During the 60s, especially the latter half of the decade, studios were going through a phase of bank-rolling some very personal, very unusual and often very experimental films. Some of them were quite wonderful in their refreshingly offbeat way, while others were grotesque and horrible beyond words. Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? falls into the latter category - an indescribably self- indulgent muddle of a film, a seemingly interminable ego-trip, which manages to simultaneously capture on film the career suicide of its writer/director/producer/star Anthony Newley while remaining oddly boring. The similarly disastrous Candy, released a year earlier, may well have been tasteless, self-indulgent and muddled but at least it was lively. This one is anything but the word 'tedious' seems almost too mild, too kind, for Newley's gargantuan fart of a film.
40 year old performer Heironymous Merkin (Newley) assembles a small stage and a good deal of personal bric-a-brac on a beach, and begins to recount his life story to his children (Alexander & Tara Newley) and mother (Patricia Hayes). His story is told in a deliberately fragmented, theatrical and metaphorical manner, always symbolic, never straightforward. Led astray by the tempting voice of Goodtime Eddie Filth (Milton Berle), Merkin is quickly seduced into a lifestyle of promiscuity and gross self-indulgence, loving and leaving women as frequently as most of us have hot meals. But amid the army of female admirers, two women in particular make a lasting impression on his unfeeling heart - Polyester Poontang (Joan Collins) whom he impregnates and marries, and the adolescent Mercy Humppe (Connie Kreski) with whom a forbidden love affair leaves him emotionally scarred for life. From time to time, Merkin steps out of his own life story and looks in on it almost like a member of the production team, arguing with the unseen director (Newley again, seen only in silhouette) about the portrayal of himself, while two producers (Tom Stern & Louis Negin) and a trio of scathing critics (Ronald Radd, Rosalind Knight & Victor Spinetti) look on in consternation.
Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? is certainly a one-of-a-kind film and, heaven knows, how often do we movie-lovers spend our time complaining about films that are overly familiar, unoriginal and derivative? At least this one has a go at being something totally new and different, a unique voice singing courageously against the masses. Alas, it is, despite a mammoth effort to be quite unlike anything ever made before, an absolute failure. Beyond Otto Heller's entertainingly off-kilter camera angles and the impressive set and costume design (which earn the film an extra star just), there is virtually nothing else in the entire thing which actually works.
Merkin/Newley's troubled sex life - his personal demons about commitment, women and relationships - certainly offer nothing interesting or amusing. The musical numbers are spectacularly dull; the humour is mostly wide of the mark; the narrative becomes wearisome in its endless quest to be as deliberately offbeat as possible. Male and female nudity is thrown in periodically, but its purpose is as obscure as everything else about the film. Ultimately, the whole thing comes across like an attempt to make an 'adult' erotic musical about the pitfalls of being famous (and therefore 'desirable') sadly it is too muddled in conception and self-indulgent in style to really work. A curiosity of its time for sure, but a dead-loss as a film.
40 year old performer Heironymous Merkin (Newley) assembles a small stage and a good deal of personal bric-a-brac on a beach, and begins to recount his life story to his children (Alexander & Tara Newley) and mother (Patricia Hayes). His story is told in a deliberately fragmented, theatrical and metaphorical manner, always symbolic, never straightforward. Led astray by the tempting voice of Goodtime Eddie Filth (Milton Berle), Merkin is quickly seduced into a lifestyle of promiscuity and gross self-indulgence, loving and leaving women as frequently as most of us have hot meals. But amid the army of female admirers, two women in particular make a lasting impression on his unfeeling heart - Polyester Poontang (Joan Collins) whom he impregnates and marries, and the adolescent Mercy Humppe (Connie Kreski) with whom a forbidden love affair leaves him emotionally scarred for life. From time to time, Merkin steps out of his own life story and looks in on it almost like a member of the production team, arguing with the unseen director (Newley again, seen only in silhouette) about the portrayal of himself, while two producers (Tom Stern & Louis Negin) and a trio of scathing critics (Ronald Radd, Rosalind Knight & Victor Spinetti) look on in consternation.
Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? is certainly a one-of-a-kind film and, heaven knows, how often do we movie-lovers spend our time complaining about films that are overly familiar, unoriginal and derivative? At least this one has a go at being something totally new and different, a unique voice singing courageously against the masses. Alas, it is, despite a mammoth effort to be quite unlike anything ever made before, an absolute failure. Beyond Otto Heller's entertainingly off-kilter camera angles and the impressive set and costume design (which earn the film an extra star just), there is virtually nothing else in the entire thing which actually works.
Merkin/Newley's troubled sex life - his personal demons about commitment, women and relationships - certainly offer nothing interesting or amusing. The musical numbers are spectacularly dull; the humour is mostly wide of the mark; the narrative becomes wearisome in its endless quest to be as deliberately offbeat as possible. Male and female nudity is thrown in periodically, but its purpose is as obscure as everything else about the film. Ultimately, the whole thing comes across like an attempt to make an 'adult' erotic musical about the pitfalls of being famous (and therefore 'desirable') sadly it is too muddled in conception and self-indulgent in style to really work. A curiosity of its time for sure, but a dead-loss as a film.