'Half a Sixpence' is the Stupidest Movie I Have Ever Seen

Half a Sixpence, or (if you watch the entire 143 minutes of it and the wretched cockney of it all becomes mired in your frazzled brain) 'Alf a Sixpence, is a British musical of the most heinous kind, and quite possibly the stupidest movie I have ever seen.

Starring Tommy Steele, a song and dance man who's face is made up entirely of bug-eyes and a massive set of chompers, it's the story of Arthur Kipps; a poor cockney orphan boy who inherits a fortune from a mystery relative. Kipps gets carried away with his new found wealth and forgets the meaning of true friendship and simple pleasure, but his true love, Ann, a simple girl with simple ways, eventually steers him in the right direction and they live happily ever after.

Now, I like musicals a lot and I've never shied away from a big cheesy production number, but Half a Sixpence is pretty hard to take.

For one thing, the lead, Tommy Steele, looks entirely deranged. Apparently he was "Britain's answer to Elvis", which blows my fucking mind, particularly seeing as Sixpence was released in 1967, and the first appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show was in 1964. One would assume that Britain already had an answer to Elvis, that they could probably just relax a little, but no. Tommy Steele is a massive, massive dork in anyone's book, I can't see how anyone thought that launching this face into stardom was going to be their cash cow.

Isn't he dreamy?

His leading lady isn't much better. She has the vague look of a drug-affected, inbred baby who's just been smacked over the back of the skull with a frying pan.


There's also a baffling display of really crap special effects, which I'm sure would have been really crap even by 1960's standards. Whenever any kind of love interest comes into shot (and there are multiple, oooohh! Tommy Steele, you cad!) there is a horrific display of soft focus. I suppose this is to reflect the soft focus of mind one feels when one is in love, but it is abruptly introduced into each scene at the weirdest of moments and you can barely see what's going on. I thought my eyes had just stopped working in protest of the confounding shit I was subjecting them to, but then I realised it was a daring, cutting edge cinema technique. Speaking of daring cinema techniques, check this out.

"I say, it's very modern isn't it?"

WTF? Why is it all in red? Why is this creative zoom out necessary? I mean, this was a pretty avant guard time in cinema, Blow Up was released only a year before, and I'm sure a lot of film makers around this time were keen to experiment, but the effects in Half a Sixpence are fucking absurd.

Here is another part of that same sequence which made me snort water out of my nose. Kipps has just inherited his money and all these sexy dames start hassling him, but all the poor lad wants is a banjo, obviously. Must of this song is just Steele barking out the word "banjo!"

Other highlights include the number "That's when I'm meeting my girl", which is kind of a dorky-man's "Singin' in the Rain" and a wedding number which culminates in a very awkward freeze frame of the newly wedded couple, except the screen doesn't freeze at all, the couple just pretend to freeze for a total of about 6 seconds, ever so slightly leaning and moving with mad looks on their faces.

I can't recommend this movie to anyone. Watching Tommy Steele's face for 143 minutes was utterly painful, the acting was unanimously over done, the script was plain bad, and the songs were pretty sub-par. I realise trying to pick holes in a movie like this is like shooting a nerf gun through a spider web, but as I said before, I usually gobble cheesy musicals right up. Half a Sixpence really is that bad.