It may be a film known to some of you but I stumbled across this 1967 film with a lot of slapstick WAM scenes which unfortunately mostly feel like a lot of wasted potential. None-the-less I thought I'd share it with you all here as there may be a few of you who'll get some kick from it.

I haven't attempted to watch the film from start to finish so I may have missed a couple of bits but have time stamped the moments I am aware of. Please don't get your hopes up too much!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ei6vNKUJvs&t=5691s

The two major slapstick sequences are the following:

A food fight mostly comprising of men but featuring two women, the substances are paint-like sprays, emulating paint, various food sauces and 'liquid manure' (High brow stuff, I know). This scene begins at 11:02 and runs until 15:25

A pie fight in a restaurant starting at 59:00 and ending at 1:05:05, unfortunately very little in the way of direct hits on women, although there is what feels like a kinky nod at 1:01:07 when an unsuspecting young woman wearing a dress with a cut-out midriff passing in the street below is hit by a stray pie, she wriggles about a bit as if to shuffle whatever entered her dress down below into whatever she may (or may not) be wearing beneath with a rather sly yet contented expression on her face.

1:11:18 one of the lead actresses backs up and falls into a water trough, unfortunately this happens off screen and all we see of it is her sitting comedically in it with a look of resignation on her face.

1:31:36 the other lead actress is pushed backwards into a shallow cake and laughed at by her party-goers - unfortunately another great opportunity for mess but very underplayed.

Are there any other films or media you've stumbled across that have had great potential for WAM content but fallen short of the mark?

Thanks for this. A stunningly awful film, I might add, which is all the more disappointing as it was written by the wonderful George Melly (clearly having an off-day!).

It's a crap film, agreed. Rita Tushingham, who was brilliant in A Taste of Honey, was in it.

Yeah, bits of this film used to CONSTANTLY appear on WAMTEC cliptapes. I guess it took up space? Or it was easy to find so a lot of guys "traded" it.
The female mess was super disappointing. Based on what I saw in the clips, it's like 90% male mess, so it's a "good" film if you're in that demo.

There's literally hundreds of films/media with great WAM potential that fall short. You can even narrow them down into categories:
1) Terrible Execution (lots of messy elements, but ultimately the props department isn't concerned about WAM, so you have poor coverage pies, weak or missed hits, no facial coverage, etc.)
2) Wrong Demo (WAM is great, but almost all of it winds up on the dudes... Probably the most frustrating. I've long argued that The Great Race is really just a few Natalie Wood hits away from being this.)
3) Missed Opportunity (Basically the trend from the 1990s on, where a bit that would've been "messy slapstick" instead becomes something gross-out or violent, as reflecting the move away from "old fashioned" humor like pies. The awful Three Stooges remake by the Farrelly brothers is Exhibit A.)

Shocking opinions on this thread - disappointing wam content aside I love this film! It's scrappy yes, but what glorious scrap! Rita Tushingham was never lovelier, there's a parade of wonderful British actors throughout, and the whole "I'm So Young" sequence where Redgrave's single climbs the charts - with help from disc jockey's bribed with whiskey - is marvellous

I've always thought this "swinging Britain in the 60s" stuff is a load of hyped tosh.

The 60s "happened" to about 50 people, all of whom lived in West London and went on to work in the media.

It was nothing like that at all in the North West of England when I was growing up then

Mrangry might be closer to the truth, except he forgot to include Manhattan, ie, the New York Times, the New York Hearald Tribune, the Ed Sullivan Show, and New York--based ad agencies.

But I think Roger Ebert liked the movie.

Oddly, it was a notoriously hard to find film until relatively recently (at least in the UK), when it has been showing on the UK channel "Talking Pictures."

Yep - until Talking Pictures showed it, it hadn't been seen on TV for nearly 20 years (a Film 4 showing, which is when I saw it)

It's an oddity as it was a UK production fully backed by Paramount, and they were fairly lax on archive releases on DVD except for their big hitters. Talking Pictures made a deal with them and started showing a whole bunch of Paramount films that had never been released on UK DVD like The Fan, Harlow (which is a staggeringly inaccurate biopic and a terrible film, but does include a wonderful pie hit on Carroll Baker), The Assassination Bureau and the brilliant Downhill Racer.

Smashing Time did finally just get a blu-ray release in the US, and I'm kinda thinking the BFI might give it the same treatment here.

I should amend my message to account for the power Time and Life magazines had in those days.

Somewhat relevant
https://lwlies.com/articles/brief-history-of-movie-food-fight-scenes/

After seeing the pie fight scene regularly on YT and other sources, I finally watched the full movie. Yep, simply not very good, despite Tushingham, Redgrave, and Michael York. The one I've been hunting is THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT, with a young Don Johnson. I've seen some stills with him and one or two women messing around with paint, but I haven't seen the film itself available anywhere. But speaking of Johnson, you get to see him bathed in A BOY AND HIS DOG.

I was about to come and say The Strawberry Statement is owned by Warner Bros, has a very depressing ending involving the droning of "Give Peace A Chance" for ten minutes and I haven't seen it on TV for years.

...then I checked Don Johnson's filmography, and I can't find any record he was in that film. He was, however, in something called "The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart" (the double S title may have been a mix up?) That's owned by MGM/Warner, and apparently has never been released on any home format.

But it is on Youtube right now. Might that be your film?

The film critic Leslie Halliwell brought out several encyclopaedic volumes in the 1980s and was magnanimous enough to list such things as custard pies and slapstick scenes.

Frequent, tantalising, reference was made to Smashing Time (without pictures!) in his books around the idea of a feature film with two female protagonists engaging in outrageous messy slapstick antics which was sufficient to elevate the idea of this film into legend.

This was around 1988. What didn't help the sense of mystique was that the film was both entirely unavailable on video and was never shown on television in the UK until Film 4 got the rights a few years ago.

I can't describe my utter disappointment when I finally saw these 'legendary' scenes in 2008. It was a turkey of a film and the messy scenes (after decades of anticipation) scarcely involved the female leads. The 'paint squirting' scene was entirely male and intensely odd.

A reputation with feet of clay (and not much clay)

SlapstickStuff wrote: 2) Wrong Demo (WAM is great, but almost all of it winds up on the dudes... Probably the most frustrating. I've long argued that The Great Race is really just a few Natalie Wood hits away from being this.)

I agree with the premise of this statement. But wow was Natalie Wood smoking hot. With no other females in the scene, concentrating on her was much easier. How amazing for pie fight fans was her performance?

Loved Messy Fun's parody with many female models. But Natalie took the cake (pie) when she entered with the coat over her lingerie clad body then took it off to allow her to get covered in pies in a more skimpy outfit. The fact that she got completely covered in pies was also a highlight. How many other mainstream films show a female with this much mess? There are a few mud scenes, but no other pie fight I can remember.

I know, right? I hate the extremely misleading impression big media/big entertainment gives people. e.g. the Disney movie "Cruella": it's gorgeous to look at, the costumes and sets,
but GOD I hope nobody seriously believes the 1960s were that way for anyone other
than, as you say, about 50 people in the entertainment industry.

I was born in the 1960s in USA. I never came across hippies in my life.
Except one time in Atlantic City, when I was very young: got to see a live performance
of the musical "Hair". I remember being terrified by all the the "hippies" aka actors on stage.

The brilliant film "A kind of Loving" is much nearer the mark for life in the 60s in Britain for most people. It was, incidentally, partly filmed where I lived at the time, when I was a kid.