslie Halliwell 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.