GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

mpan-65792 Hands down without an other flick coming in 2nd place. I will strive to have either disks or downloads freely available (whatever is the predominant format at such time} for any attendee who is twisted enough to want to see what it was that inspired and sustained me.

fiftychance I could write pages and pages about it, but what it boils down to is that it's a mess.Half baked ideas are wedged in awkwardly everywhere, the sound mix is terrible in the current DVD release, the first 20 minutes seem to be devoted to selling the soundtrack (which only a die-hard Beatles fan could love) and whatever influence the Pythons had is completely phoned in- none of their characteristic brilliance can be found in this film.Maybe this seemed brilliant in the late 60s, but if you look at this film with eyes not clouded by nostalgia (or bloodshot), it comes up very short on redeeming features and very long on poor choices in direction, writing and sound design. Good comedy can overcome such failings; it's a great pity there's hardly any to be found in this film.The best I can say is that it's technically watchable, if you have literally nothing else to watch.

t_atzmueller Subconsciously I have avoided this movie for about 20 years. One reason being, that I grew up with the Peter Sellers comedies, having watched most of them with my parents and having eventually discovered, that a lot of them don't age terribly well. The second reason was that, although Sellers has produced much, much quality work, he's at time delivered horrible performances.However, the other day I had a DVD copy from a friend-of-a-friend fall into my hands and around that same time I felt like watching something with Sir Christopher Lee – something I hadn't yet seen, mind you. The nearest and only thing in reach was that 'Magic Christian' DVD, so into the player it went.The first ten odd minutes made me sure that once again my suspicions were correct and that I was watching a Sellers movie that was both outdated and definitely in the weaker category. Inflated nonsense, pointless slapstick and random attempts at squeezing laughs out of a more innocent 1970's watcher, thought I while my index finger was nervously tapping the 'stop'-key.However, I kept on watching. And suddenly something made 'click' inside my head. I had found a gem, a diamond of a comedy and before Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr made it unto the Magic Christian, I was a believer and convinced that this film belongs right up there with Sellers greatest works.If you haven't seen Peter Sellers take his adventurous 5 course diner at a French restaurant, haven't experienced Yul Brunner singing "About the Boy" in drag to an inebriated Roman Polanski or a crowd of essential British citizens wading through a tank of urine and manure for paper money, then you haven't seen it all. And by the way: if you're a Christopher Lee and Dracula fan, you haven't seen it all either if you haven't seen Sir Christopher on board the Magic Christian.To those among the readers who have been put off from watching this by certain critiques of the time who gave the movie a finger or those who believe that the film is a random sequence of anarchic and even more random gags and sketches, please reconsider. Believe an old movie buff who says: this movie is a forgotten gem!

ferbs54 I had waited almost 40 years before finally catching up with 1969's "The Magic Christian" the other day, and am still stunned with disbelief that the film has turned out to be so singularly wretched. Scripted by Terry Southern in the same year as his superb "Easy Rider" and featuring an all-star cast, the picture is nevertheless consistently and appallingly awful. In it, a British kajillionaire, Guy Grand, played by Peter Sellers, adopts, for no apparent reason, a young man named Youngman (funny, right?), played by Ringo Starr, who he finds living in the local park, and the two set about observing mankind's greed and hypocrisy and snobbery, or something like that. The virtually plot less film consists of a group of barely connected skits, and every single one of them--a stripteasing Hamlet, a boardroom meeting, bird hunting with machine gun and mortar, a dog show, an indoor war game, a visit to a gourmet restaurant, a boxing match, a sculling competition, a wrecked auction, and a cruise on the luxury liner The Magic Christian--bombs miserably and fails to provoke a laugh. It's like the worst episode of "Laugh In" or "SNL" that you've ever seen, and all the cameo players--Laurence Harvey, Raquel Welch, Richard Attenborough, Yul Brynner, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Roman Polanski, Christopher Lee--go completely wasted. Please understand that I AM a fan of anarchic British humor, and love Monty Python and Benny Hill and even '67's "Casino Royale" (which picture's crazy final 10 minutes resemble the shipboard pandemonium aboard The Magic Christian a bit), but this picture just did not work for me. The Badfinger and Thunderclap Newman tunes are a welcome distraction here from the vacuousness on screen. I am very sad to have to give this one a big fat raspberry.