Paul Pennyfeather is an Oxford divinity student who finds himself sent down after a group of drunken undergraduates remove his trousers and he is accused of exposing himself.
Forced to look for work, he seeks the services of an employment agency who secure for him a position at a sleazy Welsh boys' boarding school, presided over by the colourful Dr. Fagan.
The school's staff are an assortment of eccentric characters: Mr Prendergast, a withdrawn former clergyman; Captain Grimes, a one-legged philanderer with his eye on Fagan's daughter; and Solomon Philbrick, an undercover criminal posing as Fagan's butler. Paul, who tutors Peter Beste-Chetwynde, is enchanted at the school’s annual sports by the boy’s rich mother. Peter thinks Paul her perfect husband so invites him to vacation at their country home. The two are taken with each other but on the day of their wedding, Paul lands in prison for his inadvertent role in her tawdry business deals. There he runs across everyone from his school days, only to be sprung and sent back into the world by the powerful husband she’s married in his absence.
According to Fox records the film required $3,100,000 in rentals to break even and by 11 December 1970 had made $1,475,000 so made a loss to the studio.[4]
Critical
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "John Krish has directed a fast-moving and funny Decline and Fall with enough familiar faces to ensure its commercial success. But unfortunately, in adapting Waugh's novel, Ivan Foxwell has taken too literally the author's claim that it belongs to no particular period, and has set Waugh's sharply observed comedy of manners in the present day. Though the scenes in the Dickensian school and in the futuristic King's Thursday retain – thanks to Jonathan Barry's inventive sets – most of their outrageous charm, the characters fare less happily: abstracted into the 1960s and uprooted from any recognisable social setting, they are relegated from the realms of satire into those of farce. ...The answer is perhaps to forget about the novel and simply enjoy the acting. ... Carry On Countess might have been a better title, but on its own level the film is enough of a success to make it worth seeing."[5]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "Ex-documentary director John Krish has a stab at Evelyn Waugh's partly autobiographical 1928 work, Decline and Fall. It was a vainglorious attempt, as the joys of this hilarious comedy of upper-class manners lie solely on the page; neither Krish nor his trio of scriptwriters have the satirical wit or irreverent verve to translate them to the screen. They are not helped by Robin Phillips's ghastly performance."[6]
Leslie Halliwell said: "Flabby, doomed attempt to film a satirical classic which lives only on the printed page. Odd moments amuse."[7]
^Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN978-0-8108-4244-1. p255
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