The Naked Truth
The Naked Truth
Description
Celebrities hate them, politicians fear them and athletes despise themthe tabloids! Starring comic genius Peter Sellers, this “hilarious satire” (The Film Daily) proves that victims of slander can get their sweet revenge. Full of “high levity” (Cue), The Naked Truth is nothing short of an “attack on the funny bone” (Variety)! The publisher of The Naked Truth (Dennis Price) has been blackmailing prominent Londoners by threatening to print shocking stories about them. Actor Sonny MacGregor (Sellers), a prime target, figures the only way to stop him is to kill him! A master of disguises, Sonny repeatedly attempts to stop the poison press. But it looks like he’ll need help from a band of unlikely assassins’those also scandalized on the rag’s front page!Amazon.com
In 1957′s The Naked Truth, Terry-Thomas plays a peer of the realm being blackmailed in the company of Peter Sellers, Peggy Mount, and Shirley Eaton by a gutter-press journalist, Dennis Price (“Don’t try to appeal to my better nature, because I haven’t one”). One fascinating element in this picture is the portrayal of those relationships that could be only suggested in a period of tighter censorship, such as Peter Sellers’s TV personality and Kenneth Griffith as his dresser, whose gay relationship is only faintly etched in here. More overt is the characterization of a masculine-looking authoress, known only by her initials, but sporting Agatha Christie’s hairdo. The moments of slapstick are brought off to a tee, as when the larger-than-life Peggy Mount attempts a suicide drop from her window to be saved by an awning on a shop front. –Adrian Edwards
The Naked Truth
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Comments
Unfortunately the DVD was in the USA format so unplayable in the UK. This was not clear on the Amazon description.. Disappointed
Rating: 1 / 5
Dennis Price is the ruthless editor of a smutty magazine that deals with these minor and major scandals of public celebrities or renowned political who have committed a little and unspoken sins here and there. And elaborating a true dossier he decides to blackmail them.
That farcical satire is a real tour de force because gather to Terry Thomas and Peter Sellers who are over the top.
Funny and amazing script all the way will make you laugh from start to finish.
The main highlight is when Sellers pass himself off for an Irish terrorist imitating the body language acquiring the very accent and gestures that will make you to hold your seat for avoiding to fall from laughs.
An acidic movie that really doesn’t leave behind tree with leaves.
Rating: 5 / 5
This movie is a riot! Peter Sellers is wonderful as usual along with Terry-Thomas. It will keep you laughing. It has to do with blackmail with several people involved in trying to get the evidence back. Along the way, several very funny things happen. This movie is also known as Your Past is Showing.
Rating: 5 / 5
In this Mario Zampi black comedy, Dennis Price plays a black mailer threatening to publish dark secrets about the lives of the people portrayed by the acting ensemble:
–Terry Thomas, Lord Mayley the bumbling upper class cad who is his own worst enemy.
–Peter Sellers, primarily Sonny MacGregor the tv personality and others
–Georgina Cookson, a wonderful Lady Mayley who anticipates her husband’s next move and is amused by his low cunning and his foibles.
–Peggy Mount, the mystery novelist who tries to obtain a “Mickey Finn”
–Jean Sims, who gives the “Mickey Finn” to the wrong man and helps Mount dispose of the body in a panic “Oh Mumsy, I could hang for this!”
–Shirley Easton, the young woman with the jealous boyfriend.
The Naked Truth has a wonderful richness of characters who come to life with great character actors playing off one another. It is Georgina Cookson’s chain jerking that makes Terry Thomas’s antics even funnier. Also, Jean Sims’s horrified compliance with “Mumsy’s” orders that make both of their characters work so well.
Terry Thomas is an extraordinary character actor. He was blessed with physcial characteristics—the gap tooth grin and gimlet eyed leer—which he then hones to a fine luster with British expressions (“Blast!”) He plays his roles flawlessly and with invention. He is a joy to watch.
Peter Sellers is an entirely different sort of actor, although he plays very well with Terry Thomas in a number of movies. Sellers is a whole comedy company rolled into one man. His main character in this movie is Sonny Macgregor, a grating television personality from the period. From there he plays in a number of disguises including a manish female author, an old snoop “Creeping Alopecia”, and an Irish rebel. Sellers was the greatest impressionist comedian, and completely unique. Unlike most stand up comics who do impressions, he creates memorable ordinary people. Dr. Strangelove is his most successful film in which he plays multiple characters.
The characters here fumble and flounder in their attempt to escape from the blackmailer’s threat until they all come together and events bring about an ingenious solution to the problem. As Terry Thomas might say, “a jolly good show.”
Rating: 5 / 5
First things first, the original title of this 1957 film seems actually to have been “The Naked Truth,” if the standard filmographies for Peter Sellers are to be believed. Fifty years later, as I write this, the title seems a little unfortunate, considering the company this black little comedy currently shares here on Amazon and elsewhere. On the DVD itself, the title card shows not “The Naked Truth,” but “Your Past is Showing.” I presume that was the American title, for a movie called “The Naked Truth” was unlikely to gain much acceptance or profit in small- or even big-town America during the Eisenhower years. “Your Past is Showing” is hardly scintillating, but it’s a better title, being perfectly appropriate to the story and having the advantage of removing the DVD from the present company of its booty-shaking peers.
This is one of that amazing series of relatively low-budget, witty, intelligent, often hilarious, usually black-and-white comedies that various English studios seemed to turn out at a rate of about one every couple of months throughout the 1950s and into the mid-60s. While “The Naked Truth” is hardly great, it’s a perfectly respectable and sound representative of the class.
Like many fine British comedies, it has a heart of inky darkness: four individuals, initially strangers to one another, are being blackmailed by a particularly despicable character. Two of them independently hit on the notion of solving their problems by murdering the blackmailer. When their initial individual schemes fail in blackly humorous ways, they resort to the very British practice of forming a committee to carry out the murderous deed (or not, as the case may be) … again with blackly hilarious results.
This is one of those films in which the plot is of secondary consideration, for the cast is a mini-Who’s Who of mid-century comedic talent and skill. This crowd would have an audience rolling on the floor with laughter with a reading from an airline arrival and departure list: gap-toothed Terry-Thomas, ever formidable Peggy Mount, indomitably unaware Miles Malleson, so-gorgeous-you-don’t-realize-she’s-smart Shirley Eaton, incomparable Joan Sims (frazzled here rather than brassy), smooth, charming, despicable Dennis Price and Peter Sellers.
This is Sellers’ third major film role. He made his movie debut in 1955 in “The Lady Killers.” His second film was “The Smallest Show on Earth” in 1957. All three of these films are ensemble films and in all three, Sellers was teamed with, to say the very least, performers of impressive talent: Alec Guinness in “The Ladykillers,” Margaret Rutherford in “The Smallest Show on Earth” and Terry-Thomas in “The Naked Truth.” In each of these films, Sellers has a memorable but subordinate part. That would all change in his Wunderjahr, 1959, when he became a one-man picture franchise with back-to-back international triumphs in “The Mouse That Roared” and “I’m All Right Jack.” In the former, he played (at least) three starring roles. In the latter, he outshone the brilliant Ian Carmichael.
If memory serves me correctly, I first became aware of Sellers’ new star status when the then-mighty Life Magazine devoted a full picture spread to the wonderful new, satirical comedy about labor relations, “I’m All Right Jack.” (The magazine even felt obliged to explain to puzzled Americans what the title meant.) The only star that I can recall receiving an equivalent accolade was Jacques Tati in “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.”
Time and the publication of tell-all memoirs place this film is a rather different light than the one in which I viewed it in 1957. I certainly see things in “The Naked Truth” (by whatever title) that I entirely missed fifty years ago. Amazon’s editorial reviewer, Adrian Edwards, touched on this, but his gaze was firmly fixed on what he perceived as gay elements in the film: the relationship between Sellers’ character and his Welsh dresser (heh-heh), and perhaps an overly butch caricature of Agatha Christie. Well … maybe.
Of more significance to me is the nature of the character played by Sellers. He’s a widely-loved television personality who is massively insecure in his private life. He’s a man who hops manically from persona to persona, never taking rest in any one of them, while on the hop, he concocts grandiose and unworkable schemes that only bring him pain. This, it turns out, was a coldly accurate portrait of Peter Sellers, himself, whose agonized cry to the universe was, “I don’t know who I am!” Who knew?
This is a funny picture from a brilliant epoch with a superb cast. Of course it deserves five stars.
Rating: 5 / 5
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