Where Is Parsifal?

BFI Most Wanted: the hunt for Britain's missing films

Directed by Henri Helman, 1983

Satirical comedy about an inventor who hopes his name and fortune will be restored by his revolutionary new laser skywriting machine.

Parsifal (Tony Curtis) prepares to strike a deal with Klingsor (Orson Welles)

Credits

Director Production Company Producer Screenplay Photography Music	Henri Helman Slenderline Daniel Carrillo Berta Dominguez D. Norman Langley Hubert Rostaing, Ivan Jullien
Cast: Tony Curtis (Parsifal Katzanella-Boden), Cassandra Domenica (Elba Katzanella-Boden), Erik Estrada (Henry Board II), Peter Lawford (Montague Chippendale), Ron Moody (Baron Gaspard Beersbohm), Donald Pleasence (Mackintosh), Orson Welles (Klingsor)
87 mins, 7,799 feet, sound, colour.

Why are we so keen to find it?

Premiered at Cannes in 1984 in the 'Un Certain Regard' section, Where is Parsifal? was hugely ambitious, drawing for inspiration on Wagner's Parsifal and the screwball comedy You Can't Take It With You (US, 1938), and assembling an extraordinary international cast including Tony Curtis, Orson Welles, Donald Pleasence, Ron Moody and Curtis's Rat Pack buddy Peter Lawford in his final screen role.

It's the most obscure entry in the Salkind family filmography, which also includes The Three Musketeers (1974) and Superman (1978). Alexander Salkind's wife Berta was co-star and writer (under different pseudonyms), and her nephew Hector S. Peralta argued on the Internet Movie Database that the film should ideally be viewed as an allegorical self-portrait:

"Had you had the chance to meet their incredible and surrealistic world (and lives), you could see how real this film is. Berta's role is played by herself, Parsifal (Tony Curtis) plays Alex's role; the housekeeper, the baron, are real life characters that used to hover about Berta's luxurious apartments in Paris. Christopher Chaplin plays Berta's real son, Ilya. Alex looking to raise money to produce his films. Berta with her younger lovers. The whole madness lived in their environment is very well represented in this film."

What's it about?

The original Cannes press pack includes a detailed synopsis, which reads as though it was translated from another language (most likely French):

"Parsifal Katzenellenbogen swims in a sea of troubles. Not only is he broke, but being a hypochondriac, he is convinced that he has a weak heart (he will live to be one hundred). He fears also the campaign to change the world that his idealistic wife, Elba, leads. He looks upon her as a strange kind of misfit who resembles Dostoyevski's Prince Mychka (The Idiot, a person "not in this world"), living much of her life in unreality. She is always sharing her home - Montsalvat - and belongings with everyone and anyone, mainly, in Parsifal's opinion, with beggars. She has invited to stay (by now they are permanent guests) a magician named Morjack and his white dove, a seven-foot tall black electronic expert and yogi called Jasper and an overweight, chatter-box woman friend, Ruth, who apparently loves to cook Bortscht. Two other guests, Trofimov, a devout Russian kleptomaniac, and Beersbohm, an eccentric baron, are Parsifal's old protégés. They complete a group which would make the household of You Can't Take It With You look comparatively normal.

Only one thing can save Parsifal: his hopes. He owns an invention, still unpaid for naturally, which can project advertising slogans and messages into the air by means of laser beams. But he needs a buyer, and on this particular day, the moneylender Mackintosh, to whom he is deeply in hock, is coming to seize the house and the furniture. And tonight Parsifal has invited the advertising tycoon Henry Board II to dinner for a demonstration of the marvellous sky-writing machine.

Dinner is a complete disaster. Morjack's dove flaps all over the place. All the good food is gobbled up in the kitchen by Board's bodyguards. His PR man, faded English film star Montague Chippendale, has wine spilled over him and he is put into a coffin to be cut up by Morjack the magician, while Board is bitten in the leg by the drunken Beersbohm. The dinner becomes a nightmarish farce.

They leave in high dudgeon, only to return hurriedly when they find out that an arch business rival Klingsor is also coming to see a demonstration of the wonder machine. The miracle is that the equipment actually works and, thanks to Elba's childish interference, a message of love is sent out to the entire world instead of a trivial commercial slogan.

After some frenzied counter bidding, Parsifal with Mackintosh as his agent (for 5 per cent commission, of course) receives a cheque from Klingsor for five million dollars and the shark-toothed Henry Board II is totally defeated.

So now Parsifal can continue to enjoy his house in peace. He is aware of the miracle which has taken place and gratefully receives the blessing of the Dove."

Last seen?

Following a May 1984 Cannes premiere, Rank Film Distributors scheduled it to open in Britain on 19 July 1985. It then seems to have been withdrawn with only a few days' notice - London listings magazine City Limits was able to correct its listings and include a notice in its 'Stop Press' section, but nonetheless ran a review of the film as though it was still opening, presumably because the relevant page had already been typeset. It has never been given a video release in Britain, and there is no record of a television airing. Internationally, it seems to have opened theatrically in France on 13 April 1988, and has had dubbed VHS releases in Italy (C'è qualcosa di strano in famiglia, RCA) and Germany (Die Himmelmaschine, Taurus Video). It has never opened in the US, and doesn't seem to have had a legitimate DVD release anywhere. There are unsubstantiated rumours that the film's rarity was deliberately engineered by the Salkinds.

What else do we know about it?

The Cannes pressbook goes into somewhat flowery detail about the film's production, rhapsodising about its primary location (Hampden House, near Aylesbury, reputed to be haunted) and the brief contribution of Orson Welles:

"This was shot during three dusk-to-dawn night shoots. The Great Man (whose Citizen Kane changed the face of filming) arrived looking more majestic than even recent news-pictures have shown him. There was an atmosphere of reverence. Then, into the silence, the great sonorous voice spoke its lines, resounding in the night air like timpanies from an orchestra pit..."

In the smaller pressbook that accompanied the UK press shows, director Henri Helman says that the film began life as a play, which he first read eight years before production after contacting the Salkinds in connection with another project. Helman and Berta Salkind adapted the film for the cinema over a period of several years, and she eventually asked him to direct it. It is very safe to assume that the Salkind family connections and commercial track record helped secure both production funds and the stellar cast. Two decades earlier, Alexander Salkind had produced Welles' The Trial (1962), one of the Great Man's happier filming experiences.

Does anything survive?

The BFI National Archive holds copies of both the pressbooks mentioned above (the Cannes one in its original printed form, the other on microfiche), but no stills other than those reproduced in the Cannes pressbook.

Reviews

The reviews were generally dreadful. Variety set the tone on 30 May 1984: "Ludicrous beyond belief, Where Is Parsifal? is one of those pictures that makes one wonder how it got made at all.". In Britain, Kim Newman covered it twice, for the Monthly Film Bulletin (September 1985) - "So perversely ill-conceived that one begins to suspect that something like the cinema equivalent of vanity publishing is responsible for the production" - and, more bluntly, for City Limits (19 Jul 1985) - "an hour and a half of unmitigated shit." Allan Hunter, in Films and Filming (October 1985), glumly noted that "to review the film is to detail a dispiriting catalogue of abject failure from which no one emerges unscathed". The major exception to the overwhelmingly negative response is the review posted by Hector S. Peralta on the Internet Movie Database, quoted above.

Michael Brooke, Curator (Screenonline), BFI National Archive

You can find more about British films of the 1980s, including entries on surviving films and video clips for users in UK schools, colleges, universities and public libraries, at BFI Screenonline. You can also view similar titles at the BFI Mediatheques.