Bedazzled Details

This Faustian fantasy was made when London was still swinging and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were a partnership made in comedy heaven. Moore plays cook Stanley Moon, who is in lust with waitress Eleanor Bron, and Cook is in his element as a drawlingly engaging Devil who's hungry for Dud's soul and so grants him seven wishes. As Lillian Lust, the “Babe with the Bust”, a briefly clad, briefly glimpsed Raquel Welch is one of the Deadly Sins, while Barry Humphries turns in a typically hilarious performance as Envy. By electing to have Cook play Satan as a prankster rather than the incarnation of evil, director Stanley Donen settles for quirky comedy instead of razor-sharp satire, and his determinedly trendy direction means that the film ends up being as patchy as Raquel's outfit and as outdated as flower power.