Bedazzled

A 1960s English comic version of Faust. Stanley is a cook in a hamburger restaurant, in love with Margaret the waitress and unable to say a word to her. When he attempts suicide the Devil appears and offers him seven wishes. The Devil is called George Spiggott and walks around London like an ordinary man; in his spare time he breaks parking meters, tears the last page out of newspapers and pulls the wings off bees. Each wish brings Stanley closer to Margaret, and because the Devil grants them to the letter each becomes a different hell: he is made an intellectual and she stops talking; he is made rich and she is married to him and bored; he is made a pop star and the attention goes elsewhere. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore star and wrote it; they were the best-known comic pair in Britain at the time. Stanley Donen directed. It was remade in 2000 with Brendan Fraser. An enjoyable discovery for anyone who likes 1960s English humour and conceptual comedy. For a viewer wanting fast comedy the pace is slow, and some passages depend on the jokes of their moment and have lost their charge.