A Rogue's Progress

Nothing but the Best. Under the opening credits come the enchorial strains of God Save the Queen. The camera, floating through a limbo of pound-foolish British affluence, ogles a jeweled clip, a limousine, a blonde, a bottle of expensive brandy. Close behind, and sniffing, comes Alan Bates, steaming with parvenu dreams about an A-type lady and an E-type Jag. "It's a filthy, stinking world," Bates muses, "but there are some smashing things in it." By the time this cheeky, stylish, mordantly funny variation on Room at the Top is over, most of the smashing things are his.

Bates begins as a lowly clerk in an upper-U firm of London property agents. En route to a partnership and a Westminster Abbey wedding with the boss's daughter (Millicent Martin), he hires an aging, aristocratic wastrel (Denholm Elliott) to guide him through a whirlwind curriculum of fashionable prejudices. "Say 'bloody' a lot," counsels Elliott. "Know a few dirty jokes about the Caesars." When tutor and pupil take aim at the Establishment in a series of daft vignettes--playing squash, touring Cambridge, or off on a jolly shoot--Nothing but the Best looks and sounds like superlative satire.

Later, the potholes in the plot tend to become troublesome, particularly in Bates's dealings with an oversexed landlady who helps him to conceal a corpse. But Director Clive Donner (The Guest, Genevieve) maneuvers between black comedy and melodrama with absorbing skill. Maintaining a light, steady touch on the story line, he deploys his camera for a series of witty asides, mocking views of upper-crust life as it is temptingly reproduced in the advertising on the lid of a cookie tin. And one ripe interlude at a hunt ball finds all the horsiest young socialites in full cry.

Democratic in its savagery, the film takes equal delight in nailing down its hero. Aping his betters, he finally, ironically, proves himself inferior--faster, bolder, by necessity more resourceful, but at bottom just a greedy, churlish Jimmy who yearns with might and main to be known as James.

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