StudioCanal Blu-ray Film Review

Nothing But the Best (1964) • Blu-ray [StudioCanal, Vintage Classics] — class, sex, and echoes of Tom Ripley in a Swinging London satire

In 1960s London, an ambitious young man tries to fake his way into the upper class.

The Swinging London of the 1960s might have been hip and brightly coloured (at least if you ignored most of it), with post-war austerity banished to an unpleasant memory, and the younger generation embracing more liberal feelings (though not as much as we sometimes imagine). But the British class system still sailed on majestically, and if you didn’t want to drop out, one way to get ahead was to climb the social ladder.

The degree to which this could still dominate the thinking of smart young things supposedly freed from the hidebound ways of their elders is the biggest joke of all in Clive Donner’s Nothing But the Best; and further smaller jokes, virtually all of them successful, come in a seemingly endless stream as Frederic Raphael’s screenplay tracks the rise and rise of Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates), a…