Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 126

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Popular Culture Review

the blankly agreeable go-between), Richie and Eddie represent the twin halves of
arrested adolescence at their most immature and childish, figures the audience can
safely condescend to with no fear of contradiction. If Richie is the consummate
social parasite and obsequious flatterer, Eddie is everyman, the average, some
what vague individual who does his best to cope with the chaos that surrounds
him, chaos often caused by his own incompetence, and/or Richie’s false dreams of
grandiose superiority. Combining youthful aggressiveness with a string of unde
sirable character traits (laziness, greed, unrestrained anger, jealousy - the list is
nearly endless), Richie and Eddie represent the worst possible outcome of a Brit
ish public school education, and are thus emblematic exemplars of a society in
collapse.
But what is most refreshing about the narrative and imagistic construction of
G u e s t H ou se P a ra d iso is its scrupulous lack of misogyny and sexism. Gina
Carbonara’s character is never demeaned or exploited in the film; there are none of
the sniggering Burlesque Jokes associated with The B enny H ill Show, or the later,
less interesting C a rry On films. Of all the characters in the film, only Gino
Bolognese, whose personality itself is a compound criticism of the worst aspects
of typical macho behavior, comes to a deservedly bad ending, after attempting to
rape Gina - an assault prevented by Richie and Eddie, not out of any sense of
honor or propriety, but rather because in the peculiar moral universe that both men
inhabit, such acts are beyond the pale - reprehensible as given limits to social
behavior. Gina’s character is never called upon to do a nude scene, and even the
elderly and somewhat senile Mrs. Foxfur (although she is punched unconscious
by Richie, in a futile attempt to dig the gold out of her teeth with a pickax) usually
gets the best of the situation in her dealings with Richie and Eddie, and escapes
any real harm or indignity - this is, after all, a cartoon. Otherwise, as Richie notes,
in a direct address to the spectator at the end of the film, the narrative’s structure
“would be morally questionable.”
In the world of G uest H ouse P aradiso, everyone exists to be ridiculed, even
the Nice family (whose only “crime” is in being too conventional, too representa
tive of the heterotopic family unit), but the innocence and genuine humanity repre
sented by Gina Carbonara is the moral center of the film, counter-balancing the
excess of violence that surrounds her. Gina comes to the guest house seeking sanc
tuary from the pressures of fame, and she recei\es it, along with the assistance ot
Richie and Eddie in extricating herself from the unwanted attentions of (lino (who
wants, at one point, two prostitutes to share his bed w ith (jina). One could easily
argue that this strategy of feminine purity harkens back to the many women in
Chaplin’s films {City Lights [1931], The G o ld Rush [1925] and M odern Times
[1936] being prime examples), and it does indeed reflect this comedic strategy.
And yet, when one compares Gina’s treatment in G uest House Paradiso to the